I’ve seen that the half life of certain radioactive materials and other things are useful especially in applying mathematical models. However, how do we know how long these half lifes are? I can understand some of them coming from testing/observation, but say Radium-226 with a half life of 1590 years (according to this textbook problem)… there’s no way we just waited 16 centuries to find out how long a sample takes to reduce to half. Is it extrapolation of data using properties of the materials?
In: Chemistry
When we say that a car is going 60 miles per hour, we don’t wait an hour and then measure how far it’s gone. we measure how far it goes over a few seconds and extrapolate. Same with measuring half life.
We can measure how much of something decays over an hour or day, and extrapolate that to find the half life. If 0.0001% (I’m not going to do the actual math) decays over one day, then we say the half life is 1600 years.
You seem to have learned the equations for how to convert half life and a known timeframe into a certain amount of decay. For instance, your isotope has a half-life of 1590 years and it has been around for ten years, how decayed is it? You can run this equation ‘backwards’ if you know how long it has been and how long it has decayed in order to find its half-life.
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