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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

JayUtah said:
But how else is she going to get us to 500 pages?


Considerably more.

What makes the lunar surface emit radiation is the fact that it's on the Moon. The environment is what makes it do that, not some property of the material itself. Earth dirt, water, or angel food cake will emit secondary radiation if you put it in the lunar environment. As long as it's being bombarded by solar protons and GCRs, it will emit some form of secondary radiation. Once you take your cake back indoors, it will stop emitting secondary radiation and be quite safe to eat. Actually it would be safe to eat at any point, because the act of eating will remove the cake from the environmental causes that make it emit secondary radiation.

At no time in this process will any of those substances become a radiological contaminant.

The radium on a watch dial would be a radiological contaminant because the radium spontaneously emits radiation at all times, not just in response to something else. If you get the radium on you or (heaven forbid!) in you, it will keep emitting radiation that is absorbed immediately, directly, and constantly by the surrounding tissue for as long as the radium is there. It's not the substance per se that is a danger. The danger is that you're being constantly irradiated by the contaminant and you will want to take physical precautions to remove the contaminant—decontamination. Then, separately, you will need to address the biological effects of having been irradiated.


She's not smart enough to distinguish among various causes and effects, so I would say no. She has specifically disavowed that she believes that exposing something to radiation makes it radioactive. The problem seems to be that when she reads something that says, "The lunar surface is radioactive," she doesn't understand how or why that is. Consequently she can only think of it as inherently radioactive and therefore a contaminant because that's her simplistic understanding of what "is radioactive" could mean.


Yeah, that's got to be today's howler.

Protons can't themselves be radioactive. "Radioactive" means something that gives off radiation—typically ionizing radiation is what we care about. The radiation being given off is particles than can include protons, depending on the mode of radioactivity. Protons don't emit radiation, they are radiation. The person who doesn't know this foundational concept is the one trying to school everyone on how radiation works.
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Well, from what I've read, it is suggested that it is possible for a proton to decay (into a positron and a neutral pion?), but the latest estimate of the low bound of their half-life is around 10^34 years. So I suppose it's just possible one might have decayed during the Apollo 11 mission.

Though I don't think it would have had much of an effect.
 
JayUtah said:
To be clear, she doesn't think any such thing. She wants to say that I accused her of believing such a thing. I made no such accusation. As usual she's straw-manning her critics' claims to make her critics seem irrational or mean-spirited.
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That's all well and good, but I'm still laughing at the idea that Vixen believes there's a 66,000km hill on the Moon.
 
I am really so glad that I only did normal, workaday O-level physics up here in the uncivilised north, because clearly they forgot to include the "special" "understandings" of things to do with radiation, radioactivity and the like which seem to have been a feature elsewhere.

Oh, and I've been to Dartmoor and Strontian, even going up to the old quarries above the latter and bringing home a little bit of said granite...How have I not been killed to death? Several times, as I didn't decontaminate...Unless you count being rained on coming down the Strontian River...
 
Reformed Offlian said:
Yes, it does. The phenomenon you are alluding to here involves actual contamination (i.e., the radioactive materials actually sticking to you and continuing to irradiate you). That is what decontamination procedures mitigate.

Simply being exposed to radiation does not make one a radiation threat to others. Nor would decontamination procedures mitigate radiation damage already done by such exposure.
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I have never said it would be a 'radiation threat' to others. Stop making up falsehoods.
 
Vixen said:
I have never said it would be a 'radiation threat' to others. Stop making up falsehoods.
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What would be the effect of the decontamination you seemed to think should have been done, then?

ETA: And if you didn't say it, that's because you didn't understand the implications of your (false) understanding of the situation.
 
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JayUtah said:
I use Ilford as well. I'm familiar with several film manufacturers. However the problem is that because you don't know anything about film photography, you thought Ektachrome and Kodak were two different companies, two different brands, with two different groups of people working for them. That's why you were trying to talk about employees of Ektachrome having a special role in Apollo. The people who make Ektachrome film are employees of Kodak, because it's their product line.

The larger issue is that you have variously appointed yourself either the arbiter of the Apollo authenticity question or the proponent of the case against the "debunkers," and we're pointing out that you fail at both tasks because you neither know enough about the Apollo program and its relevant sciences nor know enough about your sources and their flaws to speak intelligently about either one.
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Untrue. I have always known the difference.
 
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