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
No that is not what half life means(lol you are accidentally half correct) let me explain
When a radioactive material starts decaying, initially it’s decays very rapidly but soon it starts slowing down and it keeps on slowing down and decays very slowly.
Like some radioactive material will decay to half in about 20 years the the next half will decay in 1 million years.
Now 1 million years is a not and no human has conducted that experiment and that is why we measure the decay in half life as it is measurable in human life time.
In order to understand this look at the graph of radioactive decay and learn about the properties of that curve.
Latest Answers