eli5 How come if highly radioactive radium was on watches that the wearers didn’t succumb to radiation poisoning at the wrist?
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Frankly, the answer to this is that radiation is almost always way less dangerous than people imagine.
Sometimes radiation does crazy things. Inside a working reactor there’s some science-fiction-like bizarre stuff going on, it’s hard to exaggerate how wild those conditions are. Elements transmuted, sun-like temperatures, the toughest materials swollen and broken down. People can hear about that kind of thing and mistakenly think that how radiation works usually, instead of as an extreme example.
A blacksmith’s forge might be so hot that it’s dangerous to literally look at it (UV hazard). But that doesn’t mean the heat from a regular wrist watch is harmful at all. There’s very little of it and some shielding between its source and your body.
Radiation is often the same way. There’s always radiation around us, dose makes the poison and all that, and legal limits on radioactive dose/contamination are usually extremely low.
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