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
The half life is the time over which each *individual* atom has a *50% chance* of decaying. *As a result of that*, a sample of a very large number of atoms will decrease by half in that time, but that isn’t what it actually means.
If you have 1 atom, there is a 1/2 chance it will decay after one half life, and a 1/2 chance it won’t. There is no half decay.
And if you have 2 atoms, there is a 1/4 chance they both will decay, a 1/2 chance one will decay, and a 1/4 chance neither will. It’s just like flipping coins.
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