Eli5, if I left some valuable collectible, say, a car or a paining in am hermetically sealed room filled with pure argon and nothing else, and had it completely protected from UV radiation, would it ever decay or degrade?

Question

Eli5, if I left some valuable collectible, say, a car or a paining in am hermetically sealed room filled with pure argon and nothing else, and had it completely protected from UV radiation, would it ever decay or degrade?

In: 121

Answer 1

Yes it would, but most forms of degradation would take a lot longer. It wouldn’t be very good for some materials to have very low moisture environment, for example wood can easily dry too much, warp and crack. Some materials inherently are not stable and will degrade in time, many plastics in particular. Ultimately, just thermal randomness means that even a block of inert metal sitting on it’s own will lose an atom or few every now and then.