Apparently xenon-124 has a half life of 18 sextillion years for example. How can it be calculated when it’s greater the age of the universe?
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It’s sort of like how you don’t need to actually wait an entire hour to know how fast your car is going in miles per hour. Half-life is just a convenient point of reference for describing a rate of exponential decay.
For example, if I had 1000 grams of some substance on January 1, and on December 31 there were 999.99 grams left, I could do some math and determine that that substance has a half-life of about 70,000 years (assuming I’ve calculated that correctly). I don’t actually have to wait 70,000 years until there are 500 grams left to know for sure.
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