:uhoh:
Dangit, Jim I'm a Draftsman not a physiststsss
Believe me. I was thinking the same thing when I was studying for my radiation safety exam.
d'ooh what have you done! You are controlling a battleship on the ocean i think, and you studied radiation, etc... Damn it :D incredible, within a few minutes you can build probably a warp engine! keep up, akulaman!
It's funny you should mention warp engine. One form of radiation that we had to look at was a beta plus particle as opposed to a regular beta particle which is an electron which has a negative charge. However a beta plus particle is aa electron that has a positive charge. Beta plus particles are also called positrons. To make this short, a positron is the anti-matter form of an electron. When both meet, they annihilate each other and give off gamma rays.
I always thought I'd sometimes see an odd green glow around Data's head. That explains it! Thanks for the extra info Akula! :D
OMG. I forgot all about the fact that Data's brain was positronic.
Okay...
I have to ask...Why was being shieldless not a factor in Scientific Method?
It was for the Enterprise...and Voyager was facing twice the EM radiation....What's the deal...Now the Exspourse was limited..true....and the alien ships were destroyed...
but would there be ill effects?
I think we'd probably have to have an intimate understanding about the physical and chemical characteristics of starship hull materials to understand that. Even then we'd probably need to understand how other materials of other components react to different forms of radiation. Not all forms of radiation react the same way to certain materials.
For example, most people are under the impression that lead, steel, and other metals is the material to use to protect against radiation. This is true for x-rays and gamma rays. However when you are dealing with high energy beta particles, lead and other metals are really a bad choices. In those cases you want to use plastics. The reason is that when a high energy beta particle interacts with the electric field of the nucleas of an atom such as a lead atom which has a high atomic number, the beta particle changes direction and loses energy. When this happens the energy lost by the beta particle is released in the form of x-rays. Under this condition these x-rays are refered to as "bremsstrahlung" or "breaking radiation. This is actually how x-rays are made in an x-ray tube by shooting a high energy electron beam onto a metal with a high atomic number, usually tungsten. That's also why shielding for high energy beta particles uses low atomic number substances like plastics.
Also we'd probably want to understand which form of radiation had a greater effect. EM radiation like gamma, and x-rays are ionizing radiation which can knock electrons off of atoms. Particle radiation like alpha and beta particles also are ionizing radiation. On the otherhand, EM radiation like microwaves, radio waves and a few others are what are called non-ionizing radiation do no knock electrons off of atoms, but they can cause things to heat up a lot and when things heat up to a certain point they can melt and vaporized.
That's why we're able to bounce FM signals off the upper ionosphere?
It's actually AM signals or Amplitude Modulated signals that we can bounce off, because FM or Frequency Modulated signals do not have a fixed wavelength. In order to modulate the frequency of a radio signal you need to change the wavelength since the speed of the wave is constant.
Amplitude Modulation is achieved by changing the amplitude of the signal. AM signals are long wave radio signals. This means that they have long wavelengths.
Longer wavelengths are reflected by the upper atmosphere. This why sunsets look so red because the longer wavelength are bouncing off the upper atmosphere over the horizon and back to where the observer is.