How does an object become radioactive just by being near or touching something else that is radioactive?
In: Physics
Imagine you’re at a market and you have a basket filled to the brim with fruit and someone has completely overloaded their basket, causing things to fall out as they move about. Your basket is like a stable particle and theirs is like a radioactive particle – too much stuff/energy in there bursting to get out.
Say an orange falls from their basket into yours as they walk past so now your basket has too many things in it. As you move either the same orange will drop out or something else in your basket will be displaced and fall out instead. Your basket was overloaded because some other nearby overloaded basket dropped something into your already fully-loaded basket, causing yours to have to drop something.
In the case of radiation, instead of fruit and baskets it’s other smaller particles/energy and the center of an atom
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