Talk:Radiation

This article is about all kinds of radiation, this includes ionizing radiation; particle radiation; electromagnetic radiation including light, microwaves and radio waves; gravitational waves; and acoustic radiation including sound and seismic waves. Please make sure the article is not biased towards one kind of radiation and that in-depth information is added to the relevant article instead of this one.

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Photons

It is essential to say that electomagnetic radiation is composed of photons. Radiation in form of waves can be any kind of radiation icluding alpha, beta, neutron etc. In fact radiation and waves are synonymous in modern physics. Therefore, I changed the definition of electromagnetic radiation to comprise the fact that it is composed of photons (as opposed to other kind of radiation). I also removed the restrictive use of "photons" in the opening paragraph.  Andreas  ^(T) 16:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• The physics on your thought here isn't right though. Alpha, Beta and Neutron are not, by any means a form of waves, they are most certainly particles. All waves do not exhibit particle behavior; consider water waves for example. I think you are confused about wave/particle duality. Particles may exhibit wave behavior under certain conditions and waves may exhibit particle behavior under certain conditions, but that does not mean that they are the same thing. Also radiation and waves are not synonymous in modern physics. Radiation may be in the form of particles, or waves, as seen on the atomic level, and both are actually forms of energy. EM radiation is not composed of photons but photons are the particle manifestation of EM radiation. Starkrm (talk) 15:54, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Starkm, A beta (electron) is a wave if you choose to describe its behavior in terms of quantum mechanics, and it is a particle if you choose to describe its behavior in terms of mechanical laws. Note though, that the latter choice, though valid for some experiments, limits you to a late nineteenth century level of understanding. Same goes for neutrons, protons, photons, ..., even big things like alphas. They're all particles if you study them as such, and they're all waves if you study them as such. As for what they are really, that's easy. An alpha is two neutrons and two protons bound by the strong force, and a neutron is an up quark and two down quarks bound by the color force, and a quark is... Well, you get the picture. I'll leave the complete explanation as an exercise for the reader.

You probably think of Alphas, betas, and neutrons as "particles" because they are all fermions: They obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which can be crudely stated as, "no two can occupy the same space at the same time." It fits with most folk's idea of what a "particle" is like. Photons are bosons. They don't have that restriction, and that makes them more intuitively wave-like.

151.201.219.161 (talk) 04:42, 2 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is electron revolve around the nucleus in the form waves or particle

Hanfi khan (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is electron revolve around the nucleus in the form waves or particle

Hanfi khan (talk) 14:06, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is electron revolve around the nucleus in the form waves or particle

Hanfi khan (talk) 14:06, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

=> Frequency * 4.13566733(10)×10−15 eV/s = Radiation Energy

Hence, cell phone radiation has an energy of about 0.0000004 eV. And as long as the radiation energy is lower than circa 1 eV, someone's safe. :-) --MarS (talk) 20:54, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 26 September 2017

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

In the article Radiation, § X-ray, first line "(greater than 3x10^17 Hz and 1,240 eV)" should be 124 eV Afnylund (talk) 13:39, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not done for now: Please provide a reliable source that supports changing this definition. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 16:28, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Many typos in last section "Possible damage to Health and Environment from certain tipes [sic] of radiation"

Possible damage to Health and Environment from certain tipes of radiation See also: Electromagnetic radiation and health

Ionizing radiation in certain conditions can cause damage to living organizms, can cause cancer, genetic damage[4].

Non-ionizing radiation in certain conditions also can cause damage to living organizms, such as burns. In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement adding radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (including microwave and millimeter waves) to their list of things which are possibly carcinogenic to humans.[10]

The site: "EMF-Portal" of the RWTH Aachen University, present one of the bigests database about the effects of Electromagnetic radiation. As of 12 July 2019 it have "28,547 publications and 6,369 summaries of individual scientific studies on the effects of electromagnetic fields"[11].

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.170.196.53 (talk) 12:26, July 30, 2019 (UTC)

I fixed the typos and did a bit of copy editing. I'm not sure the material is totally appropriate or appropriately presented, but that's a harder question. Jordan Brown (talk) 17:22, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Author?

Hello who has recently edited this wiki page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A601:AAD8:5300:851C:A2F:C27F:DB5E (talk) 04:19, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I may have. Wanna make something of it?

Seriously, there is a history tab at the top of all wikipedia pages. Clicking it will give you a list of edits on that page all the way back to Methuselah. SkoreKeep (talk) 22:02, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Alpha Radiation penetration

Numerous research sources show alpha particles to be entirely unable to penetrate paper but there are also sources showing some can and will penetrate a sheet of paper. For this, check out the "The Thought Emporium" Video with the title "Negative Ion/Anti-5g Products are actually radioactive" (video section "Alpha Particles") This should be noted under the graph until clear research is found and confirmed. Chaos.mindsp4ce (talk) 14:50, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ultraviolet radiation needs its own article

"Ultraviolet" is commonly understood as the name of a color, a band in the color spectrum.

Ultraviolet radiation and its health effects do deserve a separate article. 2025 (UTC) Fkoutsoukis (talk) 21:01, 16 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The article as is references this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet

-ATBS ~2025-34023-50 (talk) 19:58, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Coffee cup

Keeping mass-energy equivalence in mind, it seems that a coffee cup fits the definition of radiation given in the first sentence of the article. Is this intentional? If it intentional, shouldn't an example like a coffee cup be given in the list of examples in the introduction? If it's not intentional, then maybe the definition is problematic. For reference, here's the definition in the current version of the article: "In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or a material medium." ~2025-34023-50 (talk) 19:36, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Inverse square law problems

Several points about this passage:

".. the intensity of all types of radiation from a point source follows an inverse-square law in relation to the distance from its source. Like any ideal law, the inverse-square law approximates a measured radiation intensity to the extent that the source approximates a geometric point."

1) A single photon is radiation. Does the article really mean to say that a single photon follows an inverse-square law? I can imagine this being somewhat correct with respect to the distribution of the wave function of a single photon, but I don't know about this, and I don't think that's what's meant here in any case. 2) This implies that all ideal laws have a source and approximates a geometric point. This formulation looks false. The ideal gas law is an example of an ideal law that does not have a source that approximates a geometric point. 3) Since the sentence brought up approximation, maybe this should mention quantum mechanics, perhaps a statistical averaging, and/or a quantification of the extent to which the inverse square law is not correct.

- ATBS ~2025-34023-50 (talk) 19:46, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

4) Consider contrasting, early in the article, the definition of radiation with the definition of matter, e.g., including but not limited to cosmological scaling. Regarding the latter, here are some excerpts from the current Google AI:

In cosmology, matter and radiation are defined by how their energy densities scale with the expansion of the universe, specifically in relation to the scale factor. Matter (non-relativistic matter, including both ordinary and dark matter) is defined as any component whose energy density () is inversely proportional to the cube of the scale factor. Radiation (relativistic matter, such as photons and possibly very low-mass neutrinos in the early universe) is defined as any component whose energy density () is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the scale factor.

-ATBS ~2025-34023-50 (talk) 20:08, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]