What do people mean when they say “half life of element X”?
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Radioa time elements decay through natural processes, turning them from one element into another. Sometimes this occurs through spitting out a Hydrogen nucleus (atom?), sometimes spitting out a proton, and sometimes spitting out a high-energy photon. When this happens, that original element is no longer the same. It becomes a different element. The amount of time it takes for this to happen is truly random for an individual atom of an element, but, when measured against a large enough sample size, a pattern of time emerges, such that at the beginning of the measurement you have 1 large unit (say, a kilogram) of the element. After the average half-life has passed, you have half of that large unit of the element remaining, and the rest is something else (e.g. half a kilogram). Alternatively, you could start with 1 kilogram of the element and start a clock. When you have half as much of the element, the average time has elapsed, thus giving you the half-life of the element. For stable, but still radioactive elements, the half-life can be measured un millions of years or more. For less stables elements (like C14), thousands of years. And for extremely unstable elements (like what used to be called Unilhexium), fractions of a microsecond.
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