how can radiation penetrate eveything but still leaves no visible holes
In: Physics
Think of everything around as pants and radiation as farts. Although you don’t see any holes in the pants there are tiny holes that the farts can get through and allow people to experience the fart in all it’s glory. The pants are everything around us and Radiation is the fart 💨.
It’s not the matter that’s being transferred, it’s the fields.
Imagine it like blowing of winds. Some things stay undisturbed like stones, some thing shake like trees and somethings fly up like paper and dust.
Everything is made of material and has a structure. Some of these structures are disturbed or break from radiation and some don’t.
Radiation is energy is passes through the body in the same way percussive energy passes through you.
Have you ever felt bass so loud you feel it in your gut? The sound energy didn’t enter you but it still affected your insides
Just like water can soak through your clothes without leaving holes, but it can also slowly leak through paper, or a towel. Everything has holes, some are just bigger than others. With radiation you are talking about very small atomic particles, and those go through a lot. Different radiation has different size particles and go through different things; some radiation is more like light – it’s not even matter. Some gasses are so small that they go through stuff as well: Hydrogen is really hard to store because just like radiation, it’s so small it leaks through everything!
we are the scale or giants. as we zoom down smaller and smaller, you start to see the sub atomic structure of multi cellar organisms, when high speed radiation shoots through your body, it smacks electrons off their bonds, all over the place, messing with your living cells and DNA within your cellular structures, there may be zero evidence of holes beyond irreparable damage to the point your skin starts dying, you start to bleed from every orifice. Fun stuff. The big takeaway for knocking off electrons is they cause the breaking if chemical bonds, destroys vital proteins, etc. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-04-22/what-nuclear-radiation-does-to-your-body/7346324
Here’s one super abstract when you think about it.
Particles are super duper tiny, and they don’t really touch anything in a physical way.
What they do have are super strong force field surrounding them (think like the magnetic field around a magnet), and these force fields are how they actually interact with stuff.
So now imagine one of those videos online where a person gets inside of a giant clear plastic ball (sort of like a hamster ball) and rolls down a hill.
They never really “touch” anything, but the ball does, and the ball travels with them, so they can effectively “interact” with stuff.
And you could also “interact” with them using the ball.
So imagine now that you are waiting for them at the bottom of the hill, and let’s also imagine that you’re 50 ft tall.
And when the human hamster ball with a person inside comes up to you, you run up to it and give it a field goal style soccer kick, and the ball and the little person inside sail off into the sunset never to return.
But you never really touched the person, you just kicked the plastic ball and the little person sailed along for the ride.
Now let’s imagine that we replace the person in the hamster ball with a super powerful magnet.
Let’s now also imagine that we now make the sloping track out of metal, and we replace your foot with metal as well.
With his new arrangement, the exact same thing would happen.
The super powerful magnet wood float above the ground without ever touching it, and sail down the hill towards your foot
And if you did a slow motion video capture when you went in for the kick, you would see that your foot approached to the magnet, but the magnet began flying away from your foot without the two of them ever actually touching.
But magnets can repel as well as attack. And particles are like “complex” magnets because they can have multiple different “kinds” of force fields up at the same time.
So they literally can be attracting another particle with one of their force fields, and pushing it away with another force at the same.
Think,
“Oh God I need you near me!!! No wait… not that close…”
So the particles form like a net, or a lattice (think like those old school 1970s bead curtains, but without the string).
So each particle clings on to all of its neighbors super duper hard, BUT pushes them away even harder if they get too close.
So what you see as a physical wall, is really a cloud of particles made up almost completely of empty space, with the super tiny particles clinging on for dear life to their extremely distant next door neighbors, but always maintaining a tremendous distance from anyone else at the same time.
So NOW when you swing your metal booted foot (from way back up top when you kicked that magnet) at the wall, usually one of two things happens.
1. The “attractive” forces between the next door neighbors particles in the wall holds up, and your boot bounced off (think ping pong ball vs a wall).
2. OR you kick hard enough and your boot physically breaks those bonds of attraction and soves it ways past the particles (think NFL linebacker) and leaves a hole.
AND radiation is the same way.
Remember that radiation is just the name that we give for the electromagnetic field as it moves through space. EM radiation is made up of photons and includes visible light, UV, infrared, X-Rays, cosmic rays, gamma rays, radio waves, etc.
So when radiation hits a wall, it might.
1. Bounce off like a ping pong ball. This is actually how you “see” things.
Visible light has a pretty low energy, and it can’t really penetrate through most things
So the reason why any object at all looks solid to you, instead of looking like what it really is (which is an almost completely empty cloud of particles), it’s because that visible light when trying to move through that wall, tries to violate the personal space and get too close to those particles, and their repulsory force field kicks the light right back out at you towards your eyeballs, and that’s what you see.
SO what happens when EM radiation penetrates the wall? Why doesn’t it leave holes like when you kick a hole in the wall?
The answer is because light is made up of photons which are extremely extremely tiny.
So when they don’t have enough energy to push through the repulsor field of the particles that make up the wall, they just bounce back towards you.
But when they DO have enough energy to pass through the repulsor fields on those particles, there’s so much empty space for the photons to move around in, they can pass clean from one side of the wall to the other without ever actually touching anything or having to move anything out of the way (unlike your boot, which actually had to move particles out of the way in order to get through)
That isn’t to say the radiation doesn’t have any effect at all on the things that passes through.
Quite the opposite.
High energy radiation positively shred the things that passes through.
But because each individual photon is so tiny, all that damage is only going to be on that super tiny particle level.
So if you get hit in the chest with a lethal blast of radiation, it’s not going to put a hole in you.
In fact you probably wouldn’t even be able to feel it.
Because all those photons were doing on the way through your body was just moving one particle a little bit this way, another particle a little bit that way, nothing you’d even be able to feel.
But on your most fragile bits (like the DNA inside your cells) this can cause irreversible damage.
Please let me know if this helps and if you have any additional questions at all!
The same way that light passes through glass.
Some radiation is good at getting through different things, and/or some things are transparent to different kinds of radiation.
For example, the normal frequency for Wifi (2.4ghz), is pretty good at getting through most things. It gets blocked by metal and water, mostly. If you imagine a strong light bulb sitting where your router is, and that everything in your home that isn’t water and metal were glass, you would have a pretty good idea of where your wifi works well. Wherever a shadow is cast, it will not have the strongest signal.
To very powerful radiation, everything is glass.
The same way light goes through windows.
The space between atoms is sufficiently wide to allow light particles to go trough.
Photons are stopped when they are absorbed or reflected. To do so, what they hit needs to either have room to absorb the energy or it can’t be absorbed and the gap between atoms is smaller than the frequency (wavelength) at which the light is.
Radiation has a very small wavelength, while normal surface have larger wavelength between their atoms. Which means radiation goes trough. It it gets absorbed, it causes a lot of damage because its a lot more energy than what the atom can absorb and remain stable.
You know how light goes through glass, water and other transparent things?
Light is a type of radiation. And if you could see radiation, things that it passed through would look transparent.
I’ll talk about Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation.
Alpha and Beta radiation can be stopped, alpha by a sheet of paper and Beta by a layer of aluminum. Because it’s basically particles travelling at high-speed, so it can be stopped with matter.
But Gamma is different, like x-ray it’s light.
And just like visible light can travel throught glass, so does gamma/X-ray can travel throught a wall as if there’s nothing.
Unless it’s a material with properties capable of absorbing Gamma/X-ray, it won’t stop. This is why lead is used.
Even so, gamma can go throught lead. My analogy for that is that lead is like a really opaque glass, with enough lead you can stop the radiation, but use too little and it won’t be able to stop all of it.
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