If a drug has a half-life of, say, 16 hours, how does the concentration in the body reach zero at some point?
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Lay out 100 M&Ms on a table. Go through them one by one, and for each M&M, flip a coin. If heads, you eat it. If tails, you leave it and move on to the next.
After doing this for all 100 M&Ms, you’ll probably end up with somewhere close to 50 M&Ms left on the table. If our M&M half-life is an hour, you’ll wait an hour, and do that process again. You’ll have about 25, then about 17, then about 8, then about 4.
At this point, the number you have remaining becomes harder to predict. You’re only flipping the coin four times and it becomes far less likely that you’ll get the same number of heads and tails flips. The amount of M&Ms you eat every hour slows down a lot because you have fewer total M&Ms, but you’ll get to all of them eventually.
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