Speaking as a physicist who knows QM, this is almost-correct.
More precisely, the chemical effects of microwave photons are restricted to being the sort of effects that routinely happen within your body all the time due to the thermal jiggle of atoms. Obviously this is not "nothing", because your body does a lot of cool stuff with all of that jiggling.
Obviously, chemical effects can also happen due to accumulated electric potential, as when a metal fork causes sparks in a microwave, but cell phones only have one hundredth or thousandth of that much power going through them at any given time, and the most visible effects of this in the human body seem to be negligible. (These effects do exist -- witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue.)
So the possibilities are certainly there but it does seem like if cell phones caused the calamities that are sometimes attributed to them, it would probably change our understanding of one of these two spaces.
"These effects do exist -- witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue."
I liked the comment in the beginning but it's problematic here. I come from a system engineering background with some knowledge on hardware side. For our chips, the effects of an electrical surge are totally different than the effects of electromagnetic radiation. The interface point and nature of materials make them respond differently to each. The machinery of the human body might do the same thing. I cited the Frey effect as an example of non-melting-point effects in a previous comment.
Also, I found something very interesting about your claim to support my hypothetical parallel between chips and the bodies. Let me show you instead of trying to explain it:
"witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue."
Witness what a surge does to the CPU or how dropping an electricity source onto its I/O pins results in detectable activity. Yet, no users or monitor software reports detecting something like this when you hold a cellphone next to it.
Your claim would be true and readers would think cellphones/radiation had no effect on computers. Yet, they actually do have an effect that ranges from undetectable leaks to failures of the system from components made faulty due to long exposure. In later case, users not aware of attacks believe the components were faulty for other reasons. Here's a nice timeline on the leak side:
Matter of fact, they banned cellphones in secure facilities because bringing certain ones within 20 or so ft of a secure phone compromised it. The background radiation of the phone bounced off the inside of the chip in a way that was modified by the circuits holding the master key. What bounced out could be caught, analyzed, and keys re-assembled. All conversations compromised without anyone ever knowing. Just because you walked in with a cellphone on your waste.
But, "nobody really reports these [compromises] when holding a transmitting cell phone near their [computer]."
;) What do you think of that parallel? Something to it possibly or just a fun thought experiment?
More precisely, the chemical effects of microwave photons are restricted to being the sort of effects that routinely happen within your body all the time due to the thermal jiggle of atoms. Obviously this is not "nothing", because your body does a lot of cool stuff with all of that jiggling.
Obviously, chemical effects can also happen due to accumulated electric potential, as when a metal fork causes sparks in a microwave, but cell phones only have one hundredth or thousandth of that much power going through them at any given time, and the most visible effects of this in the human body seem to be negligible. (These effects do exist -- witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue.)
So the possibilities are certainly there but it does seem like if cell phones caused the calamities that are sometimes attributed to them, it would probably change our understanding of one of these two spaces.