Is there something special about the halfway point? Does the decay happen at a steady pace or exponentially?
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I use a dice analogy for this. Imagine your atom’s decay is measured as a tub of 100 dice. You roll all 100 dice at once, and if it lands on a 1 then it has decayed and anything else it hasn’t. It might take ten rolls to have 50 of these dice decay, but when there’s only 50 then it might take ten rolls for only 25 to land on 1. The fewer there is, the longer it takes for large amounts of decay to occur. This relates to half life, because the “ten rolls” are equivalent to the half-life being ten (whatever time measurements). It takes 10 for the number of dice to half, and then it takes another 10 for it to half again. In actual physics terms, this is because the greater the number of neutrons, the more unstable it is. Also, decay occurs spontaneously. These two factors mean that when the atoms have lots of neutrons, the decay will happen faster, but as there are less neutrons the decay happens at a slower rate, because it is less unstable and therefore the chance that the same amount of neutrons will “land on a 1” is lower. Just like with the dice, the first ten rolls 50 decay, but the next ten rolls only 25 decay. It happens at a slower rate. So to answer your question, there can’t really be a full life because it’s not a case of “the first ten rolls 50 decay and the next 10 rolls the other 50 decay” it’s exponential and spontaneous, so there’s no way to really know the full life. The half life is the most accurate way we have to measure the rate of decay.
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