Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

Like many people, you're starting from assumption of the mechanism (ionization) and ignoring the fact that there are many other known physical mechanisms that are plausible.

Also, if people detect a reliable signal without a plausible physical mechanism, best thing to do is determine what the cause of the signal is- rather than just assuming it's impossible.

In grad school we were taught to do "back of the envelope" calculations to rule out improbably hypotheses, but I often found the physics people convinced (I think they used the term "proved impossible") themselves things wouldn't work, then after 5-7 years of grad school, managed to come up with actual physical data that showed they had made a false assumption.

What are the other plausible mechanisms? The effect of low intensity RF fields on chemistry is essentially negligible. For the most part, folks doing chemistry with non-ionizing radiation need intense lasers or microwave resonating cavities.

The main exceptions (which in reality also mostly require intense radiation) are highly engineered scenarios where you finely tune a radiation source to excite an electron to a specific level that's far from the continuous spectrum, but useful for some other chemical to interact with. To detect low frequency radiation, these usually require very specific materials with nearly continuous energy bands (think carefully doped semiconductors or possibly photoreceptor proteins).

These are also highly unlikely to occur - again, unless you've engineered it to happen, 10^{-5} is probably an extreme overestimate on the probability.

But if you know a plausible mechanism, I'd love to hear it. Feel free to provide references or go into physical detail.

I don't even need to read the actual paper in order to debunk it. They admit a selection bias in their fucking abstract: "Questionnaires accessing demographic data and characteristics of cell phone usage were completed by 106 men referred for semen analysis."

I appreciate this analysis (and I agree with commenter who notes that there may be another element at work here and not just ionization/radiation). But concerning radiation, Shawn Otto has a great breakdown of why cellphones cannot cause cancer because the microwaves in cellphone transmission don't have enough energy to break DNA chains. It's a great, enlightening passage from his book "Fool Me Twice." I love how down-to-earth it is:

Physics explains why no links were found. The microwaves used in cell phone transmissions do not have enough energy to break the chemical bonds of DNA, which is how cell mutations occur and cause cancer. How do we know this? Light and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, and ultraviolet light waves, are all forms of radiation. A single unit of radiation is called a photon. A photon can be thought of either as a particle or as a wave. A century ago, Albert Einstein showed that the energy (E) of a photon can be calculated as Planck's constant (h) times the frequency (v) of its wave form, or E = hv This formula was set out in one of his early papers, among his most famous, which was published in 1905 and is one of the reasons for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Photons with low frequencies are at the red end of the spectrum. They include radio photons, whose waves can be as long as a football field and thus fly past us with low frequency and low energy. Microwaves are slightly stronger, followed by infrared radiation and then visible light waves. Waves at the high end of the spectrum fly past us at much faster frequencies (and thus have more energy) and appear more blue. This part of the spectrum includes ultraviolet light, followed by the even more energetic X-rays, followed by gamma rays, whose waves can be shorter than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom and thus very high frequency and very highly energetic.

Microwaves are slightly more energetic than radio waves, but far less energetic than even the infrared radiation that our skin gives off, which is how we can be seen by someone wearing infrared night vision goggles. Both visible light and microwaves can be used to cook food and heat up your coffee by concentrating them in very large amounts, such as in a solar oven or a microwave oven. The concentrated waves excite the molecules in a way that increases their vibration, and the friction H that produces increases their temperature, but they still don't have anywhere near enough energy to break chemical bonds. If they did, the food would turn into goop.

Microwaves are much weaker than visible light, though, so it takes a lot more of them to make an oven work than it does to make a solar oven work, which is why microwave ovens are such electricity hogs. It'st's not until you travel into the red end of the visible light photons, then on to the yellow emitted by incandescent bulbs, then to the blue that illuminates many fluorescent bulbs, and then on past the visible spectrum: into ultraviolet light that you get photons that have a high enough frequency and thus enough energy to break DNA bonds. These photons have about million times more energy than microwave photons, enough that they can act like cue balls and knock electrons out of atoms, ionizing the atoms and changing their chemical nature. This is what Einstein's 1905 paper showed. Just imagine the force of a wave the length of a football field being concentrated into a wave the length of a molecule and then flashing past you over and over and over, and you can get a sense of the vast difference in the power of the two. That is what can break the bond between two carbon atoms, damaging DNA and causing cancer. Bi these ultraviolet photons still don't have enough energy to penetrate us very deeply, so they can only give us skin cancer.

Electromagnetic radiation above this level grows increasingly dangerous. X-rays are sometimes stopped by our skin, but if we are bombarded by enough of them they have enough energy to penetrate through us, a few of them being absorbed by skin and muscle, many more by our bones. which are denser, and many shooting that cue ball of a photon clear through us, which is why we can use them to make images of the inside of our bodies. X-rays can and do cause cancer, but our bodies can almost always stop them if the exposure is low enough. Gamma rays are so energetic that they can penetrate us, kill cells, and cause cancer very easily, and in high exposures they cause radiation poisoning, which kills much more quickly by damaging our bone marrow and gastrointestinal tract.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=6pMqCjVynG0C&dq=shawn+lawr...