For example, UV light from the sun is known to cause skin cancer, so what makes it different from the visible spectrum (other than that we can’t see it)? Furthermore, does the spectrum gradually become more harmful, or is it a sudden jump to being harmful?
In: Physics
As you move up the light spectrum the wavelength becomes shorter and the individual photons begin to contain more energy, to the point where they start to become “ionizing”. This means they have the ability to knock an electron loose from an atom, changing that atom’s charge and forming an ion.
Chemical bonds are heavily dependent on the charge of the atoms involved, so if you are creating ions in existing molecules then you are likely to be breaking and forming chemical bonds along the way. For living creatures that have the complex code that defines their structure and function stored in the form of a long molecule, randomly changing that molecule is bad news.
The visible spectrum isn’t generally ionizing. There is a sort of vague area of transition into ionizing behavior between 400 nanometers and 125 nanometers, but 125 and lower is what is usually considered ionizing.
Now towards the other end of the spectrum with long wavelengths I don’t think they are generally considered dangerous. Infrared radiation is basically just heat, and everything around us is emitting that to some extent. Barring there being enough to actually cook you it is harmless. Similarly radio waves pass through us without incident.
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