I’ve been reading about HL, but I still don’t get why would you use it. So, if half life of coffee is 5h, how that info is relevant when we know that full life is 10 (roughly)? On top of that, how do you get the half-life of a material other than waiting to be completely ‘dead’ and say, ok full life is X, the half life is X/2.
Also, let’s take uranium which in Earth’s crust has a half-life of almost 4.5 billion years.. how did we get this number?
Thank you!
In: Chemistry
Things decay at an exponential rate. Every certain amount of time, a certain percent decays.
If you limit this to pure math, take the number 100 and say it decays at a rate of 10% per day. The first day, 10% is 10, so 100-10 is 90. The second day, 10% is 9, so 90-9 is 81.
Let’s skip ahead to 50. 10% is now only 5. When we began, 10% was 10, now it is 5. You can see that we approached the halfway point very fast, but from here we will approach 0 very slow. This is what “half-life” means.
There are many things we really care about the potency of. Often, by the time we reach 50%, those things are no good for their original purpose. Medicine is a primary example of why this is important, because it loses potency as it decays and can even turn into something dangerous to consume in rare cases.
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