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
As for how we reach a half-life we haven’t had time to literally confirm:
You can take a known amount of a substance, know roughly how many atoms are in it. I’ll make up some really dumb numbers:
10,000 thousand atoms
Then you watch and track how many decay in an hour. Do that a bunch and you have an average. Let’s say you see only 5 every hour.
That means that each atom has a 1/2000 chance of decaying every hour.
To have 5000 atoms left (half-life) you have to figure out how long on average it would take 5000 atoms with a 1/2000 chance per hour to decay, which is just algebra and then you have your answer.
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