Is 5G Telephone Radiation Dangerous to Your Health?

The word "radiation" causes concern because of association with nuclear radiation from radioactivity and other forms of ionizing radiation which can cause health effects including risk of cancer. Ionization refers to the forcible ejection of one or more electrons from an intact atom or molecule.That can disrupt important molecules in the body which can produce mutations leading to cancer. The concern about radiation is justified because of its interaction with matter, but the key phrase is "ionizing radiation", radiation that can impart enough energy to eject an electron. For radiation that is below that threshold, "non-ionizing radiation", there can be physiological effects such as heating of the tissue but not the disruptive kind of interaction that is associated with cancer risk.

A key concept in assessing the reasonableness of a perceived risk from radiation is the energy that can be imparted to tissue from the radiation and whether it can produce ionization. The intent here is to set up some reasonable models for assessing the available energy for that interaction with tissue.

The 5G radiation is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the energy of interaction of such radiation is in units called photons. For a given frequency of radiation f, all the photons have the quantum energy E = hf, where h is Planck's constant. A common unit of energy in the atomic realm is the electron volt, abbreviated eV, the energy given to an electron by accelerating it through one volt of electric potential. The most energetic 5G photon at 52.6 GHz has the tiny energy 0.000218 eV.

The kinetic energy of ordinary molecules associated with their temperature, called thermal energy, may be calculated from that temperature. At 20°C, close to ordinary room temperature, the average molecular kinetic energy is 0.0379 eV. That is 174 times the energy of the highest frequency 5G photon.

As an attempt to give a rough qualitative comparison to a 5G photon interacting with ordinary matter at 20°C, visualize a ping pong ball interacting with a container of high-speed golf balls. The golf ball energies are adjusted to have the same energy ratio with the ping pong ball as the comparison of molecular thermal energy and 5G photon energy described above.

Model parameters: ping pong ball mass = 2.7 gm, serving speed 60 mi/hr, golf ball mass = 46 gm.

This is a classical physics analogy, and the quantum physics aspects of the interaction will be discussed below. But this analogy strongly suggests that the ping pong ball (5G photon) would have negligible effects on ordinary room temperature matter (high speed molecules).

Moving to the quantum mechanical nature of the interaction between a 5G photon and ordinary matter, an interaction with even the highest frequency 5G photon would necessarily involve absorption of the photon because its quantum energy is far too small to produce ionization. That brings in the phenomenon of transparency, since to be absorbed, the photon would be required to find available energy levels separated by an energy gap matching the photon energy. The 5G photon at 52.6 GHz would match only molecular phenomena such as molecular rotation and vibration which might lead to a small amount of absorption when transmitted over large distances, but the only effect for local matter would be a small amount of heating. There is no known realistic evidence that this would be associated with major negative health effects. Human tissue would be expected to be transparent to the vast majority of the 5G radiant energy.