[Gllug] re: rf energy

[Nix]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Henrik Morsing moaned:
> How will Gamma rays kill you (instantly)?

Ionisation damage (producing free radicals and such things), but not
*that* fast, at least not compared to a source of truly strong ionising
radiation (alpha or beta particles, neither of which are any kind of
light of course).

> AFAIK light is gamma rays and even if some gamma rays are harmful they
> won't kill you instantly (only in Star wars).

Er, gamma rays are light (light == electromagnetic radiation), but that
doesn't mean that all light is gamma radiation! After all, you see by it
at one lower frequency, it cooks your food at a lower frequency yet and
you listen to Radio 4 on a still lower one.

All of these will have excitatory effects (e.g. on electrons), but the
low-energy stuff doesn't have the same sorts of problems with secondary
radiation that the high-energy stuff does (once that stuff gets absorbed
by an electron, firstly it has so much energy it knocks the electron
loose and gives you a free radical, and secondly that electron can have
so much energy that *it* reradiates lots of high-energy photons which
may then go on to do their own damage).

If you go high enough, gamma radiation will kill you instantly, but you
need to get pretty high for that. (After all, gamma is the top of the EM
spectrum, so it has no `upper bound'[1].)


[1] pedants will point out that there is an upper bound to the
    intensity of photons producable by known physical processes at
    this point; but, well, the same laws applied at the Big Bang,
    when the upper bound didn't really apply; things got kind of hot
    at T=10^-35s...

-- 
`If you want a vision of the future, it is a wireless broadband network
 feeding requests for foreign money-laundering assistance into a human
 temporal lobe, forever. With banner ads.' --- John M. Ford

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug