Today just happens to be the International Day of Medical Physics. A day to highlight how the science of physics has helped advance medical science with things like X-rays, CT Scans, ultrasounds and MRIs. We might not think of physics and medicine combining, but they have pretty much since the time Marie Curie noticed her desk drawer was glowing strangely.
Physics has supplied medical science with some pretty fancy equipment, although there is one thing where they have dropped the ball. X-ray specs. You know. Those glasses that were advertised in the back of comic books. We should have those by now.
There were always such neat things in the backs comic books. Those mini submarines, which I doubt worked very well. Sea monkeys, which probably didn’t look like the pictures, but at least would sort of work. And of course, the X-ray specs.
You could see the bones in your hand. You could see through people’s clothes. Although they really didn’t work as promised. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I was never allowed to send in my money to get such products. I was always told they were a scam. But I still wanted them.
I think they worked by making your vision so blurry, you thought you could see through things. In one version, they had cardboard lenses in the glasses with tiny holes to see through. Another version used feathers blocking the holes to cloud your vision. But the idea was to make things look blurry enough you might think you could see through things.
But this was a long time ago. You’d think we would have things like that now. I went to the doctor not long ago because of pain in one hand. It’s probably something like arthritis, but I was thinking at the time, it would be perfect if the doctor actually had a pair of those x-ray glasses. She could just glance at my hand, check out the bones and say, “there’s your problem.”
Unfortunately, they do not yet exist. You would think someone would have come up a working pair by now. But no. Another Medical Physics Day and no x-ray specs. Maybe next year.
And maybe while they’re at it, they could perfect that mini submarine. I’ve lost a lot of fishing lures over the years. One of those subs could come in handy.