Why exactly do radioactive elements decay in half every set amount of time? What is happening on an atomic scale?
In: Physics
At an atomic scale, the decay is random. Each atom has a chance to decay in any given period of time that stays constant.
But because there are *so many* atoms, the behavior at observable scales doesn’t seem random. If you flip one coin, it can come up either way. But if you flip a trillion coins, you will get very, *very* close to 500 billion heads (even though each individual coin can still land either way). The number of atoms in a macroscopic sample of radioactive material is more than a trillion trillion, so large that the randomness is more-or-less invisible.
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