[Corvettaholic]

Well I was reading up on rays this weekend, and I had an idea. Well there's plenty of ways to generate your own x-rays (which is VERY dangerous, so don't do it), and its commonly known that x-rays are used for pictures. Rays penetrate your hand (or whatever), and continue on to some kind of film that can form a good picture based on intensity of x-rays hitting it, as bone will dampen x-rays to an extent. So the key thing here is, the x-rays go through you (and destroy DNA) yet some is absorbed.

So that got me thinking about gamma rays, those suckers go through just about anything! The sun puts out UV rays, but I assume it emits everything else too (like gamma rays). Now I looked into gamma ray generation, and thats beyond my scope as far as dollars AND safety, so maybe I can use plain ol sunlight. Is there a type of photography film that gamma rays will be absorbed into, and would it have the same effect as trying to take a picture using x-rays?

Just a thought.

[Mitch]

I don't know how much detail I want to get into this... Gamma rays don't like interacting with materials so they just pass through them. However, sometimes they decide to interact and thats why they can actually be measured. But the probability of them interacting is low, I think Geiger type devices can only measure a few clicks an hour.

This kind of reminds me of an interesting remaining question in physics about non-interacting particles(unless they solved it?). Nuetrinos are extremely non-reacting particles which will not react with anything and pass through everything. Neutrinos do decay though, so by looking at the products of the decay you can infer there was a neutrino there. Now the question is, the number of neutrinos that enter the planet from one side is different then the number of neutinos that leave the other side(with the rate of decay factored in of course). So there is something very strange going on in the core of the planet. Very odd stuff.

[AWK]

If gamma rays don't like interacting with materials why they are used for killing cancer (eg. ⁶⁰Co)

[Mitch]

woops, I think I'm thinking of cosmic rays, sorry about that.

[Donaldson Tan]

If Gamma can kill cells, perhaps someone can invent an organic film meant for Gamma Imaging (pointing to our future PhD holder)