how can radiation penetrate eveything but still leaves no visible holes
In: Physics
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.
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.
Radiation is just light (for simplicity’s sake). Take visible light, for example. That’s a kind of light that passes through air pretty well, walls no so much. The wifi in your router is another kind of light, and it can pass through walls pretty easily.
Infrared light doesn’t leave holes, but it DOES interact by making a lot of things hot. Radiation interacts with things in a similar way. (well, not exactly, but this is ELI5)
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
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 💨.
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