Is there something special about the halfway point? Does the decay happen at a steady pace or exponentially?
In: 910
These isotopes don’t have a fixed lifespan.
What they do have as a fixed chance for an atom to decay at any single moment.
This means you can say that in x-time half of the atoms you currently have will have decayed.
Take cobalt-60 for example.
It has a half life of 5.27 years.
So if you have some cobalt 60 right now you will have half of it left after 5 years and quarter years.
This does not mean that in 10 and a half years all of it will be gone.
Every 5 and a quarter years the amount you will have left halves.
After 10 and a half years you will have a quatre left and after 15 3 quarter years you will have an eight left and after 21 years you will have a sixteenth left.
At some point in the future you will have so little left that it will become undetectable and eventually the last atom will really be gone.
However those points aren’t really useful to know.
You want to know how fast it disappears and half life is a useful measure to know about that.
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