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The reason that some radiation is harmful is because it ionizes cellular substances in its path, thereby causing changes in state that are either irreparable or causing damage that promotes mutation. There's a minimum hurdle of radiation required before it starts to harm you - that's the amount of energy required to dislodge the most loosely-held electron bound to an atom. This is referred to as the "first ionization energy".
(1) We must note that any radiation consists of particles called "photons", and such photons carry specific amounts of energy whose value depends only on its angular frequency and as such, only on its wavelength.
(2) Thankfully, energy levels are "quantized", meaning that particles can only occupy specific energy levels and the exact amount of energy difference between such levels is strictly required to promote a particle from 1 energy level to another.
Facts (1) and (2) combined are fortunate for us, because such energy differences for organic substances (e.g. proteins) are too significant for the photons that make up monitor lighting to surmount. In other words, regardless of the intensity of, say, monitor lighting that you're exposed to, the energies of its "constituent particles" are too far below the minimum energy differences required to ionize any cellular substance.
Radiation is only documented to harm you at 400 nm or below, i.e. ultraviolet light and more energetic radiation. X-rays have wavelengths of 10 nm and below. A cool result about energy quantization is that while we know that gamma rays are harmful to humans, it's the low-energy gamma rays that are more harmful than the high-energy gamma rays - because the latter just passes straight through with photon energy way exceeding the energy differences corresponding to the energy levels of your regular cellular substances.
To put it in perspective, the highest frequency of household WiFi radiation is 5 GHz, which corresponds to wavelength of 6 cm, which is about 15 million times larger than the wavelength of UV light. A somewhat inaccurate but visually simple analogy is to suppose a ball of 2m in diameter is just enough to crush you to death - then your WiFi signal is like a ball of 0.000000133m in diameter (1/376 the size of a fine ballpoint tip) and worrying about your WiFi radiation killing you is like worrying about being crushed to death by a ball that's 1/376 the size of a ballpoint tip.
I'm sure most traders are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, heart problems with sitting long hours watching the screen than being toasted by wifi
Haha, I wish I was really omnipotent. I'm a physicist by training so this is bread and butter.
Another cool thing that affects your daily life if you're interested to know about quantum mechanics: If you get opportunity to get swiped by the TSA at the airport and scanned for potentially hazardous substances on your hands, try to peek at their screen - it will show an x-ray spectrum like this one:
It works on the same principle. The idea is that if you bombard an unknown substance with the entire spectrum of X-rays (energies 0 KeV to 10++ keV), an atom of any element has its own unique energy levels, so specific points along the horizontal axis correspond to specific elements. If there's a peak in "count" on vertical axis, that means that the element is present in high concentration because the x-rays are being 'absorbed' by those atoms in the process of promoting electrons in those atoms to high energy levels, and such absorption can only take place if the x-rays' energies match exactly to the difference between those energy levels for those specific atoms (of those elements).
The same theory explains why you're safe from WiFi radiation.
So there's not many ways you can game the system - there's only a certain number of elements on the periodic table that are stable, and of those elements, only a select portion meet the requirements of being hazardous on a plane, e.g. (1) produces an exothermic reaction, (2) reacts with other substances to produce a significant increase in gaseous volume, (3) generally stable under room temperature and pressure.
ok you guys are funny.
