Imagine standing at the edge of a still pond. You pick up a stone and drop it in. The moment it hits the water, a ring of ripples spreads outward. Close to the impact point, the waves are tall and powerful. By the time they reach the far bank, they've become barely a whisper — a gentle rise and fall you'd almost miss.

This is one of the most important principles in all of physics, and it has everything to do with why your exposure to EMF radiation drops so dramatically the moment you put some distance between yourself and the source.

The Ripples as Energy Spreading Across a Surface

When the stone hits the water, it releases a fixed amount of energy. That energy doesn't disappear — it spreads. The first ripple ring is small, encircling just a few centimetres of water. As it expands outward, the same amount of energy is now distributed around a much larger circumference. And as the ring keeps growing, the energy per unit of that circumference keeps shrinking.

EMF radiation works the same way — except instead of spreading across a flat surface in two dimensions, it expands through three-dimensional space in every direction at once. This changes the mathematics significantly. The surface area of a sphere grows with the square of its radius. Double the radius, and the surface area quadruples. Triple it, and the surface area increases ninefold.

The Inverse Square Law: What the Numbers Actually Say

"Strength decreases with the square of the distance" sounds abstract. Here's what it means in practice: move twice as far from a source and you receive one quarter the field strength (1/2² = 1/4). Move three times as far and you receive one ninth. Move ten times as far and you receive one hundredth.

Notice the shape of that curve. The steepest drop happens in the first few metres. By the time you're at 3 metres from a source, you're already receiving only about 11% of what you'd receive at 1 metre. The gains from moving even further are real but increasingly modest — the dramatic protection comes from that first bit of distance.

What This Means for Your Devices

Every wireless transmitter — your router, your phone, your smart meter, a mobile base station — is a stone dropped in a three-dimensional pond. The "ripples" are the electromagnetic field radiating outward in all directions.

The single most effective and cost-free thing you can do to reduce your exposure is simply to increase your distance from the transmitting device. A few practical examples:

• Sleeping with your phone — placing your phone on your nightstand at arm's length (roughly 60 cm) exposes you to far more than placing it across the room at 3 metres. At 3 metres you're receiving about 4% of what you'd receive at 30 cm.
• Router placement — moving your router to a hallway or spare room, gaining even 3–4 metres of distance, reduces exposure by over 90% compared to sitting next to it.
• Laptops and tablets in your lap — placing the device on a table at arm's length rather than 20–30 cm from your body makes a significant difference.

How Different Frequencies Compare

The inverse square law applies to all EMF sources equally — but different frequencies have important differences in how they behave near the source, how far they travel, and how they interact with the body.

All four sources follow the same fundamental inverse square law curve. What differs is the starting intensity at the source, how much the field is absorbed or reflected by walls and furniture before it reaches you, and how the field interacts with tissue once it does.

The chart confirms what the physics predicts: a universal curve shape across all frequencies. The inverse square law doesn't care what frequency you are.

Your Personal Exposure Calculator

Use this calculator to see how your exposure changes as you move further from any device. Select a source, set your current distance, and compare it to a target distance to see the reduction.