eli5 / How do we know the half life of (or even that it is radioactive) Bismuth-209 when it is literally longer than the age of the universe by several orders of magnitude
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How do you know the speed of an object in km/h if you don’t measure for an hour? Simple, you measur3 the distance traveled in 1 second and calculate the km/h. Same for radioactive decay. You measure for a short time and using math you can calculate half-life, even though you didn’t measure for that long.
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