<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
<br />Atomic nucleii (IOW, protons and neutrons) are known to be radioactive, but electrons are not. If energy absorbtion and eventual re-emission really is the cause of radioactivity, the difference might be due to the smaller size of electrons. The cube/square law [1] suggests the possibility that if something is small enough it might not be able to get hot enough to go pop.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">True. But electrons have some strange properties. They have no collisional cross-section, as I understand it. And interestingly, if we calculate the escape velocity from the surface of the "classical radius of the electron" (whatever that means), it is pretty close to the speed of light.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The smaller something is, the more surface area it has per unit mass. This is great for radiating internal heat. But what would "radiation" mean at that scale? Or "heat"? Probably something similar to what they mean at larger scales, but also probably not the same.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">"Radiation" would mean any emission. "Heat" would be a measure of internal energy based on the mean vibration speed of internal constituents, whatever they are.
Your statement about area/mass in not general because it depends on density. -|Tom|-
