how can radiation penetrate eveything but still leaves no visible holes
In: Physics
Imagine the atoms that make up the stuff around us as trees seen from above, with the trunk being the nucleus and the interconnected leaves and branches being the electron clouds and bonds that hold the atoms together much like trees growing together in a forest.
Now if you tried to carry a whole bunch of already interlocked trees through this forest, you can appreciate that you’re going to have to cut down some of the trees in your way or else the branches are going to snag together. This is the same as a bullet or other big solid object blasting through a wall; their electron clouds really don’t like to overlap and like to resist this, so passing through the wall involves pushing all the intervening atoms out of the way, which creates a hole.
Very penetrating radiation particles are like small birds that can just fly between the branches; to them the branches might as well not be there, and so they can pass through the forest with relative ease without moving any atoms out of the way. I’d like to note that not all radiation particles are like this, some are large enough to act like individual trees, and these do often interact with the “forest” of atoms much more. That being said, they still have much less mass than say a bullet, so they’re not going to be moving many atoms aside. However, they CAN move aside single atoms very efficiently, which can be a very bad thing when those atoms are parts of your DNA. That’s why radiation can be so good at screwing up your DNA and giving you cancer.
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