[eli5] If a half-life is the amount of time it takes for a radioactive substance to lose half its radioactivity, and this number is constant no matter how much radiation remains, will there come a time when the substance loses all radioactivity?
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Halflife works on a large scale because of the law of large numbers in probabilities.
If you have a 1 kg mass of Uranium, you have roughly 2.5 * 10^(24) atoms. All of those atoms independently have a chance to decompose, but there are just so many of them that any variance is such a small amount that it’s kind of irrelevant.
When you get down to very small amounts, then you don’t have the law of large numbers helping out. Each atom can individually decay. However, when you’re at that kind of low amount, then the effects of single atoms are very hard to even notice.
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