What is Radiation?

We all want to know that. I think the best that anyone can say is that they all have wave & particle duality.

How much radiation exposure is normal, what is a lot?

https://catherinesherman.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/radiation-dose-chart.png

I'm toast!

I worked in an open cut coal mine for 25 years where granite and basalt were exposed, a couple of years on an oil rig and another 25 years in coal fired power stations and HV switch yards. My brick house is built on a decomposed granite and granite ridge.

No wonder the numbers on my wrist watch glow and here's me thinking it was cool.

Ha ha ...It gets worse...

...."Though emblematic of our time, energy drinks aren’t an invention of the new millennium. People have relied on them to combat fatigue for at least a century. Today, their “energy” typically derives from some type of neurological stimulant that makes people feel more energetic, or sometimes just sugar.

But there was a time when energy drinks actually contained real energy. The active ingredient in these drinks was radium, a radioactive element that releases a packet of radiant energy with every atomic decay. While the connection between consuming a radioactive element and reaping a perceived energy boost is tenuous at best, it didn’t stop people in the early 1900s from ignoring the known downsides of ingesting radioactivity and risking the long-term health consequences.

Yum yum radium?

RadiThor claimed to be a panacea for a variety of health ailments. Sam L., CC BY-SA

One of these energy-containing products was RadiThor. This energy drink was simply radium dissolved in water. It was sold in the 1920s in one-ounce bottles costing about US$1 each ($15 in 2016 dollars). Its manufacturer claimed the drink not only provided energy but also cured a host of ailments, including impotence. Evidence for a sexual benefit to humans was lacking, but at least one scientific paper claimed that radium water could increase “the sexual passion of water newts.” For many men, in this pre-Viagra era, the water newt evidence was enough. RadiThor was a big seller.

RadiThor’s most famous customer was Eben Byers, a Pittsburgh industrialist and amateur golfer of some repute. Byers first became acquainted with RadiThor when he took it to help heal a broken arm. Although the product contained no narcotics at all, Byers became at least psychologically, if not physiologically, addicted to it. He continued to consume large amounts of RadiThor even after his arm had healed. He reportedly downed a bottle or two daily for over three years, and sang its praises to all his friends, some of whom also took up the RadiThor habit.

In the end, Byers’ RadiThor addiction killed him. Unfortunately, ingested radium gets incorporated into bone and all of its radiation energy is, therefore, deposited in bone tissue. Over time, the radium delivered a whopping radiation dose to Byers’ skeleton. He developed holes in his skull, lost most of his jaw and suffered a variety of other bone-related illnesses. Ultimately, he died a gruesome death on March 31, 1932."...

..."The shame of this was that the dangers of ingested radium were already known, even before Byers started taking RadiThor. As I describe in my book, “Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation,” the medical community had been studying the health effects of radium since its discovery by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. British scientist Walter Lazarus-Barlow had published as early as 1913 that ingested radium goes into bone. And in 1914, Ernst Zueblin, a medical professor at the University of Maryland, published a review of 700 medical reports, many of which showed that bone necrosis and ulcerations were a frequent side effect from ingesting radium. Unfortunately, the early red flags went unnoticed, and RadiThor sales remained strong through the 1920s.

When Byers died, he was put to rest in a lead-lined coffin, to block the radiation being released from the bones in his body. Thirty-three years later, in 1965, an MIT scientist, Robley Evans, exhumed Byers’ skeleton to measure the amount of radium in his bones. Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so Byers’ bones would have had virtually the same amount of radium in them as they did on the day he died.

Evans was an expert at measuring and mathematically modeling the human body’s uptake and excretion of radioactivity. Based on Byers’ self-reported RadiThor consumption, Evans’ model had predicted that Byers’ body would contain about 100,000 becquerel of radioactivity. (“Becquerel” is an international unit of radioactivity.) What he found was that Byers’ skeletal remains actually had a total of 225,000 becquerel, suggesting that either Evans’ model of radiation uptake was underestimating radium’s affinity for bone, or alternatively, that Byers had actually understated his personal RadiThor consumption by a factor of at least two. It was not possible to determine which alternative accounted for the discrepancy.

Once Evans had completed his radium measurements, he returned Byers’ bones to their lead coffin in Pittsburgh, where they remain to this very day, as radioactive as ever."...

http://theconversation.com/when-energy-drinks-actually-contained-radioactive-energy-67976

Mr. Byers sounds like a genuine "glow-in-the-dark" kind of guy .

That he was....and still is!

I feel great, this stuff really works....

Thank you SE as informative as ever. Lucky they didn't cremate Byers they could have had a mini China Syndrome.

Thanks SE. I wish more people, the "antis," could see that presentation, especially the "Linear No Threshold" (LNT) part of it. So many are just not aware that tiny doses are probably good for us. I thought an effective printed presentation was Wade Allison's book Nuclear is for Life. Wade has another, Radiation and Reason, which is also good.

Should be mandatory reading for high school students....

https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Life-Wade-Allison-author/dp/0956275648

Good! I have both of the books mentioned in the Amazon ad and have a bunch of pages-of-interest noted inside the front cover of each. But they should be read by everybody, not just high school students.

Well hopefully everybody is or was at one time a high school student...I meant as a fundamental part of education....but yes I agree...

I think of it as a sort of invisible fire.

More the distance you are from the fire....like if there is a nice bonfire burning, and you can feel the warmth from 20 feet away, it's comfortable and you can sit there all night....but at 10 feet it's a little too warm, but you can sit there for a while....at 5 feet it's hot and uncomfortable, but you can stay there momentarily without harm....at 2.5 feet it's very uncomfortable and you can only pass by very quickly...at 1.25 feet your hair and clothes are at risk of bursting into flames, and your flesh is receiving burns...at .75 feet you are consumed in flames...So you have the size of the fire that's important, the distance away you are and the length of time you are in that position that determine the probably outcome....

Exactly correct. I like the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's acronym of R-E-A-D to differentiate between the meanings of the units.

One thing that additionally compounds the complexity of radioactivity is where the radioactive source resides in respect to the object or organism. While an alpha or beta particle can be easily stopped by paper or foil and thus they rarely enter a body from outside, this also means that if the emitter of these particles resides inside a body then it is a near certainty the ionising energy of each these particles will be deposited into that body.

There is very much more to ionizing radiation and its effects on bodies (living and inanimate) than these simplified discussions. For instance what happens to the atom that disintegrates from an alpha or beta emission and how does that affect the local chemistry at the source? When a deposited ionization occurs how does the target respond?

Radiation? Speculation only? So lets start with empty space, lets say that it consists of two singular forces, expansion and contraction, and they are in equilibrium, each in there own dimension. Speculating we can concider four different conditions, (1) A point in the expansion dimension out of phase, and which is a point separate from the contraction dimension. (2) A point in the contraction dimension out of phase, and which is a point separate from the expansion dimension, (3) Two separate points that extend into each dimension, expansion and contraction, (4) An extension between the dimensions that does not have a point of origin, a wave.

So, speculation is as follows, a photon constructed as point (3) above, one point being attracted and the opposite being repelled, and as the dimensional forces extend to infinity the photon is driven for eternity through space.

Radiation? I speculate as point (4) above, and a wave at the right frequency can interfere with points (1) and (2) above, and that interference can act on a neutron, in an isotope, to polarize it like photon where upon it is driven in the same manure as a photon.

An old mans speculation.

Curious off-topic question: I notice that he is writing on the backside of a transparent surface. This means he is writing backward. Is the skill to write backward easier for a person with dyslexia?

The old school trick is to have the camera looking through a mirror. Nowadays simple video processing flips the image.

I guess my experience would say yes.

If <...We all know about the alpha, beta and gamma rays...>, then the question <... what exactly are they composed of?...> seems superfluous.

How so?