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
I’ll just accept the caffeine half life as 5h without looking into it. This would be the decline over time.
At the start, let’s say there is 128mg from a coffee
After 5 hr, there is half (64mg)
After 10 hr, there is half again (32mg)
After 15hr, 16mg
After 20hr, 8mg…
After 100 hr, 122ng (0.122mg)…
After 200 hr, .116pg (0.000000116mg)
It halves every half-life, until there’s so little that you don’t notice it / can’t measure it. Bodies are complex so this reality might vary, but it’s the idea of a half life..
Why? Imagine a crowd of people flipping coins every 5 hours. Every coin flip, the people with heads remain and people with tails are eliminated. You’ll eliminate about half of the people every time, and it will take ages to eliminate them all. The caffeine is like a a mob of molecules flipping coins, they have a constant 50% chance of breaking down per 5 hours.
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