How do scientists know the half life of a substance when the half life is longer than the time we have known about the substance?
In: Physics
The half life is just a standard measure of how fast unstable isotopes decay. It is possible to convert between half time and say 90%time or 99.9%time and back again. So you measure how many isotopes decay in say one hour versos how many isotopes there are in the sample and then you can extrapolate from this the half time of the specific isotope in millions of years.
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