My friend just tried to convinced me that the light emitted by photos taken of nuclear blasts are radioactive...

Lost

Photons of energy >1.022 MeV are way beyond the spectrum of visible light, they're in the X-ray spectrum
These types of high-energy photons are used in radiography, for example

alchemy? photon to electron?

maybe he qas referring to a physical photo? a film that was literally blasted with radioactive radiation

It's not emitting anything, just reflecting.

On physical film, possibly

Let's make one thing clear - theres a distinction that had to be made between 'irradiated' and 'radioactive'.

Radioactive material is matter that is unstable and will decay, emitting radiation in the process.

That radiation will cause objects in the trajectory of the emitted radiation (to be general here) to become irradiated.

You can eat a salad that had been irradiated since it will have killed a good deal of the bacteria, but eating radioactive salad is a bad idea.

Objects that have radioactive material on them are often called 'contaminated'.

If a dirty bomb goes off, it spreads radioactive material everywhere and contaminates things.

Nuclear bombs are different. They emit tons of radiation, and some (especially the older ones) disperse tons of radioactive material, often referred as 'fallout'.

If the picture was contaminated with fallout, it would come out super fucked up because the film would likely be overexposed due to constant ionizing radiation hitting the film.

So theres a chance he's right, but it'd be a shitty picture. (Though my knowledge of oldschool photography is lacking).

More than likely, it was just irradiated to a degree.

so is this photo taken of nuclear blast is radioactive ? D:

No

eating a banana is more dangerous than holding your phone next to your balls in terms of radioactivity.

Photos dont emit light, only reflect.

...

>Photos dont emit light, only reflect.

You sir need to read up on basic chemistry, because you're making yourself look like a retard spewing this bullshit

Anything on the electromagnetic spectrum is radiation. Most things that emit light are harmless, but watching a nuke explode is a pretty bad idea.

Ehhhh there are other things your phone does that make that a crappy idea.

But wouldn't the radiation fuck up the film? Like how the elephants foot did?

All light is electromagnetic radiation, so kiiiiind of.

The pictured blast emits a wide range of photons, only some of which are dangerous to you. The camera used to take that picture is (likely) only sensitive to photons in the visible range though, so any information contained in there (and subsequently emitted when you look at any reproduction of it) would also still be in the visible range.

Is it "radioactive" in the "will it give me cancer" sense? No. There are no photons emitted by your gross, Dorito-covered laptop screen that are of dangerously high energy. At least no more than is typical of you watching pirated anime.

For the sake of bullshit, you could theoretically design a "camera" that accepts x-rays, gamma rays, etc. and design a screen that spits out that same image. Such "cameras" exist in any given particle/nuclear physics experiment. Building a computer screen that spits out a reconstruction of that data doesn't seem terribly useful though.

This is incorrect. Beta particles are emitted by some unstable nuclei. You might be thinking of pair production, where the energy of the photon is converted to an electron/positron pair.

uhh but he's right though

ive yet to see a photograph that glows in the dark, faggot

A physical photograph (or piece of paper that you've printed the above jpeg on) emits photons. The ambient light is absorbed and then emitted by pigments on the page.

Your screen is emitting photons. Some kind of fancy pants pixel gets data from your OS that says "spit out a red photon" and it does.

>absorbed and then emitted
so... reflected.

faggot

He's right. Light is electromagnetic radiation. Give him his 50$ right now.

>radiation
>radioactive

jesus fucking christ, kids

Maybe if it was developed with the light from the blast

Yeah if it's the fucking 18th century it gets "reflected." This is a good approximation but at a smaller scale the absorption and emission are two separate processes. It isn't instantaneous.

Maybe a shaky analogy, but do you "reflect" a baseball? No you catch it and then you throw it.

This is still contingent upon the frequency response of the camera/detector and the medium emitting the photons that are reconstructing the image. If the camera is only sensitive to the visible spectrum, the reconstructed image contains no photons outside that range.

>This is incorrect. Beta particles are emitted by some unstable nuclei. You might be thinking of pair production, where the energy of the photon is converted to an electron/positron pair.

Spoiler: Beta particles are electrons or positrons.

spoiler alert spoiler: beta decay is still not the same as pair production

By your logic, ionization is the same as beta decay.

To make this a little more specific and not just get in a pissing contest, I'll give you some terms to Google. Beta decay is a weak interaction. Ionization and pair-production are QED.

all photons generate electromagnetic radiation

you are mixing terms like "radioactive" which make no sense

Apologies for being word police here, but semantics and correct usage of jargon matters in science. Photons *are* electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation can be *generated* in many ways but that radiation *is* composed of quanta called photons.

>By your logic
Lrn2logic fgt pls

Hm thats retarded for this digital image but for the film thats auctualy a good question
Probably not though.

I was using that phrase more as an idiom than legit "A implies B". Enjoy your willful ignorance of established physics for the sake of being a dick on the internet. You're not gonna go far in science if you keep it up. I was really just trying to inject some real info into this pisspot of a board. Hope 10th grade doesn't stress you out too much.

I don't get it

There is a high density of armchair physicists in this thread, making it all pretty confusing. But people are correct in saying the photo does emit radiation. However this does not equate to it being 'radioactive.' Your friend is wrong if he mixed the terms because he does not have an understanding of the physics behind it. He is also wrong if he implied the photograph is radioactive BECAUSE it's a photo of a nuclear bomb. So, I'd say you win the bet.

>So theres a chance he's right
not much of one.
If you posit a camera that was radioactive either by way of fallout contamination or secondary radiation caused by the irradiation from the atomic blast, only the camera and film would be radioactive the picture will NOT be since it had no physical contact with the camera or the film and was not in the blast area unless we're talking polaroid picture where the negative, positive print part and developing solutions are all in a packet in the camera.