When the quiz says “Anthropogenic EMFs are fully polarised and highly coherent,” it means that—unlike sunlight—human‑made wireless signals have their electric‑field arrows pointing the same way and their wave crests marching in tight formation. These properties make them more capable of producing targeted, cumulative electrical forces in living tissue, even at power levels far below those that cause heating.
| Term | Everyday picture | How sunlight behaves | How most man‑made RF / microwave signals behave | Why biophysicists care |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Polarisation | Imagine shaking a jump‑rope. If you always shake it up‑and‑down, the rope’s wiggles lie in a single flat plane—polarised. If sometimes you shake side‑to‑side or on weird angles, the wiggles point every which way—un‑polarised. | Sunlight’s electric field vectors point in all directions at random as the waves race past you → largely un‑polarised. | Cell‑tower, Wi‑Fi or phone antennas emit waves whose field vectors are locked into one or two specific directions (vertical, horizontal, circular) → fully polarised. | A uniform field can push on charged molecules (ions, proteins) in cells in the same direction every cycle, making interactions more efficient than a field that constantly changes orientation. |
| Coherence | Think of a marching band. If everyone steps in perfect sync, their combined footfalls create a sharp, organised thump—coherent. If each marcher keeps their own tempo, the sound smears into background noise—incoherent. | Sunlight is produced by trillions of independent atomic events, each wavelet starting at a different instant and wavelength → low temporal coherence; its phases quickly drift out of step. | A radio transmitter is like a conductor with a metronome: every part of the antenna radiates waves that maintain a constant phase relationship over long distances → highly coherent (much like a laser but at lower frequencies). | When waves stay “in step,” the peaks and troughs add together predictably, creating stronger local electric forces and making it easier to set charged particles inside membranes into resonance. |
Why this distinction shows up in EMF‑health discussions
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Biological resonance – Proteins such as voltage‑gated ion channels respond to rhythmic electric forces. A coherent, polarised field can drive these molecular “gates” more effectively than the jittery, random field of sunlight.
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Modulation layering – Wireless communication adds low‑frequency pulses (kHz‑Hz) on top of the microwave carrier; those pulses ride on a coherent, polarised wave, giving cells a clear, repetitive beat to which they can inadvertently synchronise.
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Evolutionary novelty – For billions of years organisms were bathed only in incoherent, unpolarised natural EMFs (lightning, cosmic background, sunlight). The sudden 24/7 addition of coherent, polarised signals is a new environmental factor—hence the concern that our biology may not be fully adapted to it.
