system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does visible light only penetrate a few millimetres, whilst both X-rays and radio waves can penetrate much further even though they're on opposite ends of the energy spectrum?

I was thinking about television signals, and it occurred to me that whilst radio waves and X-rays are both used because they penetrate through matter, visible light does not. Why is this the case, given that X-rays are much higher energy than visible light and radio waves are much lower? Surely that should mean that one penetrates even less that visible light.
gpt
It's because the method for penetration is different for both x-ray and radio waves.

For radio waves, it has to do with the electron structure in the material - radio waves can pass very easily through some matter's electron configurations (like in plaster or wood), and not at all through others (like steel, or other metals), coupled with the wavelength of the radio waves - which is much, much longer than visible light.

Whereas x-rays just have so much energy that they can punch right through most things - they have so much energy that due to the inertia of electrons the electrons cannot "keep up" with them so they just bull-rush right through.

Visible light neither has the wavelength of radio nor the energy of x-ray, so it can't get through using either method.