I’m sure there is an easy answer to this, but for some reason I can’t wrap my head around how a sample of an element can ever decay all the way to zero, when measured in half lives. It seems like you could always split a number in half, it would just be infinitesimally small.
In: Chemistry
Half-life doesn’t mean that half the element will be gone, although that is a consequence.
Half-life means that each individual atom has a 50% chance of decaying in that span of time. Eventually, you get down to the last atom, which has a 50% chance of being gone after one half-life, 75% after two, 87.5% after three, etc. You can never say when it will reach zero, but it will eventually happen.
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