Dr Carlo’s Vortex Theory

Dr Carlo presented another interesting theory during his presentation. He didn’t formulate this theory as clearly and precisely as his other theory of all man-made things being toxic, so I’m going to just have to try to present this theory as best as I can recall it. The reason for presenting it is the same as for the other theory - if you find it convincing, then Dr Carlo is your man, and so on.

The theory is this. Sometimes, radio waves get trapped in things, and they don’t come out. For example, your car, or for another example, that small valley behind your house. This turns that area into a “hot spot” or “vortex” or “resonant zone”. The radio waves in that area are swirling around and around, and that’s dangerous.

This is not just a vague theory, Dr Carlo is actually able to be quite quantitative about it. And (no surprise here) when the doctor analyzed and measured and whatnot in the area around Rancho Santa Fe, he discovered that we have just the right kind of valleys to be particularly concerning in this regard. Not too big, not too small, but goldilocks-perfect for RF hazardry. Our valleys are positively swirling with trapped radio waves, yearning to be free. Now somebody in the audience rather politely inquired if the doctor had some, you know, measurements and so on to support that. It turned out that he did, but he didn’t have it with him. Such a shame, but it is quite understandable that when you are addressing a large public audience about some measurements you did, that you would not foresee the need to bring them with you. Especially if they are a load of bollocks. But he did produce the equipment that he used.

Now let me pause here and just mention that this swirling bathtub effect is mentioned nowhere in the entire literature of radio research dating back about 150 years or so. So if you are going to discover something like this, I’m guessing you’ll be needing some pretty fancy test gear. Racks of spectrum analyzers, reflectometers, calibrated antennas, directional arrays, a carload of research assistants, maybe a rack of supercomputers to log all those billions of ray paths, stuff like that. Let’s say a big vanload of it. And what did the good doctor deploy to make his ground-breaking discovery? Well, it looked to me like one of those handheld dosimeters that you can get on ebay for about $50. So little test gear, so much new science. The needle on my own ebay scepto-meter is swinging quickly past the red and bending itself around the end-stop.

Another reason I’m sceptical, apart from the fact that I don’t think it’s likely you can make a Nobel-winning discovery with a $50 meter, is that I’ve done a few calculations in my head, and it seems to me that something that is resonant at 1800MHz or thereabouts is going to be a bit smaller than that valley behind my house. Things resonate at multiples of half-wavelengths, usually a small-integer multiple for reasons I’ll get into later. And unless I’m very much mistaken, half-wavelengths at that frequency are about 3 inches or so. Now that’s a pretty small valley if you ask me. We definitely have a lot of those. Rabbit holes and so on. Bad news for the rabbits I guess, with all those radio waves trapped and swirling and vortexing down their little burrows, but what does it have to do with the mile-wide irregular valleys round here?

Now I know that the smart boy at the back of the class is going to put his hand up and point out that things can resonate at multiples of wavelengths, and so maybe that valley happens to be exactly 10,560 wavelengths wide, and it’s resonating merrily away on a harmonic. And I’m going to allow that. Provided, that is, the sides of the valley are precisely parallel, like a canyon, graded so that the total distance across is the same everywhere to within lets say (I’m being very generous) about a quarter inch, and the whole thing is plated with something highly reflective ( I’m guessing polished silver is about the minimum to get anything really sustainable), and that the energy enters from a hole in the side of the valley (because if it comes in at an angle, it’s eventually going back out again - I call it the “Pong” effect). If, on the other hand, your valley is a random pile of dry dirt all round, I’m going to have to suggest that perhaps it isn’t reflective enough and parallel enough on the sides to keep those beams locked up for more than a bounce or two.

Actually, I’m not really guessing here. People measure reflections of cellphone waves all the time. It’s a whole field of research, because those reflections have to be taken into account when designing the modulation and coding schemes that cellular systems rely on.  I’m willing to wager that there are at least a thousand researchers and PhD candidates right now doing work on this exact topic. Looking at my bookshelf, I can count about ten recently published technical books on the subject, and I’ve got a stack of published papers about three feet high taking up space in the broomcupboard. That’s after I threw away a carload of them when I retired. And of all the thousands of research papers on that very topic, nobody has ever found a swirling vortex of radio waves trapped in a valley. Or in a car for that matter. The best you’re going to get, if you are a radio wave at that frequency, is two or three bounces. Four on your birthday. After that, you are either absorbed by something, or you are headed skywards on a one-way trip.

Anyway, I’m fairly convinced in my own mind that Dr Carlo has just invented this theory out of whole cloth. But I could be wrong, so if Dr Carlo has some corroboration of this new effect, or some measurements, or anything at all really, it would be interesting. In the meantime, I’m going to go with the simpler explanation - Dr Carlo just made it up, and he figured that in a roomful of concerned believers nobody would call him on it.