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Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation
The fascinating science and history of radiation.
More than ever before, radiation is a part of our modern daily lives. We own radiation-emitting phones, regularly get diagnostic x-rays, such as mammograms, and submit to full-body security scans at airports. We worry and debate about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the safety of nuclear power plants. But how much do we really know about radiation? And what are its actual dangers?
An accessible blend of narrative history and science, Strange Glow describes mankind's extraordinary, thorny relationship with radiation, including the hard-won lessons of how radiation helps and harms our health. Timothy Jorgensen explores how our knowledge of and experiences with radiation in the last century can lead us to smarter personal decisions about radiation exposures today.
Jorgensen introduces key figures in the story of radiation--from Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverer of x-rays, and pioneering radioactivity researchers Marie and Pierre Curie, to Thomas Edison and the victims of the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. Tracing the most important events in the evolution of radiation, Jorgensen explains exactly what radiation is, how it produces certain health consequences, and how we can protect ourselves from harm. He also considers a range of practical scenarios such as the risks of radon in our basements, radiation levels in the fish we eat, questions about cell-phone use, and radiation's link to cancer. Jorgensen empowers us to make informed choices while offering a clearer understanding of broader societal issues.
Investigating radiation's benefits and risks, Strange Glow takes a remarkable look at how, for better or worse, radiation has transformed our society.
More than ever before, radiation is a part of our modern daily lives. We own radiation-emitting phones, regularly get diagnostic x-rays, such as mammograms, and submit to full-body security scans at airports. We worry and debate about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the safety of nuclear power plants. But how much do we really know about radiation? And what are its actual dangers?
An accessible blend of narrative history and science, Strange Glow describes mankind's extraordinary, thorny relationship with radiation, including the hard-won lessons of how radiation helps and harms our health. Timothy Jorgensen explores how our knowledge of and experiences with radiation in the last century can lead us to smarter personal decisions about radiation exposures today.
Jorgensen introduces key figures in the story of radiation--from Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverer of x-rays, and pioneering radioactivity researchers Marie and Pierre Curie, to Thomas Edison and the victims of the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. Tracing the most important events in the evolution of radiation, Jorgensen explains exactly what radiation is, how it produces certain health consequences, and how we can protect ourselves from harm. He also considers a range of practical scenarios such as the risks of radon in our basements, radiation levels in the fish we eat, questions about cell-phone use, and radiation's link to cancer. Jorgensen empowers us to make informed choices while offering a clearer understanding of broader societal issues.
Investigating radiation's benefits and risks, Strange Glow takes a remarkable look at how, for better or worse, radiation has transformed our society.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published February 22, 2016
142 people are currently reading
3217 people want to read
About the author
Timothy J. Jorgensen
3 books59 followersTimothy J. Jorgensen is professor of radiation medicine and biochemistry, and director of the Health Physics Graduate Program, at Georgetown University in Washington DC. His scientific expertise is in radiation biology, cancer epidemiology, and public health. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
April 25, 2016
Adapted from a review I wrote for the Literary Review
I approached this book with low expectations. Ho hum, I thought. A book about radiation, written by a professor of radiation medicine. Probably some dull memoir by a retired old boy. How wrong I was. Strange Glow is a cracking good read, filled with fascinating stories about the people behind the science, and covering vastly more of that science than I anticipated, in an accessible style.
The first delight is that Timothy Jorgensen deals with radiation in all it's forms, starting with light and putting other forms of electromagnetic radiation (such as X-rays) in context, as well as explaining the nature of particulate firms of radiation, such as the particle beams used to treat cancers. He starts with, as he puts it, "the basics", an historical overview from Newton to nuclear fusion via X-rays and radium. Just occasionally the American view of the world seems slightly out of tune with my version of reality -- as in "the British love their plum puddings" -- but this is a small price to pay for a friendly, jargon-free narrative.
In the second part of his narrative, on the health effects of radiation, Jorgensen really comes into his own. The slightly grim stories of the emerging understanding of the occupational hazards of working with radioactive materials have a morbid fascination. Even the familiar tale of the girls who painted radioactive paint onto the disks of luminous watches, and had a habit of licking their paint brushes, comes up fresh in his hands. But I had not previously been aware that in Marie Curie's lab in the 1920s workers had regular blood tests for anaemia. When they showed signs of anaemia, the worker was sent to the country to recover a normal blood count before returning to work. Nobody realised that the effects of the radiation they experienced were cumulative, and lethal. It was this long term exposure that killed Marie herself.
Jorgensen's expository skill is not limited to medicine. He is equally good at explaining microwave ovens, and at telling the story of the how the bombing run of the Enola Gay had to be calculated to minimise the risk to the aircraft from the Hiroshima bomb. And as he points out, only a relatively few people who lived on the fringes of the area destroyed by that bomb lived to suffer radiation sickness. "We have heard nothing from the shock wave and firestorm victims. . . Doubtless they would have told a completely different story about how atomic bombs affect health."
This leads in to what is for me the heart of the book, as clear a presentation of what the kind of numbers used in assessing health risks really mean as I have seen. Jorgensen neatly punctures the myth that mobile phones cause cancer, first pointing out that the alleged 40 per cent increase in risk is “feeble" compared with the 2,000 per cent increased risk from smoking, then demonstrating that the allegation is probably false anyway. “Cell phones fail miserably as a cause for cancer,” he says, but as a good scientist he notes that this does not mean that it is impossible for cell phones to cause cancer, simply that “cell phones don’t meet even the minimum conditions that we would expect to see in epidemiology studies, if it were true.” Good enough for me. Similarly, headlines sometimes say things like "eating X doubles your risk of Y". But what was the risk of Y anyway? If it was one in a million, then eating X raises it to two in a million, which may not worry you. An example used by Jorgensen is the hypothetical possibility that a whole-body CT scan might give you a 0.1 per cent chance of cancer. The baseline figure for the chance of a US citizen dying from cancer is about 25 per cent. So the scan raised the risk to just 25.1 per cent.
Things were not quite so good for the workers involved in the cleanup after the Fukushima disaster. Nobody suffered radiation sickness, but just two workers received doses of radiation that increased their risk of dying from cancer from 25 per cent to 28 per cent. Not quite the apocalypse. But Jorgensen reports the sad case of a Fukushima worker, not one of those two, who has decided he can never marry because no woman would want to chance having his deformed babies. "This is a tragic example of how exaggerated fears of radiation can damage lives".
Perhaps this book can do something to redress the balance. The author writes, "if I have done my job well, readers of this book will learn a tremendous amount about radiation and will find this information useful in many practical ways." He has, and they will.
I approached this book with low expectations. Ho hum, I thought. A book about radiation, written by a professor of radiation medicine. Probably some dull memoir by a retired old boy. How wrong I was. Strange Glow is a cracking good read, filled with fascinating stories about the people behind the science, and covering vastly more of that science than I anticipated, in an accessible style.
The first delight is that Timothy Jorgensen deals with radiation in all it's forms, starting with light and putting other forms of electromagnetic radiation (such as X-rays) in context, as well as explaining the nature of particulate firms of radiation, such as the particle beams used to treat cancers. He starts with, as he puts it, "the basics", an historical overview from Newton to nuclear fusion via X-rays and radium. Just occasionally the American view of the world seems slightly out of tune with my version of reality -- as in "the British love their plum puddings" -- but this is a small price to pay for a friendly, jargon-free narrative.
In the second part of his narrative, on the health effects of radiation, Jorgensen really comes into his own. The slightly grim stories of the emerging understanding of the occupational hazards of working with radioactive materials have a morbid fascination. Even the familiar tale of the girls who painted radioactive paint onto the disks of luminous watches, and had a habit of licking their paint brushes, comes up fresh in his hands. But I had not previously been aware that in Marie Curie's lab in the 1920s workers had regular blood tests for anaemia. When they showed signs of anaemia, the worker was sent to the country to recover a normal blood count before returning to work. Nobody realised that the effects of the radiation they experienced were cumulative, and lethal. It was this long term exposure that killed Marie herself.
Jorgensen's expository skill is not limited to medicine. He is equally good at explaining microwave ovens, and at telling the story of the how the bombing run of the Enola Gay had to be calculated to minimise the risk to the aircraft from the Hiroshima bomb. And as he points out, only a relatively few people who lived on the fringes of the area destroyed by that bomb lived to suffer radiation sickness. "We have heard nothing from the shock wave and firestorm victims. . . Doubtless they would have told a completely different story about how atomic bombs affect health."
This leads in to what is for me the heart of the book, as clear a presentation of what the kind of numbers used in assessing health risks really mean as I have seen. Jorgensen neatly punctures the myth that mobile phones cause cancer, first pointing out that the alleged 40 per cent increase in risk is “feeble" compared with the 2,000 per cent increased risk from smoking, then demonstrating that the allegation is probably false anyway. “Cell phones fail miserably as a cause for cancer,” he says, but as a good scientist he notes that this does not mean that it is impossible for cell phones to cause cancer, simply that “cell phones don’t meet even the minimum conditions that we would expect to see in epidemiology studies, if it were true.” Good enough for me. Similarly, headlines sometimes say things like "eating X doubles your risk of Y". But what was the risk of Y anyway? If it was one in a million, then eating X raises it to two in a million, which may not worry you. An example used by Jorgensen is the hypothetical possibility that a whole-body CT scan might give you a 0.1 per cent chance of cancer. The baseline figure for the chance of a US citizen dying from cancer is about 25 per cent. So the scan raised the risk to just 25.1 per cent.
Things were not quite so good for the workers involved in the cleanup after the Fukushima disaster. Nobody suffered radiation sickness, but just two workers received doses of radiation that increased their risk of dying from cancer from 25 per cent to 28 per cent. Not quite the apocalypse. But Jorgensen reports the sad case of a Fukushima worker, not one of those two, who has decided he can never marry because no woman would want to chance having his deformed babies. "This is a tragic example of how exaggerated fears of radiation can damage lives".
Perhaps this book can do something to redress the balance. The author writes, "if I have done my job well, readers of this book will learn a tremendous amount about radiation and will find this information useful in many practical ways." He has, and they will.
January 24, 2017
Very rarely does one find a writer that can casually blend complex scientific theories and data with a canny ability to tell a story. I felt like I understood the book better because of my personal background in Chemistry but I found Jorgensen's writing style accessible and extremely fascinating.
January 24, 2020
"This book was not meant to be a classic; it was meant to be useful. I have, therefore, written it using straightforward language largely devoid of scientific jargon... [It] is the story of people's encounters with radiation, and of how mankind has been transformed by the experience. The story is, therefore, told with an emphasis on the human aspects, and it is told from a health-centric perspective." (from the Preface)
Timothy J. Jorgensen explains that radiation is often in the form of electromagnetic waves, similar to light waves. Those wavelengths, which are shorter than visible light (such as x-rays), carry more energy and can actually break biological molecules. And radiation can be very useful or very dangerous.
"... this is not a book about lessening your fear of radiation." (page ix)
"It’s no small feat to drop an atomic bomb from an airplane and not fry your own ass in the process." (page 141)
The book is broken up roughly into three parts: Part 1 is the history of how radiation was discovered and how it has been put to practical use. Part 2 discusses how radiation can and has affected human health - such as the so-called "Radium Girls" and Hiroshima and Nagasaki - as well as things like radiation sickness and fallout. Part 3 is more focused on topics like radon, x-rays (including mammograms), cell phones, and radioactivity in food. He also talks about nuclear power plant accidents (especially Fukushima) and dirty bombs. And, true to his intent, I found the book very enlightening and mostly easy to read and understand.
His discussions about the atomic bombs used in WW2 was interesting, especially the deeper understanding of radiation from the post-war studies that were done. But also the risks we face from things such as x-rays and cell phones. (Psst! Simple x-rays of your broken hand are no big deal, but mammograms aren't exactly simple.) And he does it all with a funny sense of humor (“If cell phones are truly killing us with brain cancer, where are the bodies?”) that doesn't make light of the subject but makes his point more clearly. Overall, I thought this was an excellent book and I ended up making a whole lot of highlights!
Timothy J. Jorgensen explains that radiation is often in the form of electromagnetic waves, similar to light waves. Those wavelengths, which are shorter than visible light (such as x-rays), carry more energy and can actually break biological molecules. And radiation can be very useful or very dangerous.
"... this is not a book about lessening your fear of radiation." (page ix)
"It’s no small feat to drop an atomic bomb from an airplane and not fry your own ass in the process." (page 141)
The book is broken up roughly into three parts: Part 1 is the history of how radiation was discovered and how it has been put to practical use. Part 2 discusses how radiation can and has affected human health - such as the so-called "Radium Girls" and Hiroshima and Nagasaki - as well as things like radiation sickness and fallout. Part 3 is more focused on topics like radon, x-rays (including mammograms), cell phones, and radioactivity in food. He also talks about nuclear power plant accidents (especially Fukushima) and dirty bombs. And, true to his intent, I found the book very enlightening and mostly easy to read and understand.
His discussions about the atomic bombs used in WW2 was interesting, especially the deeper understanding of radiation from the post-war studies that were done. But also the risks we face from things such as x-rays and cell phones. (Psst! Simple x-rays of your broken hand are no big deal, but mammograms aren't exactly simple.) And he does it all with a funny sense of humor (“If cell phones are truly killing us with brain cancer, where are the bodies?”) that doesn't make light of the subject but makes his point more clearly. Overall, I thought this was an excellent book and I ended up making a whole lot of highlights!
September 20, 2019
The interesting parts were REALLY interesting. The dry parts were REALLY dry. At times I felt like I was reading a textbook the goal of which is keeping the interest of the 10th grade AP science class. I'm not sorry I read it, but I'm also still not quite sure if I liked it or not.
August 5, 2022
Great book on the history, effects, and benefits/risks of radiation. The author's writing style made the science very accessible, without dumbing it down too much for the reader. I learned a lot, though I probably would have learned/retained even more if I hadn't read half of it while under the influence of COVID-haze.
April 5, 2023
Busting the myths and confronting fears around radiation to make better choices.
Radiation, like mythical beasts of old, gets a bad rap mostly by virtue of being invisible. In the human psyche, what cannot be seen is often more terrifying than clearly visible threats.
In this book, we’ll tackle some basic science of radiation in layman's terms, including the discovery of particle, or nuclear, radiation and its many uses. Spoiler alert: instead of dry, dusty science it’s full of curiosity and wonder. We’ll chart a course through revolutionary medical treatments that save countless lives each year. To the rise of nuclear fission and fusion, and yes, even atomic bombs and thermonuclear weapons.
Along the way, we’ll encounter some of the pioneers of broadcasting, medicine and physics, and meet both innocent and not-so-innocent victims of early radiation science. Revealing how some lived long and healthy lives, while others did not, can help all of us understand the real costs and benefits of nuclear science.
---
The start of playing with radiation
“I’ve seen the light!” It’s such a simple expression, but it reveals much about the near mystical importance of light for humans. From sunsets to sparkles on the water, light and its refracted parts, –also known as colours– cause delight. These light rays? They’re radiation. In fact, it’s the radiation you can see with your naked eyes, because it excites special molecules in your retina. This visible light falls in the middle of the energy spectrum, sandwiched between Infrared energy below, and Ultraviolet above.
Light, like all radiation, is energy on the move, and it moves in waves. From the longest, or radio waves, at the bottom of the spectrum, to the shortest, or gamma rays, at the top, all are just energy moving through space. Thanks to Einstein, we know that all electromagnetic radiation travels at a constant speed: the speed of light. But like waves on the ocean, the crests of each wave can be closer together or farther apart. Short, frequent waves carry more energy at the same speed, while slow, rolling waves carry less.
Electricity, too, is energy on the move. While we harness it now for almost everything, before the 19th century it was a destructive force of nature, lightning started fires and could kill in an instant. When electricity was first introduced to homes for electric light, it was seen as incredibly dangerous. More dangerous, ironically, than the gas lamps and candles that regularly burned down houses.
The discovery and early transmission of radio waves, however, didn’t generate the same fear, even though it was linked to electricity.
As a young man of 20, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi discovered the work of Heinrich Hertz, who had detected radio waves in his laboratory back in 1888. The discovery went almost unnoticed by the world, but when Hertz died in 1894, Marconi saw the discovery lauded in the press, and immediately understood its potential. Marconi jumped in and began exploring the possibility of using long wavelength electromagnetic, or radio, waves to transmit messages wirelessly.
But it was another discovery in 1891 by the French Scientist Édouard Branly, that opened the door to radio communications. Imagine the scene: playing around in his lab with electric sparks one day, Branly notices that the sparks of electricity made some metal fillings sealed in a nearby glass tube jump up and line up from end to end. Once the electricity stops, a quick tap on the tube makes them crumble into a pile again. Some strange force made them defy gravity and organise themselves into a line! But what? The force is so strong it works even if the spark is on the other end of the room.
Oddly enough, through this process, Marconi and his team never worried about the potential dangers of radio wave exposure even knowing energy waves could be dangerous. The electricity they used terrified them, but the radio waves never did. Looking back, Marconi himself realised this was short sighted, but history proved him right.
Why? It's all about wavelength, which we’ll get into next.
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Wavelength is the key
It’s Christmas Day, 1895. In Germany, professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen feels troubled. Days earlier he made a revolutionary discovery, but it was so disturbing, he hoped it might be a mistake. His discovery? He found that invisible rays could pass through solid objects. Even seeing it with his own eyes he had his doubts.
Little did he, nor any other scientist at the time, know about the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, another German scientist. In 1893 Helmholtz had predicted that, if there were rays with wavelengths shorter than visible light, those rays could pass through matter. If Roentgen had known that, he might have relaxed a bit and enjoyed his holiday.
Roentgen was one of those old-fashioned scientists who believed discovery came with constant experimentation. A few days before Christmas, he’d noticed that while he was experimenting with electricity at one end of the room, his fluorescent screen on the other end was emitting a strange glow. The screen was just coated with a fluorescent chemical, but it seemed to react to the electricity from a distance. Roentgen couldn’t understand why.
Unlike light, he couldn’t bend the effect with a prism, or block the effect by inserting something between the source and the screen—unless he inserted metal. Wood was transparent to these unknown rays, but coins or other metal objects were not. He called them “x” like mathematicians would, indicating an unknown ray.
Soon he was placing coins into wooden boxes and “seeing” inside when the rays passed from the spark to his screen through the wood. In one of these experiments, his hand blocked the beam, and what he saw on the screen astonished him: the bones of his hand. While the flesh didn’t block these new X rays - the bones of his hand did.
Within days he told his wife in confidence, brought her to the laboratory and showed her the results. She too was astonished, and a bit worried about what she saw.
But lucky for us, once confident in his discovery, Roentgen was quick to see its benefits for medical science. He immediately published his methods and sent out a few images, making sure every scientist or physician could duplicate his results. Just a few months later, a successful surgery to remove a bullet in a patient's leg was completed after using an X-ray to locate the object near the bone. The patient was spared amputation, and the practice of medical X-rays was born.
---
A cautious approach pays off
Luckily for Roentgen, he had protected himself from these unknown rays early on. Perhaps because he was a cautious man, or perhaps because the image of bones on a fluorescent screen seemed like an omen of death. Still, not everyone was so cautious.
American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison was quick to pursue X-ray experiments in his own commercial laboratory. Edison’s involvement in bringing electric light to households had been both ruthless and cruel. But it put him at the forefront of innovation. Sadly, it was the experiments with these new waves that showed how dangerous X-ray exposure can be. Edison’s assistant, Clarence Dally, had volunteered to have his hands bombarded with X-Rays again and again to show how X-rays worked. Hand ulcers showed him how high exposure could burn the skin. But these ulcers grew cancerous, and spread from his hands, up the arms and to his chest, and eventually caused his death.
That brings us back to the topic of energy waves. Remember: shorter, faster waves carry more energy. And longer, slower waves carry less energy. At that point, it became clear that wavelengths longer than those of visible light are generally safe, like radio waves, microwaves and infrared. However, any wavelengths shorter than those of visible light carry so much energy that they interfere with the atoms and living cells, like Ultraviolet, X-rays, and Gamma rays.
Gamma rays carry enough energy to rip particles from the nucleus of other atoms as they pass through. Scientists call this ionising radiation because ionisation is essentially changing the electrical charge of an atom by removing particles from it. Molecules missing either electrons or protons are called ions, and their uneven charge tends to be unstable and they break down further. These chain reactions in cells can cause mutations and potentially even cell death.
So Marconi was correct, radio waves couldn’t hurt him or his colleagues. While Edison, who clearly knew the risks of electricity, chose to assume wavelengths shorter than visible light were equally safe. Edison himself nearly lost his eyesight after too many observations, but as we’ll see in the coming chapters, there were even more costs in scientific discovery.
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Radiation is everywhere—and so are the risks
The discovery of new wavelengths of energy happened at the same time as other discoveries. In France, scientist Antoine Becquerel was fascinated by Roentgen’s experiments, but more drawn to fluorescence, or light-emitting chemicals. He also loved photography, and wanted to capture fluorescence on film like light. So, he sealed films in dark covers and sprinkled them with minerals coated in fluorescent chemicals. He thought fluorescence was like X-rays and could pass through the covering and expose the film.
Sadly for him, none of his fluorescence experiments worked out until he tried the mineral Uranium. Without exposure to light, but WITH exposure to uranium, the photographic films were exposed and showed an image even without light. Oddly enough, the uranium hadn’t been treated with fluorescent chemicals at all—it seemed to emit an as-yet-undiscovered kind of ray. In 1903, he shared the Nobel Prize for this discovery with the famed scientific team, Marie and Pierre Curie.
But what was this new kind of ray? At last we come to the most common association of the current topic: particle radiation, also known as nuclear radiation.
But why nuclear? This refers to the nucleus, or centre, of an atom, so it's a good idea at this point to review the basic atomic structure.
Atoms are essential collections of smaller particles organised by charge: Ok. So, to break it down - the centre, or nucleus, holds a positive charge. That positive charge comes from the protons in the nucleus. Meanwhile the electrons, or negatively charged particles, orbit around the nucleus like planets in a solar system. Balancing the charges in the nucleus are neutrons, or neutral particles, that carry neither a positive or negative charge and keep things stable.
With large atoms like Uranium, which has 92 protons, or Radium which has 88, the positive charge at the nucleus builds up even with the neutrons trying to regulate. And so, occasionally a particle will fly out and spontaneously the atom will decay into another state. In the process, the particle carries energy, and energy waves are generated.
The ionising radiation referred to earlier was dangerous because it carried enough energy to rip particles out of an atom and leave it unstable. For DNA and other complex molecules, this is dangerous. But it is precisely the capacity to kill cells with higher wavelengths of particles, or nuclear radiation, that actually introduced helpful treatments to Western medicine.
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The introduction of nuclear radiation to medicine.
Fun fact: until the 1890s you were as likely to be killed by medicine as you were by any disease. Doctors injected mercury or used bloodletting regularly, and killed patients in the process.
Perhaps no one saw both the benefits and risks of the new nuclear science for medicine as clearly as Chicago physician Emil Herman Grubbe. At only 7, Grubbe was brought along to Edison’s new light bulb demonstration at the McVicker Theatre. At 20, he was working for a lightbulb manufacturer. His company wanted to make special scientific equipment, called Crookes tubes, for commercial sale. These small glass and metal instruments could send streams of electrons through the air, and Grubbe’s work life involved countless experiments with them. He considered his burned and blistered hands from the X-rays they emit to be the cost of discovery.
But Grubbe was also studying medicine in the evenings, and his professors noticed his bandaged hands. One, Dr. John Gilman thought that if X-rays were so good at destroying healthy tissue, they might be good at killing diseased tissues like tumours. And so, nuclear medicine was born, just one month after Roentgen’s Christmas-time X-ray discovery.
Incredibly, Grubbe began treating patients with X-rays just two days later. The first patients were beyond available medicine, essentially terminal. Still, the X-rays managed to reduce their pain, and are still used as pain relief for cancer patients today. But patients who were referred to Dr. Grubbe at earlier stages of their disease benefited more from treatments: tumours shrank and metastasis slowed.
Harnessing the radiation properties of minerals like uranium and radium was not far behind. Marie and Pierre Curie's refinement of radium and many published findings had led to a fashion trend for radioactivity. The soft glow of radium was the height of modern fashion for things like watch dials and clock faces that were visible in the dark. Firms like the Waterbury Clock Company happily jumped on the trend.
The glowing detail was radium-infused paint and done by hand— with a tiny paint brush by the mostly female workers at the factory. Since the fine brush tips often dried, they wet them with their lips between brushstrokes. Ingesting tiny amounts of radium with each tiny lick turned out to be disastrous.
Turns out, when a body absorbs radium it quickly travels to the bones and is deposited there like calcium. Over time, the radiation it emits destroys the bones. The workers suffered as their bones crumbled and cancers ensued, eventually receiving a payout from the Company. But the most important change their story made was about safety: everyone stopped licking brushes, and painting moved under ventilation that kept workers from breathing it in. With these small changes, radium was safely used for many years to come.
And remember that special equipment Grubbe was making at the lightbulb factory? The tubes that can fire electrons? Well, it turns out that if you fire a lot of electrons at an atom like radium or uranium, you can split it into smaller ones. You can even do the opposite - fire lots of electrons at smaller molecules and force them together.
In both processes, called fission and fusion, tiny amounts of matter—a gram or less—could release unbelievable amounts of power. Even a gram of matter yields more than 90 trillion joules of energy.
How much is that? Well, about the same energy needed to heat 1,000 homes for a year. Or about 10,000 lightning bolts. Or the energy released in a single atomic bomb. A point that will become all too relevant next.
---
The effects of Hiroshima
It’s a warm morning on August 6, 1945, and Dr. Terufumi Sasaki is settling into a day’s work at the Red Cross Hospital, just outside the city centre in Hiroshima, Japan. By 8:15, he’s heading down the hallway to deliver a patient’s blood specimen to the lab. Suddenly, he sees a bright flash of light.
An atomic bomb just detonated at the center of Hiroshima. At ground zero, the temperature was hotter than the surface of the sun. Heat from the bomb ignites fires, which engulf about 4 square miles of the city center. The blast radius was circular, just under a mile across.
Just five hundred feet beyond this radius, Dr. Sasaki quickly learns he’s one of only 6 doctors at the hospital to survive the initial blast. Why so lucky? The hallway was the best place he could have been in that moment—it shielded most of the initial shockwave and kept flying glass from hitting him. But the hospital was soon overwhelmed with others who weren’t so lucky.
Many had cuts and traumatic injuries, but a few had strange burns—images of flowers or objects—on their skin beneath their clothing. Sasaki knew overexposure to X-rays caused strange burns, but radiation sickness is almost unknown in 1945. Sasaki and his colleagues are among the first to witness it, and see it roll through in three waves.
First, some patients close to the blast, but without obvious burns or trauma, die quickly. They slip into a coma and die within 48 hours. After a few days, the surviving patients start to vomit and their hair falls out. Sadly, many of them die, too. After about a month, other survivors show symptoms like anaemia, exhaustion and vitamin deficiencies, but have a good prognosis if they get treatment for these.
But why? Looking for answers to these symptoms leads us back to the early experiments in nuclear medicine.
In those days, Doctors like Grubbe had based treatment on the fact that tumour cells were more sensitive to radiation than healthy ones because they divided more quickly. But this is why that second wave of patients died: human intestines are also lined with fast-dividing cells. These cells died during exposure, and never recovered.
The third wave of patients - those who were only partially dosed with radiation, revealed that bone marrow, too, was sensitive to radiation. Essentially these folks, at a distance of just a few hundred metres past the fatal zone, developed anaemia as a result of lost marrow. Deep in the bones, marrow makes red blood cells, which live for about 30 days, so it wasn’t until about a month later that their inability to make new ones caused anaemia.
Like Grubbe predicted decades earlier, the risks of radiation all come down to the dose. Even in an atomic blast, your proximity to a source of radiation is a powerful tool in mitigating the risks. The hallway of the hospital building was enough to shield Dr. Sasaki from many harmful effects. Were he standing before a window during the blast, instead of a wall, his story would have been quite different.
---
Radiation is just energy on the move, and it travels in waves. The faster, shorter energy waves above visible light carry more energy and can cause damage as they move, while slower, longer waves below visible light are harnessed for things like radio transmission.
Through radiation, humanity has unlocked modern medicine, harnessed atomic power, and probed the secrets of the universe. But ignorance about radiation and its risks still keep many from making wise decisions about radiation in medicine or nuclear power. Limiting exposure, shielding sources and safe handling of radiation materials can go a long way toward multiplying the benefits, while vastly limiting the risks.
Radiation, like mythical beasts of old, gets a bad rap mostly by virtue of being invisible. In the human psyche, what cannot be seen is often more terrifying than clearly visible threats.
In this book, we’ll tackle some basic science of radiation in layman's terms, including the discovery of particle, or nuclear, radiation and its many uses. Spoiler alert: instead of dry, dusty science it’s full of curiosity and wonder. We’ll chart a course through revolutionary medical treatments that save countless lives each year. To the rise of nuclear fission and fusion, and yes, even atomic bombs and thermonuclear weapons.
Along the way, we’ll encounter some of the pioneers of broadcasting, medicine and physics, and meet both innocent and not-so-innocent victims of early radiation science. Revealing how some lived long and healthy lives, while others did not, can help all of us understand the real costs and benefits of nuclear science.
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The start of playing with radiation
“I’ve seen the light!” It’s such a simple expression, but it reveals much about the near mystical importance of light for humans. From sunsets to sparkles on the water, light and its refracted parts, –also known as colours– cause delight. These light rays? They’re radiation. In fact, it’s the radiation you can see with your naked eyes, because it excites special molecules in your retina. This visible light falls in the middle of the energy spectrum, sandwiched between Infrared energy below, and Ultraviolet above.
Light, like all radiation, is energy on the move, and it moves in waves. From the longest, or radio waves, at the bottom of the spectrum, to the shortest, or gamma rays, at the top, all are just energy moving through space. Thanks to Einstein, we know that all electromagnetic radiation travels at a constant speed: the speed of light. But like waves on the ocean, the crests of each wave can be closer together or farther apart. Short, frequent waves carry more energy at the same speed, while slow, rolling waves carry less.
Electricity, too, is energy on the move. While we harness it now for almost everything, before the 19th century it was a destructive force of nature, lightning started fires and could kill in an instant. When electricity was first introduced to homes for electric light, it was seen as incredibly dangerous. More dangerous, ironically, than the gas lamps and candles that regularly burned down houses.
The discovery and early transmission of radio waves, however, didn’t generate the same fear, even though it was linked to electricity.
As a young man of 20, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi discovered the work of Heinrich Hertz, who had detected radio waves in his laboratory back in 1888. The discovery went almost unnoticed by the world, but when Hertz died in 1894, Marconi saw the discovery lauded in the press, and immediately understood its potential. Marconi jumped in and began exploring the possibility of using long wavelength electromagnetic, or radio, waves to transmit messages wirelessly.
But it was another discovery in 1891 by the French Scientist Édouard Branly, that opened the door to radio communications. Imagine the scene: playing around in his lab with electric sparks one day, Branly notices that the sparks of electricity made some metal fillings sealed in a nearby glass tube jump up and line up from end to end. Once the electricity stops, a quick tap on the tube makes them crumble into a pile again. Some strange force made them defy gravity and organise themselves into a line! But what? The force is so strong it works even if the spark is on the other end of the room.
Oddly enough, through this process, Marconi and his team never worried about the potential dangers of radio wave exposure even knowing energy waves could be dangerous. The electricity they used terrified them, but the radio waves never did. Looking back, Marconi himself realised this was short sighted, but history proved him right.
Why? It's all about wavelength, which we’ll get into next.
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Wavelength is the key
It’s Christmas Day, 1895. In Germany, professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen feels troubled. Days earlier he made a revolutionary discovery, but it was so disturbing, he hoped it might be a mistake. His discovery? He found that invisible rays could pass through solid objects. Even seeing it with his own eyes he had his doubts.
Little did he, nor any other scientist at the time, know about the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, another German scientist. In 1893 Helmholtz had predicted that, if there were rays with wavelengths shorter than visible light, those rays could pass through matter. If Roentgen had known that, he might have relaxed a bit and enjoyed his holiday.
Roentgen was one of those old-fashioned scientists who believed discovery came with constant experimentation. A few days before Christmas, he’d noticed that while he was experimenting with electricity at one end of the room, his fluorescent screen on the other end was emitting a strange glow. The screen was just coated with a fluorescent chemical, but it seemed to react to the electricity from a distance. Roentgen couldn’t understand why.
Unlike light, he couldn’t bend the effect with a prism, or block the effect by inserting something between the source and the screen—unless he inserted metal. Wood was transparent to these unknown rays, but coins or other metal objects were not. He called them “x” like mathematicians would, indicating an unknown ray.
Soon he was placing coins into wooden boxes and “seeing” inside when the rays passed from the spark to his screen through the wood. In one of these experiments, his hand blocked the beam, and what he saw on the screen astonished him: the bones of his hand. While the flesh didn’t block these new X rays - the bones of his hand did.
Within days he told his wife in confidence, brought her to the laboratory and showed her the results. She too was astonished, and a bit worried about what she saw.
But lucky for us, once confident in his discovery, Roentgen was quick to see its benefits for medical science. He immediately published his methods and sent out a few images, making sure every scientist or physician could duplicate his results. Just a few months later, a successful surgery to remove a bullet in a patient's leg was completed after using an X-ray to locate the object near the bone. The patient was spared amputation, and the practice of medical X-rays was born.
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A cautious approach pays off
Luckily for Roentgen, he had protected himself from these unknown rays early on. Perhaps because he was a cautious man, or perhaps because the image of bones on a fluorescent screen seemed like an omen of death. Still, not everyone was so cautious.
American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison was quick to pursue X-ray experiments in his own commercial laboratory. Edison’s involvement in bringing electric light to households had been both ruthless and cruel. But it put him at the forefront of innovation. Sadly, it was the experiments with these new waves that showed how dangerous X-ray exposure can be. Edison’s assistant, Clarence Dally, had volunteered to have his hands bombarded with X-Rays again and again to show how X-rays worked. Hand ulcers showed him how high exposure could burn the skin. But these ulcers grew cancerous, and spread from his hands, up the arms and to his chest, and eventually caused his death.
That brings us back to the topic of energy waves. Remember: shorter, faster waves carry more energy. And longer, slower waves carry less energy. At that point, it became clear that wavelengths longer than those of visible light are generally safe, like radio waves, microwaves and infrared. However, any wavelengths shorter than those of visible light carry so much energy that they interfere with the atoms and living cells, like Ultraviolet, X-rays, and Gamma rays.
Gamma rays carry enough energy to rip particles from the nucleus of other atoms as they pass through. Scientists call this ionising radiation because ionisation is essentially changing the electrical charge of an atom by removing particles from it. Molecules missing either electrons or protons are called ions, and their uneven charge tends to be unstable and they break down further. These chain reactions in cells can cause mutations and potentially even cell death.
So Marconi was correct, radio waves couldn’t hurt him or his colleagues. While Edison, who clearly knew the risks of electricity, chose to assume wavelengths shorter than visible light were equally safe. Edison himself nearly lost his eyesight after too many observations, but as we’ll see in the coming chapters, there were even more costs in scientific discovery.
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Radiation is everywhere—and so are the risks
The discovery of new wavelengths of energy happened at the same time as other discoveries. In France, scientist Antoine Becquerel was fascinated by Roentgen’s experiments, but more drawn to fluorescence, or light-emitting chemicals. He also loved photography, and wanted to capture fluorescence on film like light. So, he sealed films in dark covers and sprinkled them with minerals coated in fluorescent chemicals. He thought fluorescence was like X-rays and could pass through the covering and expose the film.
Sadly for him, none of his fluorescence experiments worked out until he tried the mineral Uranium. Without exposure to light, but WITH exposure to uranium, the photographic films were exposed and showed an image even without light. Oddly enough, the uranium hadn’t been treated with fluorescent chemicals at all—it seemed to emit an as-yet-undiscovered kind of ray. In 1903, he shared the Nobel Prize for this discovery with the famed scientific team, Marie and Pierre Curie.
But what was this new kind of ray? At last we come to the most common association of the current topic: particle radiation, also known as nuclear radiation.
But why nuclear? This refers to the nucleus, or centre, of an atom, so it's a good idea at this point to review the basic atomic structure.
Atoms are essential collections of smaller particles organised by charge: Ok. So, to break it down - the centre, or nucleus, holds a positive charge. That positive charge comes from the protons in the nucleus. Meanwhile the electrons, or negatively charged particles, orbit around the nucleus like planets in a solar system. Balancing the charges in the nucleus are neutrons, or neutral particles, that carry neither a positive or negative charge and keep things stable.
With large atoms like Uranium, which has 92 protons, or Radium which has 88, the positive charge at the nucleus builds up even with the neutrons trying to regulate. And so, occasionally a particle will fly out and spontaneously the atom will decay into another state. In the process, the particle carries energy, and energy waves are generated.
The ionising radiation referred to earlier was dangerous because it carried enough energy to rip particles out of an atom and leave it unstable. For DNA and other complex molecules, this is dangerous. But it is precisely the capacity to kill cells with higher wavelengths of particles, or nuclear radiation, that actually introduced helpful treatments to Western medicine.
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The introduction of nuclear radiation to medicine.
Fun fact: until the 1890s you were as likely to be killed by medicine as you were by any disease. Doctors injected mercury or used bloodletting regularly, and killed patients in the process.
Perhaps no one saw both the benefits and risks of the new nuclear science for medicine as clearly as Chicago physician Emil Herman Grubbe. At only 7, Grubbe was brought along to Edison’s new light bulb demonstration at the McVicker Theatre. At 20, he was working for a lightbulb manufacturer. His company wanted to make special scientific equipment, called Crookes tubes, for commercial sale. These small glass and metal instruments could send streams of electrons through the air, and Grubbe’s work life involved countless experiments with them. He considered his burned and blistered hands from the X-rays they emit to be the cost of discovery.
But Grubbe was also studying medicine in the evenings, and his professors noticed his bandaged hands. One, Dr. John Gilman thought that if X-rays were so good at destroying healthy tissue, they might be good at killing diseased tissues like tumours. And so, nuclear medicine was born, just one month after Roentgen’s Christmas-time X-ray discovery.
Incredibly, Grubbe began treating patients with X-rays just two days later. The first patients were beyond available medicine, essentially terminal. Still, the X-rays managed to reduce their pain, and are still used as pain relief for cancer patients today. But patients who were referred to Dr. Grubbe at earlier stages of their disease benefited more from treatments: tumours shrank and metastasis slowed.
Harnessing the radiation properties of minerals like uranium and radium was not far behind. Marie and Pierre Curie's refinement of radium and many published findings had led to a fashion trend for radioactivity. The soft glow of radium was the height of modern fashion for things like watch dials and clock faces that were visible in the dark. Firms like the Waterbury Clock Company happily jumped on the trend.
The glowing detail was radium-infused paint and done by hand— with a tiny paint brush by the mostly female workers at the factory. Since the fine brush tips often dried, they wet them with their lips between brushstrokes. Ingesting tiny amounts of radium with each tiny lick turned out to be disastrous.
Turns out, when a body absorbs radium it quickly travels to the bones and is deposited there like calcium. Over time, the radiation it emits destroys the bones. The workers suffered as their bones crumbled and cancers ensued, eventually receiving a payout from the Company. But the most important change their story made was about safety: everyone stopped licking brushes, and painting moved under ventilation that kept workers from breathing it in. With these small changes, radium was safely used for many years to come.
And remember that special equipment Grubbe was making at the lightbulb factory? The tubes that can fire electrons? Well, it turns out that if you fire a lot of electrons at an atom like radium or uranium, you can split it into smaller ones. You can even do the opposite - fire lots of electrons at smaller molecules and force them together.
In both processes, called fission and fusion, tiny amounts of matter—a gram or less—could release unbelievable amounts of power. Even a gram of matter yields more than 90 trillion joules of energy.
How much is that? Well, about the same energy needed to heat 1,000 homes for a year. Or about 10,000 lightning bolts. Or the energy released in a single atomic bomb. A point that will become all too relevant next.
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The effects of Hiroshima
It’s a warm morning on August 6, 1945, and Dr. Terufumi Sasaki is settling into a day’s work at the Red Cross Hospital, just outside the city centre in Hiroshima, Japan. By 8:15, he’s heading down the hallway to deliver a patient’s blood specimen to the lab. Suddenly, he sees a bright flash of light.
An atomic bomb just detonated at the center of Hiroshima. At ground zero, the temperature was hotter than the surface of the sun. Heat from the bomb ignites fires, which engulf about 4 square miles of the city center. The blast radius was circular, just under a mile across.
Just five hundred feet beyond this radius, Dr. Sasaki quickly learns he’s one of only 6 doctors at the hospital to survive the initial blast. Why so lucky? The hallway was the best place he could have been in that moment—it shielded most of the initial shockwave and kept flying glass from hitting him. But the hospital was soon overwhelmed with others who weren’t so lucky.
Many had cuts and traumatic injuries, but a few had strange burns—images of flowers or objects—on their skin beneath their clothing. Sasaki knew overexposure to X-rays caused strange burns, but radiation sickness is almost unknown in 1945. Sasaki and his colleagues are among the first to witness it, and see it roll through in three waves.
First, some patients close to the blast, but without obvious burns or trauma, die quickly. They slip into a coma and die within 48 hours. After a few days, the surviving patients start to vomit and their hair falls out. Sadly, many of them die, too. After about a month, other survivors show symptoms like anaemia, exhaustion and vitamin deficiencies, but have a good prognosis if they get treatment for these.
But why? Looking for answers to these symptoms leads us back to the early experiments in nuclear medicine.
In those days, Doctors like Grubbe had based treatment on the fact that tumour cells were more sensitive to radiation than healthy ones because they divided more quickly. But this is why that second wave of patients died: human intestines are also lined with fast-dividing cells. These cells died during exposure, and never recovered.
The third wave of patients - those who were only partially dosed with radiation, revealed that bone marrow, too, was sensitive to radiation. Essentially these folks, at a distance of just a few hundred metres past the fatal zone, developed anaemia as a result of lost marrow. Deep in the bones, marrow makes red blood cells, which live for about 30 days, so it wasn’t until about a month later that their inability to make new ones caused anaemia.
Like Grubbe predicted decades earlier, the risks of radiation all come down to the dose. Even in an atomic blast, your proximity to a source of radiation is a powerful tool in mitigating the risks. The hallway of the hospital building was enough to shield Dr. Sasaki from many harmful effects. Were he standing before a window during the blast, instead of a wall, his story would have been quite different.
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Radiation is just energy on the move, and it travels in waves. The faster, shorter energy waves above visible light carry more energy and can cause damage as they move, while slower, longer waves below visible light are harnessed for things like radio transmission.
Through radiation, humanity has unlocked modern medicine, harnessed atomic power, and probed the secrets of the universe. But ignorance about radiation and its risks still keep many from making wise decisions about radiation in medicine or nuclear power. Limiting exposure, shielding sources and safe handling of radiation materials can go a long way toward multiplying the benefits, while vastly limiting the risks.
October 16, 2016
A fascinating mix of science and stories exploring the history and impact of radiation is all its forms. Some of the topics covered include the rapid adoption of x-rays in medical treatment, the unfortunate work consequences to the radium girls, the various health implications of radiation exposure, and how best to consider the implications of radiation exposure used in medicine. Throughout the history of radiation, making the best of a bad situation seems to be a recurring theme. The Life Span Study, created after the bombing of Japan, generated a detailed understanding of radiation exposure while nuclear power plant accidents have advanced our understanding of how complex systems fail, often in unexpected ways. Overall a very educational and enjoyable read.
July 16, 2016
Excellent book. Won the book in a Goodreads giveaway, and was certain it would be dry, technical, and dull; science books tend in these directions. I was wrong. It was highly educative while also being quite entertaining, the key to presenting information to your average layman. I would recommend this book highly, as it is one of my ten best reads of the year thus far.
June 14, 2017
I think I learned more about Chemistry and Biology from this book than I did in high school and college. The way Jorgensen ties in simple lessons about science into the historical narrative is both engaging and memorable. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in learning more - especially if they have read Radium Girls or are planning to do so.
February 18, 2018
It was on OK book. The beginning was very interesting, with a good history of the discoveries of radioactivity. What annoyed me was that too many paragraphs ended with questions, that would then be immediately answered. This just felt like lazy writing.
November 30, 2017
An absolutely amazing book! Tough reading for all the chemistry and physics, but fascinating and highly informative. Everyone should read it.
June 20, 2021
To be clear I am not the target audience for this book, I don’t have a background in science or know much about science for that matter.
But, the first half of this book was super interesting. I learnt a lot of information about radiation, it’s history and how it works.
The second half is where it got a bit too complicated for, delving deeper into the science part. This was a bit harder to understand. I found myself skipping over most of these parts.
I was also surprised there was only a small mention of Chernobyl, not a chapter. Perhaps this is because much has already been said.
Still, this is a worthy book of reading if you want to learn more about radiation, and especially the history of it. There’s also some important historical lessons included in this book!
September 7, 2023
Early sections of the book were a struggle as Jorgensen goes through an exhaustive history that just isn't all that interesting. I understand needing some theoretical grounding for the more applicable pieces but this overshoots that mark by a hundred pages or so. The last hundred pages are chock full of interesting anecdotes and information though I do disagree with the author's pessimistic conclusions and lack of scientific rigor when it comes to "attitudes" about nuclear weapons use. Very often this book will tip toe over the line into personal screed.
August 14, 2021
Based on other reviews, I expected a book full of great storytelling. And yes, there were some engaging sections. However, don't be misled - there is still a lot of science in this book. It was a bit much for me at this point in time, hence the lower rating.
BTW props to the cover editor - the words and graphics glow in the dark! I can't decide whether that's cool or creepy... but definitely clever.
BTW props to the cover editor - the words and graphics glow in the dark! I can't decide whether that's cool or creepy... but definitely clever.
March 11, 2023
Absolutely loved this book on radiation. The history, today's applications and more are well explained in the book. Also understandable for people who have no prior knowledge or experience with radiation. Great storytelling, one of my favourite books so far of 2023!
June 1, 2025
A clear-eyed, engaging book that does what it sets out to do: help the layperson understand radiation so that they can make informed decisions about their life (and learn a lot of amazing stuff along the way).
Bonus points for the witty jacket design surprise.
Bonus points for the witty jacket design surprise.
January 12, 2023
I work in radiology and I figured I might as well read the book for fun. Well it definitely talked about how X-rays were discovered but it was more in depth. This book is an “eye opener” for those who know so little of radiation. The author of this book really breaks down medical terms and history of it. Some parts talks about physics and the mathematical side of it too. It was definitely interesting to learn history of the war, inventions and how surgery was done.
I gave it 4 stars because some parts seemed a little dry and I had to take breaks. However this book is extremely detailed and I would recommend to anyone who might be interested in some history and how radiation is.
I gave it 4 stars because some parts seemed a little dry and I had to take breaks. However this book is extremely detailed and I would recommend to anyone who might be interested in some history and how radiation is.
August 6, 2024
This book does a great job of using real life examples to explain what radiation is, how it was discovered and the health impacts of it. It then provides multiple examples to make you think about the risk/benefit of radiation in our every day life. The cover also has a little Easter egg.
September 1, 2022
I thought a lot of the book was informative and put into terms almost anyone could understand. The ending that looked at assessing risk got to be super redundant and boring. I just skimmed what I didn’t find as interesting. Overall it was a good book!
January 14, 2022
When people think of radiation, they usually think of the nuclear kind, and the two big white elephants in the room - nuclear weapons and Chernobyl - usually dominate the topic. This book takes a look at radiation from a more biological/medical perspective and although our white elephants still get their fair share of attention, they are just part of a bigger story.
The story itself is truly fascinating in its details (Röntgen's discovery of x-rays saved a man's leg from amputation less than two months later) and its grand scheme (how radiation and genetics are intertwined: in order to understand the biological effects of ionizing radiation you need to understand cell-reproduction, in order to understand cell-reproduction you need to understand DNA, in order to understand DNA you need x-ray crystallography).
However, telling a nice story is not the only aim of the author.
His more practical goal is to give the reader the necessary tools to understand the risks and benefits of radiation treatment and the like, how governmental agencies decide on various safety limits and what they mean, and how to decide through facts rather than gut if radioactive tuna (or boar or mushrooms or what-have-you) should cause you worry or not. The book really shines in those chapters and fills a yawning gap in popular science literature.
I have only two minor complaints:
I would have wished for a table summarizing the most important numbers and maybe formulas for risk assessment somewhere.
And I object to the author's description of Mendel. Mendel carefully designed his experiments and bred more than 12000 hybrids over 8 years to come to his conclusions. In the book it reads a little like he was just a monk who counted peas because he had nothing better to do - I don't think this description does Mendel and his work justice.
I have a weakness for books that approach scientific fields from a historical point of view so I was easy prey for "Strange Glow". However, my susceptibility for the topic at hand should not exonerate the author from the great job he did in painting science, history and the people behind all of it into one detailed, fascinating and educational big picture.
Highly recommended!
The story itself is truly fascinating in its details (Röntgen's discovery of x-rays saved a man's leg from amputation less than two months later) and its grand scheme (how radiation and genetics are intertwined: in order to understand the biological effects of ionizing radiation you need to understand cell-reproduction, in order to understand cell-reproduction you need to understand DNA, in order to understand DNA you need x-ray crystallography).
However, telling a nice story is not the only aim of the author.
His more practical goal is to give the reader the necessary tools to understand the risks and benefits of radiation treatment and the like, how governmental agencies decide on various safety limits and what they mean, and how to decide through facts rather than gut if radioactive tuna (or boar or mushrooms or what-have-you) should cause you worry or not. The book really shines in those chapters and fills a yawning gap in popular science literature.
I have only two minor complaints:
I would have wished for a table summarizing the most important numbers and maybe formulas for risk assessment somewhere.
And I object to the author's description of Mendel. Mendel carefully designed his experiments and bred more than 12000 hybrids over 8 years to come to his conclusions. In the book it reads a little like he was just a monk who counted peas because he had nothing better to do - I don't think this description does Mendel and his work justice.
I have a weakness for books that approach scientific fields from a historical point of view so I was easy prey for "Strange Glow". However, my susceptibility for the topic at hand should not exonerate the author from the great job he did in painting science, history and the people behind all of it into one detailed, fascinating and educational big picture.
Highly recommended!
January 15, 2017
I encountered the first explanation of "half life" that I could actually understand in this book. A really fascinating and offbeat account of the history of this weird subject. Full of strange facts like the consequences on the women workers of painting the faces for luminous watches. (quite gruesome unsurprisingly).
Also some pretty scary acounts of accidents involving nuclear material. I did not agree with everything he writes. My definition of "safe" may differ from his. Nonetheless, I really liked his humour and off the wall approach. Having the book on the floor by my bedside, I was fairly alarmed when upon waking in the middle of the night, I realised that the cover actually glows in the dark. A risk worth taking though.
Also some pretty scary acounts of accidents involving nuclear material. I did not agree with everything he writes. My definition of "safe" may differ from his. Nonetheless, I really liked his humour and off the wall approach. Having the book on the floor by my bedside, I was fairly alarmed when upon waking in the middle of the night, I realised that the cover actually glows in the dark. A risk worth taking though.
March 10, 2020
I found that there was a lot of interesting information tucked in the book however it felt as though I were reading a textbook. Full of repeated statements, reviews and recaps, and a ton of detail that seemed to be way off-topic. It's not a bad book, but one that you should read the first couple pages of a chapter, then scan the rest.
August 20, 2017
Great book. I've read a fair bit about the Atomic Age, but reading this one cleared up a lot of the science I didn't understand. A readable mix of history and science that a layman can comprehend.
April 21, 2023
This is an excellent overview of the history of radiation. I adore the author's precision of language, especially in the footnotes. Though I can imagine others skip the footnotes or find this somewhat pedantic, you can tell this man is a scientist, and I am sure other scientists appreciate this! I found the risk assessment to be very clearly presented. This is a good tool for radiation physicists as we do outreach and communicate our science to the public. Radiation is an unavoidable part of life, and much like electricity, it is important for us all to understand it.
On a personal note, as a medical physicist, I loved learning the origin story of the principles I apply daily. The chosen anecdotes were very engaging, and I can imagine how they would be effective as I speak to a lay audience. Now I have a better answer for my parents the next time they ask what I do! I also learned some useful chemistry and biology background, which enriches my knowledge of radiation physics.
This book served as a companion to my textbook during my Radiation Biology course. I am very grateful to my professor for encouraging me to read it and loaning me her copy. This is an excellent read for not only students of radiation science, but anyone seeking a well-reasoned explanation of what radiation is and whether we should worry about it.
On a personal note, as a medical physicist, I loved learning the origin story of the principles I apply daily. The chosen anecdotes were very engaging, and I can imagine how they would be effective as I speak to a lay audience. Now I have a better answer for my parents the next time they ask what I do! I also learned some useful chemistry and biology background, which enriches my knowledge of radiation physics.
This book served as a companion to my textbook during my Radiation Biology course. I am very grateful to my professor for encouraging me to read it and loaning me her copy. This is an excellent read for not only students of radiation science, but anyone seeking a well-reasoned explanation of what radiation is and whether we should worry about it.
December 31, 2019
"We must be skeptical of all new claims, not to be obstructive to progress, but rather because the offspring of skepticism is rigor. It is rigorous inquiry that purges us of our biases and makes it harder for others to deceive us, and for us to deceive ourselves. Going forward into our future with radiation, let us embrace skepticism and insist on rigor."
I loved this book. I loved the no-nonsense and factual presentation of the science behind radiation and the strong course of logic that it followed. AND THIS WAS ACCOMPLISHED WITHOUT IT BEING DRY AND BORING. It told an engaging story, not a bland history. It was also an easy book to understand, made to be read by lay people rather than scientific geniuses. We need more books about these subjects that are aimed to inform the public rather than confuse and belittle. I want books like this on all sorts of subjects, and I would read them all.
I loved this book. I loved the no-nonsense and factual presentation of the science behind radiation and the strong course of logic that it followed. AND THIS WAS ACCOMPLISHED WITHOUT IT BEING DRY AND BORING. It told an engaging story, not a bland history. It was also an easy book to understand, made to be read by lay people rather than scientific geniuses. We need more books about these subjects that are aimed to inform the public rather than confuse and belittle. I want books like this on all sorts of subjects, and I would read them all.
July 30, 2025
3.5/5
An interesting read but it was rather disappointing, in the sense that the later chapters about radiation’s effect on us humans and the world around us were pretty bland and told a whole lot of nothing.
I enjoyed the first chapters about the actual story of radiation but it almost felt like Jorgensen got tired of writing the book halfway through and just wanted to get over with it. All of the more modern-day aspects of radiation were rushed through, even though I would argue it being possibly some of the most important parts of radiation history to point out. Spent more time talking about an octopus than the actual logistics and history behind The Manhattan Project. Impressive how he managed to bore someone whose special interest is radiation and nuclear disasters while reading a book about that exact thing.
Full of not-so-fun facts I will add to my repertoire for social get togethers tho.
An interesting read but it was rather disappointing, in the sense that the later chapters about radiation’s effect on us humans and the world around us were pretty bland and told a whole lot of nothing.
I enjoyed the first chapters about the actual story of radiation but it almost felt like Jorgensen got tired of writing the book halfway through and just wanted to get over with it. All of the more modern-day aspects of radiation were rushed through, even though I would argue it being possibly some of the most important parts of radiation history to point out. Spent more time talking about an octopus than the actual logistics and history behind The Manhattan Project. Impressive how he managed to bore someone whose special interest is radiation and nuclear disasters while reading a book about that exact thing.
Full of not-so-fun facts I will add to my repertoire for social get togethers tho.
March 6, 2019
Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation
Wonderful book. This work is a very clear, concise and objective history of the discovery, use and dangers of the people and research that brought radioactivity into our lives. A non-alarmist coverage of a an alarming subject. He gives a balanced view of the genie that will never be returning to the lamp. The author's continual emphasis on risks vs benefits of nuclear energy is refreshingly different from the often anecdotal histrionic treatment covering this subject. The author also makes humor pop out in small unexpected places throughout the book and a little comic relief is welcome for this very serious subject.
Wonderful book. This work is a very clear, concise and objective history of the discovery, use and dangers of the people and research that brought radioactivity into our lives. A non-alarmist coverage of a an alarming subject. He gives a balanced view of the genie that will never be returning to the lamp. The author's continual emphasis on risks vs benefits of nuclear energy is refreshingly different from the often anecdotal histrionic treatment covering this subject. The author also makes humor pop out in small unexpected places throughout the book and a little comic relief is welcome for this very serious subject.
June 13, 2025
Radiation is a dark subject, but nonetheless, it’s fascinating. I am not in any way a past science major, but this book made me feel like a giant nerd and was easy to understand. This contained a short science “master class” on topics including basic atomic structure, nuclear fission, radioisotopes, nuclear decay, particulate radiation, and gamma rays. This book also contained significant history ranging from the Curies, Roentgen, the Radium Girls, Chernobyl, the Manhattan Project, and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. The author hands over the facts from multiple studies and leaves the reader more educated on what types of radiation should actually be feared. In summary, Strange Glow crafts together both history and science related to radiation and formulates a fascinating and educational read. The “half-life” impact of this book will stay for a long time to come.
May 31, 2021
A decent read overall; admirable merging of science and history to create stories with valuable lessons, information and guidance on all things radiation. The book is focused on the health effects of radiation, weighing its risks against its benefits and knowing how to live with radiation in the modern world, not to mention mountains of statistics embedded in most chapters. If you seek knowledge purely on the physics behind radioactivity and an exclusively scientific read, don’t read this book. If, however, you wish to acquire a fundamental understanding of the science, clarity on how big a threat radiation poses to you and how to approach matters involving radiation today, then Strange Glow is the best option out there.
February 5, 2017
I won this book through a GoodReads giveaway, and I loved it!
Radiation is a fascinating subject, and this book presents it and its history in a very easy-to-read way. There's enough science for the really interested to feel they're learning something new, but no so much that a more casual reader to feel overwhelmed. The sections are laid out well, to discuss the different aspects of radiation in a clear way.
The only criticism I would have is formatting - there are notes in an appendix, which was too hard to flip back to as I was reading, especially with a hardback book. I would have preferred footnotes, but maybe that's just me.
Radiation is a fascinating subject, and this book presents it and its history in a very easy-to-read way. There's enough science for the really interested to feel they're learning something new, but no so much that a more casual reader to feel overwhelmed. The sections are laid out well, to discuss the different aspects of radiation in a clear way.
The only criticism I would have is formatting - there are notes in an appendix, which was too hard to flip back to as I was reading, especially with a hardback book. I would have preferred footnotes, but maybe that's just me.
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