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A lot of the time when you're trying to measuring the value of something, there are things going on, independent of you and what you're concerned with, that can mask the true value that you're looking for. For instance, say you wanted to measure how loud your computer is, but a neighbor is blasting their music so loudly that you can't even hear your computer. So, what the experimentalist would do would be to first measure the music by itself, the background count, then measure the computer + background count, and then subtract the first measurement from the second leaving only the computer noise.

In nuclear decay measurement, especially gamma radiation, there are a lot of things in the background that skew the gamma ray measurement you're trying to make, mostly caused from long-lived radioactive isotopes that naturally occur in everything (K40 comes to mind). So you just simply measure those background energies by themselves and then subtract them from your data.

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