What are X-rays?

What are X-rays?

At sometime or other, the doctor must have told someone in your family to have an X-ray taken. But do you know what X-rays actually are?

X-rays seem to do the impossible: They see straight through clothing and flesh. That is, they let doctors see straight through human tissue to examine broken bones, cavities and swallowed objects with extraordinary ease.

X-rays are basically the same thing as visible light rays. Both are wavelike forms of electromagnetic energy carried by particles called photons. The difference between X-rays and visible light rays is the energy level of the individual photons. This is also expressed as the wavelength of the rays.

As with many of mankind’s monumental discoveries, X-ray Technology was invented by completely by accident. In 1895, a German physicist name Wilhelm Roentgen made the discovery while experimenting electron beams in a gas discharge tube. Roentgen noticed that a fluorescent screen in his lab started to glow when the electron beam was turned on.

Roentgen placed various objects between the tube and the screen, and the screen still glowed. Finally, he put his hand in front of the tube, and saw the silhouette of his bones projected onto the fluorescent screen!

The most important contributions of X-ray Technology have been in the world of medicine, but X-rays have played a crucial role in a number of other areas as well. X-rays have been pivotal in research involving quantum mechanics theory, crystallography and cosmology. In the industrial world, X-ray scanners are often used to detect minute flaws in heavy metal equipment. (Like plane, jet and rocket, ship bodies).

Is it any wonder then that Roentgen’s work on X-Rays won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901?