Trivial influences: a doubly stochastic Poisson process model permits the detection of arbitrarily small electromagnetic signals.

If a weak, exogenous, extremely low-frequency (ELF) electric or magnetic field is to produce biological sequelae, then there must exist averaging sufficient to lift some primary effect of that field above the endogenous stochastic variations of the biological system. One way in which a field could accomplish this is by changing the intensity of some stochastic operation that controls an important and not trivially reversible biological transformation. In this paper, this operation is modeled as a doubly stochastic Poisson process. It is then shown, first, that (in theory) even a minuscule exogenous influence might appreciably shift the incidence of a sufficiently rare transformation and, second, that this shift might be observable if a trial were allowed to run long enough over a sufficiently large population of exposed entities.