Really interesting video. Before finding this video, I did similar tests on an old watch I had sitting in my watch-box beside my desk and found very similar results. Background radiation on my detector was around 0.08 microsieverts per hour and when in contact with the watch rose drastically to 2.8 millisieverts per hour - 35x the dose of background radiation, as opposed to your findings with your watch of 25x.
This was a neat demo. Really makes me wonder what it is that "wears out" about radium paint. Does the zinc or sulfur transform from the radiation to another element (that would suggest some neutron absorption, which I'm not aware of anything like that in the Ra decay chain? Google suggests the "crystal structure" is changed - but how? Why does crystal structure change affect the ability to react to radiation for luminescence? Why can it react to UV (but with poor persistence) but not radiation? Such a curious change.
Really interesting video. Before finding this video, I did similar tests on an old watch I had sitting in my watch-box beside my desk and found very similar results. Background radiation on my detector was around 0.08 microsieverts per hour and when in contact with the watch rose drastically to 2.8 millisieverts per hour - 35x the dose of background radiation, as opposed to your findings with your watch of 25x.
This was a neat demo. Really makes me wonder what it is that "wears out" about radium paint. Does the zinc or sulfur transform from the radiation to another element (that would suggest some neutron absorption, which I'm not aware of anything like that in the Ra decay chain? Google suggests the "crystal structure" is changed - but how? Why does crystal structure change affect the ability to react to radiation for luminescence? Why can it react to UV (but with poor persistence) but not radiation? Such a curious change.
Nice video,
Getting extremely to even get lead here, banned at most hardware except for registered trade supply
Can you estimate the age of manufacture based on the relative size of the gamma spectrum peaks for the radium?
That would be a neat application.