What is the reason radioactive decay is measured in half-life’s instead of just using the elements “full-life”?

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Is there something special about the halfway point? Does the decay happen at a steady pace or exponentially?

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The half life is essentially the time it takes for each atom to have a 50% chance of decaying. You can almost imagine that each atom is flipping a coin every half life (really it would be continuously flipping a coin, but we’ll ignore that). So after two half-lives, each has a 75% chance of decaying, and after three half-lives it’s 87.5%, but it never reaches 100% (just like how no matter how many times you flip a coin, you’re never 100% certain that you’ll get even a single heads)

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