PerspectivePure2169 t1_j129e1o wrote on December 21, 2022 at 3:23 AM

It works quite well for sci fi that there's something called the blue beam of death. That unshielded shine directly from a high intensity radiological source, if one is unwise or unlucky enough to look at it, causes the human eye to perceive it as blue.

And when you see that blue - you're doomed.

I worked on nuclear waste remediation with some quite nasty tanks of stuff, and we considered shine from the tanks when they were opened. No worker or part of a worker could cross the shine from that opening.

If I recall the perception of blue came from some of the criticality accidents in the 40s and 50s, things involving the death of physicists, the demon core.

There's a lot to dive in to for sci fi in all that.

Abdiel_Kavash t1_j16y2nl wrote on December 22, 2022 at 2:52 AM

> It works quite well for sci fi that there's something called the blue beam of death. That unshielded shine directly from a high intensity radiological source, if one is unwise or unlucky enough to look at it, causes the human eye to perceive it as blue.

Is it actually blue (as in, if you let it shine on a white wall, and you look at the wall from behind a sufficiently shielded, but transparent partition, would you see the wall as blue), or does it just literally burn your ocular nerves and your brain trying to make some sense of it interprets it as "the color blue"?

PerspectivePure2169 t1_j1723hk wrote on December 22, 2022 at 3:24 AM

It's just that - if you are unlucky enough to look at the source, the interaction of high intensity radiation with your eyes is perceived as blue. You wouldn't see it looking at objects within the shine without being in it yourself. You wouldn't see it with sufficient clear shielding, though that's not possible with any materials we know of, except water perhaps.

As a side note, high radiation levels degrade regular glass transparency quite quickly. When we used to specify remote cameras, everything had to be nuclear grade and have particularly pure glass so the lenses wouldn't cloud.

Both are useful nuggets for sci fi on radiation I would think.