There's a short fictional account of a science teacher constructing a gold leaf electroscope using stuff in the school, and plaster dug out of the wall of the classroom to help map radioactivity after a limited-strike nuclear war, in "Warday" by Whitley Strieber & James Kunetka. (at least one of these authors has a bit of a nutty back-story, It's important to remember the book lies solidly in the realms of fiction)
I always thought it was somewhat fantastical. I'm rather delighted they could have beaded some polystyrene and stuck it in a cup for much the same effect.
Several SF novels mention using scintillation plastic. Is that also simply fantasy, or are there passive scintillation meters which could in fact detect levels of radioactivity? The 1900s models demanded 20 minutes of acclimatisation inside a dark chamber and were notoriously hard to use. Rutherford refused to use a counter while he could show his trained workers (women mainly) were as accurate. Those counters were photomultiplier tubes. I think quite a lot of the tech here was a precursor to TV, and ultimately the CCD in some ways.
Filmstrip exposure would tell you about a lethal dose, after the event. Helpful for budding scientists if they have enough lab rats to send out with a chunk of film in a wrapper.
Scintillation plastic is very much a thing. Big accelerators, like CERN or Fermilab, used to use long, floppy strips of plastic attached to a photomultiplier tube, which goes to the counters. I believe they still use scintillator detectors farther from the collision region, but the trend has been to move towards silicon pixel detectors closer in.
One thing with scintillators though: You're typically detecting a few photons at a time, so a photomultiplier tube (PMT) is really required for any kind of reasonable SNR with any kind of reasonable temporal resolution.
> Those counters were photomultiplier tubes.
A PMT is actually not a counter (but they are normally used with a counter). It's just a transducer that produces electrical charge at the output in response to photons at the input.
Normally the PMT is connected to a "discriminator" (very fast voltage threshold detector, with adjustable threshold(s)) which takes the very narrow pulses (~2-3 ns) from the PMT and stretches them into pulses with fixed rise time, width and voltage. Those pulses are then counted using whatever hardware you can dream up.
A PMT is really just an electron multiplier with a photocathode in front, so you have all the same issues as you do with electron multipliers and thus use a discriminator for all the same reasons (mainly to remove "runt pulses" that didn't originate from a photon at the input window). Normally you'd use a single level discriminator, but "multi-channel" ones exist also.
Having an adjustable threshold on the discriminator is important to maximize SNR because the electron multiplier within the PMT will wear out and produce smaller pulses, and there can be significant variation in pulse size across serial numbers.
> Rutherford refused to use a counter while he could show his trained workers (women mainly) were as accurate.
I'm skeptical of this account, and the only thing I can find with a quick Google is that Rutherford hired women to count scintillation events because he could pay them less than men(-counters).
Theodore Gray has one of these in his periodic table. This quote stood out to me:
"I've held this thing up to the strongest sources of radiation I have and the balls don't budge... I think it's safe to say that if you do ever see the balls drop, you should run, not walk, to wherever you think there might be less radiation around."
This website design is absurd and I love it. It works really well as a document but the skeumorph of it being a physical periodic table with samples that's also a wooden desk gets so disconnected from a physical metaphor as you drill in. Like, my desk has a zoom control?
It has that feeling of hand spun websites from the aughts maintained with such care, like a curio cabinet. It's been a long time since I just clicked around one of these. There's a lot to be said for the simple and minimalistic designs that are more conventional today, and I'm going to continue laying out my HTML that way, but in comparison they're woefully lacking in character.
We had one of these in the house when I was a kid in the 90s. Seriously wild to learn what it was when I was like 12, after some years of not understanding ha. Never really was sure if it would work or not.
Poking around I found this video, where a university professor demonstrates the principle with a snow globe (containing virtually the same beads) and a strontium 90 source.
Why not buy a normal radiometer? They are so cheap and mass produced.
These days digital integrating radiometers are able to not just integrate dose over time, but also adjust for dose rate effects (i.e. same amount radiation absorbed over shorter time is more harmful), and ratio of beta, gamma, and neutrons. And they cost in the range of $200. I still keep my CD V-715 somewhere in the closet, though.
The “prepper” mindset was rampant in the 1960s because of uncertainty and fear around nuclear war. Radiation detectors would have been still costly for the average Joe, and this allowed people to feel some level of preparedness.
It's hideous but it's a sort of psychology that makes sense to me. You're faced with this overwhelming existential threat you can't really understand. And here's a cute consumer device marketed to you to that promises to give you some idea what might be happening. It's a way of establishing the feeling of control, even if it doesn't work very well.
No, having some radiation indicating device is a lot better than not having one. It at least shows when it's safe to leave your basement for a short while or not.
I once built an advertising efficacy detector. It was a voltmeter connected to a solar cell. The more light there was in a shop window, the stronger its advertising effect.
> Because you're allowed to tactical nuke your own country (IANAL)
This isn't really a domain where the written rules are important in the sense that you can lawyer your way out of trouble with some textual technicality. There's no relevant court and your actions are judged by your opposition, who might consider what you say in defense of yourself but might also decide you're too dangerous to live, let alone listen to. When surface penetrating nuclear warheads are hollowing out your government bunkers in a retaliatory decapitation strike, your pleas of "but the laws and treaties didn't say I couldn't" will fall on deaf ears. Of course, maybe NATO would decide that the risk of ignoring you is less than the risk of taking you out, as they presently do, but similarly you need to consider if the risk of ignoring whatever provocation prompted you to consider using nukes is less than the risk of retaliation. It's a game of estimating risk and guessing what the other guy might do, not lawyering over laws and treaties before some sort of judge that cares about technicalities and can somehow restrain your opponent but not you.
Don't underestimate the power of giving your opponents plausible excuses to avoid conflict. People often don't want conflict and will be satisfied with token justifications such as "I was attacked and it's legal if it's in my territory".
It's a matter of narrative, really. Then, let's say, a NATO country has the option of the choice between "well they do have a point actually" and "I'll take the risk of you wiping my centuries old capital with your nuclear ICBMs".
I always thought it was somewhat fantastical. I'm rather delighted they could have beaded some polystyrene and stuck it in a cup for much the same effect.
Several SF novels mention using scintillation plastic. Is that also simply fantasy, or are there passive scintillation meters which could in fact detect levels of radioactivity? The 1900s models demanded 20 minutes of acclimatisation inside a dark chamber and were notoriously hard to use. Rutherford refused to use a counter while he could show his trained workers (women mainly) were as accurate. Those counters were photomultiplier tubes. I think quite a lot of the tech here was a precursor to TV, and ultimately the CCD in some ways.
Filmstrip exposure would tell you about a lethal dose, after the event. Helpful for budding scientists if they have enough lab rats to send out with a chunk of film in a wrapper.