Is there something special about the halfway point? Does the decay happen at a steady pace or exponentially?
In: 910
There is nothing special about half.
Imagine you had a million bajillion coins. If you flipped all of them and pulled out the heads, you’d expect 1 half life to be 1 flip. About half of them would be heads.
Do the rest of the tails become heads on the next flip? No. But about half of them do. In 1 flip, or 1 half-life.
Half-life is used because the decay is not on any kind of timer, but acts like the coin flips.
A small set of coins may be tails for several flips in a row and may seem to not follow the rules of chance and would be unlikely. But it would be really unlikely to have a million gazillion coins all tails over and over.
Atoms that decay are tiny, and even a teensy bit can have a million brazillion atoms. So they seem to follow the rules very well.
For fun, imagine flipping a million coins. I’m going to alter some numbers as I go to follow through easier.
1,000,000
500,000
250,000
128,000 (I know)
64,000
32,000
16,000
8,000
4,000
2,000
1,000 after 10 flips
999,000 decays in 10 flips.
How long will it take to go to 1?
1,000
500
250
128 (I know again)
64
32
16
8
4
2
1 after 10 more flips
1 of those 1,000,000 coins was tails 20 times in a row. 500,000 of them were heads on the first flip.
Will the 1 remaining coin flip to heads on the next toss?
Maybe.
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