If plastic was made in 1907 how do they know it may take up to 1000 years to decompose?
In: Chemistry
It has been explained below – but it just made me think of an even more absurd example: we have experimental evidence, that the half-life of proton (which is, simply speaking, the typical time it takes for a proton to decay) is at least 1.67×10^34 years, even though that’s 24 orders of magnitude longer than the existence of the Universe, so it’s … pretty damn sure nobody has watched a proton that long! It’s simply because there is a *lot* of protons to watch and particle decay happen randomly, so even if the average time is unfathomably long, if you watch enough protons, one would be almost guaranteed to decay in an accessible time frame if their half-life were “short” enough. (We still do not know whether they decay at all, this is just as close as we come experimental get to saying that they don’t as we can.)
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