Re: When Spock looks at the readout, it says "unknown form of radiation."
You're right that "radiation" is ambiguous, and now that I think about it, Spock's cliche is "unknown form of energy". That's a purer example of the paradox I was getting at. Detecting an unknown form of energy is a paradox, but, as you say, failing to place electromagnetic radiation somewhere on the known scale is just incompetence.