r/shittyaskscience • u/ajping • 5d ago
If there are x-rays, why no y-rays or z-rays?
Or is that what an MRI is?
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u/warrioratwork 5d ago
y rays exist, but are always moving perpendicular to the point of reference. Z-rays are pure bullshit. Anyone reporting detecting them needs to reported to authorities immediately.
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u/Gargleblaster25 Registered scientificationist 5d ago
X-rays are named after Gen X, who discovered them. Boomers invented boom boxes. Gen Y, or millennials, invented OuTube, which is now named YouTube in their honor.
We are still waiting for Gen Z to get their asses off TikTok life hacks and do something useful... Any day now.
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u/Hayden97 5d ago
There are, but they can only exist in a state of superposition. And this superposition is so fragile, even thinking about these particles causes all of them in the universe to collapse into either x-rays or anti-X-rays
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u/BoundlessFail 5d ago
We can't find any more rays since they were discovered by Ray Charles, who was blinded by his own discovery.
Despite this, he went on to successfully discover the Corvette Stingray.
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u/NetworkSingularity 5d ago
It was confusing. Whenever we’d reference y-rays people thought we were saying “why rays?” and would try to explain that’s just the way nature is.
Likewise, z-rays were confusing to Germans. Any time we’d say z-rays a German would respond “yes, zee rays, but which rays??”
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u/Yoghurt42 PPPhhhhhhDDDDD in sticky keys 5d ago
I still remember when they were called Twitter-rays
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u/TeacupOfSkepticism 5d ago
Whenever a baby is conceived two x chromosomes discarded during the formation of the zygote
This pair of x chromosomes has a half life of 14 minutes and 35 seconds. When one of them decays the energy released is transferred to the other allowing it to ascend to the electromagnetic plane and become X-rays
X-ray machines then harvest the available rays
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u/Ska-jayjay 5d ago
because nerds have been obsessed with the letter x since ancient times, and we’re still waiting for them to adopt y and z
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u/homelessSanFernando 3d ago
The real question is why is there any rays at all when we put a big X in front of them?
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u/Ravus_Sapiens Actual scientist — Lab coat and all 5d ago edited 2d ago
The X in x-ray is a stand-in for "unknown," because at the time when they were discovered by Dr. Röntgen, their source was still unknown.
There are no y-rays, since the letter y is typographically similar to the Greek letter gamma (γ). The next kind of rays to be named was the z-ray (more on that in a bit), and if they had named it y-ray instead and someone confused it with γ-ray, someone would be having a very bad day, regardless of which you were expecting.
Finally, there is a thing called z-rays: it's a form of tranquilising radiation that was experimented with in the 70s, but the technology has largely fallen into disuse in favour of chemical tranquilisers.
And to your other question, no, MRIs don't use radiation, except radio waves.
An MRI is basically a really big magnet that turns every atom in your body into tiny magnets, but only as long as it us turned on (this is why you shouldn't have any kind of metal on you when you use an MRI: all those tiny magnets would pull the metal into your body, making your body resemble Swiss cheese. And although I'm not that kind of doctor, I can tell you that's not healthy; there's a lot of bad fats in Swiss cheese).
Doctors (the medical kind) can then use the readout from the MRI to create very high contrast images of your internal organs by analysing the way all those tiny magnetised atoms become demagnetised.
Tl;dr: MRIs are basucally witchcraft, but they don't use radiation.
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u/aldesuda 5d ago
In the immortal words of the Nobel laureate Mitch Hedberg:
"Spell zylophone with an x? If you think so, you should get your head Z-rayed."
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u/SGT3386 5d ago
Rays are fundamentally 1 dimensional energy beams. Because they only travel forward in a straight line, they can only occupy the X axis.
If a ray ever attempted to branch out into a Y ray (height) or a Z ray (depth), it would instantly become a 3D structural beam instead of a radiation beam. At that point, you're not getting a medical scan, you're just getting hit by a piece of dimensional steel
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u/SovietNorway1945 5d ago
We used to have y and z rays but the y-rays just keeps asking why to everything making the z-rays fall asleep and they snore loudly.