Smartphone and Radiation

by Galih Fajar Ramadhan / 16515021

Purpose
Time-line

: To explain audience about the radiation of smart phone

:

Technology has improved a lot over the last decade. It helps human's task a lot. It could make
lifting a heavy load easier, exchanging information better, traveling between region faster,
communicating to a far away location, and much more. One of the biggest advancement of technology
in this decade is Smart Phone. It's a piece of equipment with small size but large feature. It's main
function is to receive and send phone calls, but it has many other features. Such as taking a photo,
writing memo or agenda, browsing the internet, and many more.
But, despite having many benefits, it also has some disadvantage. Along with those features, it
could give positive or negative impact, depends on the user. If the user uses it wisely, those features
give a very positive impact. But, when the user couldn't control phone's usage, it may cause some
negative impact to the user. By using smart phone excessively, it could damage user's eye. It also could
cause verbal abuse, such as bullying, via online social media. Alienate own friends, too much
dependency to it, etc.
Beside those benefit there are also an equal amount of disadvantage too, isn't it? But, the writer
want to discuss other disadvantage which is special. It's about radiation. One of the smart phone's
danger which isn't widely known by people is the existence of the phone's radiation. People today uses
smart phone without knowing what they should and shouldn't do, especially about the phone's
radiation. To know the radiation's effect to the user and how we respond to it, we should know the
definition of the radiation itself.
In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles
through space or through a material medium (Wikipedia.org/wiki/radiation). Radiation itself includes:
electromagnetic radiation, particle radiation, and acoustic radiation. The phone's radiation is one
example of electromagnetic radiation. Radiation could be hazardous if it carries high energy, such as Xray radiation has enough energy to ionize atoms. Fortunately, phone's radiation only carries low energy,
so it can be used widely.
So, why the low energy radiation phone could be dangerous to the user? Because, its ability to
ionize atoms isn't the only danger of the radiation. There is another characteristic of radiation which
could turn into problems to the user. It's the heat transfer ability of radiation. Heat transfer through
radiation takes place in form of electromagnetic waves (www.engineeringtoolbox.com/radiation-heattransfer-d_431). So, it could transfer heat from a source within the phone to another object. Although it
only transfer a small amount of heat energy, it could be hazardous in some cases.
Imagine when you were in an oil factory and you use flamethrower to all direction. The factory
would explode, right? The flamethrower produces heat energy and triggers oil's activation energy to
explode. To burn up or flaming another object, actually we give an enough amount of energy to the
object to triggers object's activation energy. It's the same principle for phones. Phones only produces a
small amount heat energy, but if the energy come in contact with an object with a low activation
energy, it would be flamed or explode.

Although it has stated before that smart phone only produces small amount of energy, it actually
could cause more dangerous effect. While small, it still transfers small heat energy. The energy will be
absorbed by the cell in our body. This energy, when it's sufficient enough, would change the chemical
bond inside the cell and initiate the cell's mutation and when the mutated cell replicate itself, it will
cause cancer to the victim.
After we know the dangers of phone radiation, we should know where it come from. When
talking on a cell phone, a transmitter takes the sound of your voice and encodes it onto a continuous
sine wave, type of continuously varying wave that radiates out from the antenna and fluctuates evenly
through space. The waves that send the encoded signal are made up of electromagnetic radiation
propagated by the antenna (electronics.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone-radiation1). That's how phone
produces radiation.
Then, we should know how to respond with the problems. First, to minimize the phone
radiation effect, we should keep it away from our vital organ when we receive or make a call. We could
use earphone and put our smart phone in our hand or in our pocket. Second, never receive or make a
call near an area with flammable substance such as gas station.
So, the conclusion is smart phone is a very helpful equipment when it's used correctly. Beside
having many advantage, it also has some disadvantage. One of them is the phone radiation. It's heat
energy could be hazardous in some cases. It also could damage our health considerably depends on our
usage. We could minimize those disadvantage with proper step. If we could handle this problem
properly, we could use those phone's features safely.