Everyone knows nuclear radiation is harmful when exceeding a certain limit. Is it different from other forms of radiation such as electromagnetic radiation from electronic devices? Like if I got blasted with some sort of super WiFi would I be harmed in the same way as nuclear radiation?
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Nuclear radiation generally consists of three kinds, which we call alpha, beta, and gamma.
Alpha rays can be blocked by a piece of paper, beta by tinfoil, and gamma only by very thick shielding: think meters of concrete or thick lead plates.
So alpha are not dangerous unless you eat them. Your skin easily blocks the rays.
Beta emitters are mostly fine unless you eat them or like, get them smeared on your skin or clothes.
Gamma rays are very dangerous. They are actually a high energy form of electromagnetic radiation. Much higher frequency than your cell phone. In addition to being hard to block, gamma rays are “ionizing” meaning they break chemical bonds when they are absorbed. This is very bad for you. In the short term, high doses can cause organ failure, and in the long term, even relatively small doses can cause cancer.
WiFi, in contrast, is lower frequency and doesn’t have the energy (per photon) to break chemical bonds. It’s in the same frequency band as a microwave oven. If you got hit by a super blast of WiFi radiation, it could heat you up, even burn you if there was enough. WiFi is not considered dangerous because having a mobile phone in your pocket, the heating you get from the radiation is small even compared with the waste heat from the battery and CPU.
Electromagnetic radiation is just light, and anything shorter wavelength than visible light can be harmful. Radio waves(like wifi) and infrared are longer wavelength than visible light. If you’re exposed to EXTREMELY high levels of light at these wavelengths, you get burned just because of the heat transferred.
Ionizing radiation is the kind that gives you radiation poisoning and cancer, it has enough energy to rip electrons off of atoms, and can cause chemical reactions that don’t normally happen.
Neutron radiation is the kind that can make things radioactive.
“Nuclear” radiation is not just one kind of radiation. It includes some electromagnetic radiation, neutron radiation, beta radiation, alpha radiation, and even neutrinos although those don’t usually get talked about as “nuclear radiation”.
Nuclear radiation is the radiation from nuclear reactions, and it is usually ionizing (strong enough to break molecules and therefore dangerous to humans).
Each of these types of radiation behaves differently. Alpha and beta are horrible for you but cannot penetrate most regular materials. Neutrons can make other things radioactive and are much more capable of penetration. Gamma rays can penetrate a *lot* of material, but this also means they are more likely to pass through your body without hurting it.
You mentioned wifi, electromagnetic radiation. I’m sure you know that microwaves, radio waves, and visible light are all “the same thing”. However, they act very differently, because they are very different versions of the same thing. Gamma radiation is also electromagnetic radiation, but it has a lot more energy in each of its photons. If a photon of radio or visible light hits you, it warms you up a bit because it does not have enough energy to do anything else. If a photon of gamma rays hit you, it busts apart important molecules in your body such as your DNA. That’s not a good thing. This is called *ionizing radiation*.
If you’re exposed to too much *non*-ionizing radiation, you can get burns from the heat. These are very similar to regular old burns from hot water or a hot stove. Ionizing burns, like sunburns or xray burns, are different because the radiation can break apart molecules inside of cells without destroying the cell completely. This can cause cancer. Gamma rays can also pass much deeper into your body, so instead of just damaging your skin they tend to damage *everything*.
There is radioactivity, which is energy emitted when an atom breaks down, and electromagnetic radiation, of which light is a form.
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Electromagnetic radiation starts at radio and increases to microwave (wifi is classed as microwave), then infra-red, then visible, then UV, x-rays and gamma rays.
You can hold your phone against your skull for hours without any ill effects, because the power output is low. OTOH you can put a pig’s head in a microwave and its eyes explode.
High UV, x-rays and gamma rays are all ionizing, that is they will knock bits off your DNA and give you cancer.
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There are three forms of radioactivity: alpha particles, beta and gamma rays. Alpha particles (a helium nucleus of two protons and two neutrons) are the most easily stopped, but if they do penetrate they will play havoc with your parts.
Beta particles, or electrons, have medium penetration and can cause damage to DNA.
Gamma rays, a form of electromagnetic radiation, are hardest to stop but do least damage.
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So you could make super wifi, depending on how you define it. If standard wifi is microwave you could simply increase the power and boil your eyeballs, or you could ramp up the frequency until you get x-rays or gamma rays, both of which can turn you into a spider with superpowers, but issues too.
A bit of history might also prove helpful. The presence of radiation and the three “types” alpha, beta and gamma were discovered BEFORE we discovered protons and neutrons. As such they were classified based on their properties. It has become sort of the things that has been popularized.
As we discovered and understood a bit more about the structure of atoms in the early 1900s, we now know that alpha radiation consists of the nucleus of helium atoms, beta radiation are electrons/positrons and gamma radiation is electromagnetic.
It is perhaps useful to think of it in terms of energy. Humans can tolerate all forms of energy to a degree. There is not a black and white, yes and no answer when there is a question “is it harmful?”.
So if you walk into a door, there is some mechanical energy transferred but it is not likely to harm you long term. But a bullet entering your body which is also a transfer of mechanical energy will very likely cause great harm.
Electromagnetic waves are waves in the electromagnetic field. At certain frequencies we see that as light. Shining a torch on your face won’t likely harm you. Shining a powerful laser on your face WILL likely harm you. As we go higher in frequency, the energy content of each “particle” of electromagnetic energy becomes higher. Very high frequency e-m waves are things like x-rays and gamma rays – these can be harmful if enough is transferred to your body. Radio frequency e-m waves are lower frequency (lower energy per “particle”) than light but if enough are present, it can still harm you.
And you might not know that microwave ovens operate by emitting radiation close to the same frequency range as “wi-fi” – so yes, they can harm you. In practice, though, your wi-fi equipment would need to be around a hundred thousand times more powerful to get close to the output of a microwave oven – and that isn’t going to happen without the wi-fi device melting down first (since the components are not going to tolerate this amount of power)
>electromagnetic radiation from electronic devices?
Eh, hold up, you’re off-base on some of the basics here. “Electromagnetic radiation” includes radio waves, light, x-rays, infrared (heat), and the sort ionizing gamma radiation where you get an LD50 of 5 Sieverts if you’re next to a nuclear reactor too long. That’s all the same sort of radiation, just at different frequencies. And that matters a lot. Above a certain level it’s called “ionizing” because it’s wiggling fast enough to knock electrons off, which can hit your DNA and stuff.
Radiation that isn’t electromagnetic is stuff like sound waves and apparently gravity now. Or things that throw off charged particles, like some nuclear decay. Any amount of shielding stops charged particles, they’re too bulky to get through. Just don’t swallow it.
> Like if I got blasted with some sort of super WiFi would I be harmed in the same way as nuclear radiation?
Wifi? That’s down in the radio range. LESS frequencies than light. All the home wifi routers (and your phone) is in milliwatts. Relax, it’s safe. If you’re in front of a big radio transmitter or such that’s outputting multiple watts of power, that’s can be harmful. At that frequency, it’ll heat you up and it’ll burn. But it won’t scramble your DNA like gamma radiation.
Long story short: Yes it’s different and no it won’t hurt you the same way.
It’s like getting shot with a nerf dart versus getting shot with a bullet. The nerf dart won’t go inside you, it probably won’t damage your skin, but being hit with a massive wall of nerf darts can harm you if there’s enough of them constantly bombarding you. A bullet will always harm you, it may completely go through you, and having good body armor only lessens your injury rather than preventing it. It may not even stop you from dying.
There’s a unit called an electron volt (eV) which can be used to measure radiation. A photon of visible light might be about 2 eV. You’re obviously familiar with what light can and cannot penetrate. That’s a lot more than signals from electronic devices.
Most nuclear radiation is alpha, beta or gamma radiation. An alpha particle is a helium nucleus. Beta particles are electrons. Gamma rays are photons, like light. The energy of each of theses is hundreds of thousands or millions of eV. That’s enough energy to break apart lots of molecules. This can cause burns or can damage your DNA and cause cancer. Alpha and beta radiation isn’t that dangerous unless the emission source is inside you, in which case you absorb all the energy from the emission. Gamma rays are extremely dangerous. They’re like X-rays, but with more energy and more penetrating ability. You can’t perfectly shield yourself from them. Most processes that emit alpha or beta radiation also emit gamma rays, so nuclear radiation is altogether unsafe.
The 3 most common forms of nuclear radiation are Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation. Alpha and Beta are similar: Alpha radiation is hydrogen nuclei (2 protons, 2 neutrons), Beta radiation is electrons. What makes them dangerous is that they have extremely high energy levels.
Gamma is Gamma waves, which are electromagnetic radiation. But “electromagnetic radiation” is a fancy way of saying “light”. That’s all EM radiation is; light. Light is a huge spectrum. Gamma waves are incredibly high energy and that high energy is dangerous. Gamma is very, VERY far into the ultraviolet spectrum.
Wi-fi, Cell, actually ALL of our communications are Radio waves, which are very LOW energy EM radiation and pretty far into the infrared range. You’re not going to get hurt from WiFi because it has so low energy. Getting close to a tower, your bigger concerns are the electricity and the heat the waves generate
Electromagnetic radiation is a very broad spectrum, literally. Nuclear radiation, light, heat and radio waves are all electromagnetic radiation, the difference is only their place on the electromagnetic spectrum, ergo their frequency. The lower their frequency, the less energy they have per photon.
A photon can be seen as a ball of pure energy. A photon of nuclear radiation has enough energy to split the molecules that make up your dna. If you put multiple photons of “WiFi” radiation together, you could (in theory) reach the same amount of energy, but they would have to strike simultaneously and in the same spot and that’s just not happening. In reality they will strike in different spots and at different times and their energy is spread out evenly through your body. If by this process you reach the point where your dna gets damaged, you’ve probably already been cooked to death.
Electromagnetic waves only make up the Gamma-radiation of nuclear radiation. There are also Alpha- and Beta-radiation, which are fast moving particles that can also transmit a lot of energy and damage your dna, but they have to be inside your body to do that. Because they are particles they are rather easily shielded, so a sheet of paper or even your very own skin can catch all the Alpha-radiation and a 1 mm sheet of aluminium is enough to catch all the Beta-radiation, so in most situations they are easier to deal with.
Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation (high frequency, high energy) so they are far more dangerous than Wifi. They’re higher energy than UV and X-rays, both of which we know to be damaging so yes they can do a lot of damage to your cells, though the likelihood of a single gamma photon interacting with a cell is small; most will just pass straight through your body.
Other types of nuclear radiation are small particles rather than pure energy: alpha particles are the same as a helium nucleus (alpha decay is where much of earth’s helium comes from now because of how light it is and its ability to escape the atmosphere) and are easily stopped or absorbed so outside of the body they’re not very damaging. Inside the body they can do A LOT of damage so eating a large amount of an alpha emitter is a very bad idea, whether the element itself is toxic or not.
Beta radiation is an electron (or its anti-particle, the positron, which has the same mass but a positive charge rather than a negative) that is ejected from the nucleus at close to the speed of light. These can penetrate fairly well and still do some damage so are actually the most dangerous type of nuclear radiation.
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