Half-life of things

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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

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

>So, if half life of coffee is 5h, how that info is relevant when we know that full life is 10 (roughly)?

It’s important because the “full life” isn’t 10h

Each 5h period halves the amount that is not yet decayed, so if t=0 is 100% then t=5h is 50% and t=10h is 25% and t=15h is 12.5% etc

It’s a curve that trends towards zero but it’s not a straight line. That’s the critical point

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