- tYRIL SMITH & SIM N BEil W. — (MAGNETIC AN HAZARD HEALTH & IN THE ELECTRICAL 0^ BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY / Digitized by the Internet Archive 2014 in https://archive.org/details/electromagneticmOOsmit ELECTROMAGNETIC MAN This book is dedicated to all thosepioneers in bioelectromagnetics, past, presentand future, and especially to ProfessorHerbert Frohlich, FRS, as wellas to our respective wives, Eileen andPenny, without whose patience andsupport it wouldnever have been completed. ELECTROMAGNETIC MAN Health and Hazard in the Environment Electrical Cyril W.Smith and Simon Best St. Martin's Press New York © Cyril W. Smith and Simon Best 1989 © Hilary Bacon, chapter 8, first section 1989 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Firstpublished in the United States ofAmerica in 1989 Printed in Great Britain ISBN 0-312-03730-9 Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Cyril W. Electromagnetic man. — 1. Electromagnetic fields Health aspects. — 2. Electric lines Health aspects. I. Best, Simon. RA569.3.S65 1989 612'.01442 89-10687 ISBN 0-312-03730-9 Contents Foreword vii Introduction 1 1 History ofa phenomenon 8 2 Basic concepts: scientific fundamentals 18 3 The cosmic connection 35 4 Human biology and electromagnetic fields 53 5 Electromagnetic fields in medicine 67 6 Electrical sensitivity and allergy 85 7 Alternative medicine—the potential breakthrough 104 8 Electromagnetic environmental pollution 126 9 Chronic electromagnetic field exposure, health risks and safety regulations 165 10 Beware military atwork 209 : 11 Old wisdom, new understanding 238 12 The last frontiers 258 Conclusion 270 Postscript 279 Glossary 290 References 298 Name index 331 Subject index 339 Acknowledgments The publishers and authors wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Dr Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News and VDT News in New York, for permission to make extensive use of material appearing in both publications. Dr Robert Becker and Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., of New York, for permission to quote extensively from The Body Electric, by Dr Robert Becker and Gary Selden, and published by William Morrow & Co., Inc., New York. Quotations pp. 216, 219, 228, reprinied by permission © of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright 1985 by Dr Robert Becker and Gary Selden. Hebrew Publishing Company, Brooklyn, New York, for permission to quote from Biblical and Talmudic Medicine by John Preuss. Quotations pp. 246, 247 reprinted by permission ofthe Publishers, Hebrew Publish- © ing Company, Copyright 1978. All rights reserved. Central Independent Television, London, for permission to quote from their documentary The Good, the Bad, and the Indefensible. Foreword by Professor Herbert Frohlich, FRS The sensitivity of biosystems to electromagnetic fields has been known for a long time. Only recently, however, has it been shown that the laws ofphysics permit extraordinarily high sensitivities when biosystems are activated through energy supply. Unlike machines and instruments, however, the non-activated state does not exhibit a particular construc- tion. It is the supply ofrandom energy (food) above a critical magnitude, rather, which causes a highly organised mode of behaviour, usually in the form of coherent electric oscillations. The transformation into this activated state has features of a phase transition in that it is very sharp in terms of the magnitude of the supplied energy — in contrast to the case ofordinary systems where energy supply leads to heating. In principle, such sharp transitions can, of course, lead to great sensi- tivityto outside stimuli. The structure of biosystems is, of course, very complex so that treat- ment of a specific case requires far-reaching investigation. The recent developments, mentioned above, do, however, indicate the possibility of sensitivities which, before the discovery of coherent states, seemed impossible. Such sensitivities do, of course, give rise to difficulties in the reproduc- tion of experiments and, in fact, a new subject, 'Deterministic Chaos', has arisen to deal with this. The present book does provide examples which in earlier years might have been rejected as unphysical but which now give rise to the hope of an understanding in terms of the recent developments which show through examples how some systems starting from minutely different situations can develop in vastly different ways.
Description: