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THIS IS MY FOURTH POST! YEAH! actually, its more like my 200th, but oh well.
 
On 2001-10-05 15:07, M0T wrote:
I learnt about half lifes and I always wondered if that meant  that the radioactive isotopes could never lose all of their radioactivity?
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Ever learn about Limits in Calculus?
 
Well, I'm glad I don't have to worry about not having a life.

I live in America. :razz:

I'm not sure if anyone got Alhexx's Joke, but aside from that description of a half-life, "Half-Life" is also the name of a very popular computer game. It's also the game the the extremely popular mod "Counter-Strike" was built upon.

Just FYI.

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"One who seeks knowledge from another person, doesn't learn half as much as the one who seeks knowledge for himself." - Vincent Valentine, The Sephiroth Chronicals, Book 1: Resurrection

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Oh god I remember them god awfull Half Life calculations in Physics!!!
 
Since I dont know what calculus is I can't answer you trilinear.
we learnt about Half lifes in Chemistry, but the next week I had the flu so I know nothing about them.

CS is the best multiplayer game ever, that takes place on a pc at any rate :smile:
 
Yep, CS is great, but it takes more resources than Half-Life. On my PII 266, which is in a LAN with Yuki's PC, it takes 'bout 7 minutes to load :sad: And then it crashes... whhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

 - Alhexx

 - edit -
Hm, my Avatar looks kinda squished...I'll have to upload a 60x60 version... :grin:
[edited] 169 2001-10-06 11:00
 
I only stayed in long enough to make it through pre-calc, so I never had the pleasure of half-lives.  I think I'm glad about that.

Nice to see we can still keep on topic, just like the old forum!  :grin:
 
isotopes can never lose all of their radioactivity, because radioactivity decreases as an exponential function.
 
Then again, as you come down to the last radioactive atom, what happens when when it finally comes apart?
 
Actually they do reach a stabilized point at some place.
All the stable elements we have today were radioactive ones a long long time ago.
Of course, some never get a chance to stabilize cause the final amount of neutrons = nothing :wink:
 
qhimm> wouldnt that cause some huge release of energy?  :evil:
 
Darkness: Umm, no. :wink:

If something has a halflife of 1 year, what that means is that any given atom has a 50% chance of decaying over the period of a year.

So, given the amount of atoms in even a tiny sample of substance, over 1 year the laws of chance dictate that you're practically certain to get very nearly 50% of the substance decaying.

Eventually you'll get down to one atom ... then, there's a 50% chance that the atom will decay within one year and there'll be no original substance left.

If it doesn't ... well, 50% chance it'll decay the year after that :wink: And so on...it COULD last forever, but it aint likely.

Mathematically speaking, if you LITERALLY halved something, you might have to split an atom, but a half life isn't a literal, exact, halving of the substance ... it's an approximation; but given the number of atoms you're dealing with it tends to average out to almost exactly 50%.
 
i never really thought of it as chance. I just thought of it as a constant function.
 
Nah, it's chance. Lots of things are. It's just that with billions of particles, it all averages out so you can pretty much take it as constant, although it isn't exactly.
 
On 2001-10-07 03:10, Darkness wrote:
i never really thought of it as chance. I just thought of it as a constant function.
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Ever heard of the Chaos Theory? :wink:
 
Saint> Ohhhhhh  Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhh........ Ok, forget everything that I said.
 
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