Is there something special about the halfway point? Does the decay happen at a steady pace or exponentially?
In: 910
Saying that a radioactive material has a full life of X would imply that, after X, there will be none of it left. That’s not how it works. After two half lives, you still have 1/4 of the original radioactive atoms left. After another half life, you have 1/8. There is no amount of time where you can guarantee that there will be no atoms left. It’s not like lifespan for humans or animals, where you can confidently say that there is nobody alive today who was alive in 1870. There’s no amount of time you can wait and then confidently say that there are no atoms of a radioactive material left. If you want to talk about the lifetime of a radioactive material, you have to define some non-zero percentage of the original material where you will say there is none left below that threshold. Depending how you define that threshold, there might still be some atoms of the material left, even at the point where you’re saying its lifetime is over.
Latest Answers