why do scientest say half life?

Question

why dont they jus say this has a life of.....

Answer 1

Because radiation never totally dissipates so its full life cycle is never ending. However, it does decrease in power over time following a logarithmic curve. We can then state with absolute certainty how long it will take for the radioactive elements to decrease in power by a half. As such, we can state its half life, but its full life, like any form of radiation is eternal.

Answer 2

Half-life applies to any process which decays exponentially. It is a property of exponential curves that the time for a quantity to be reduced to 50% of it's initial value is the same no matter what time you start the measurement. The single number completely describes the decay characteristic. By specifying a half-life, you are also specifying that the decay is exponential. Actuallly, it doesn't have to be half; quarter-life or eight-life would work just as well. Half has been adopted as a standard.

Answer 3

The half-life is when HALF of the atoms have decayed. It's like that old math problem where you always go half the distance and never get there. In this case, there is a finite number of atoms so eventually there would be none left but you would reach a point of impracticality long, long before that.

Answer 4

The half-life refers to the timecourse necessary for the quantity of the chemical which is found in an organism in the body (or plasma concentration) to be reduced to half of its original level through various elimination processes.The half-life of a quantity subject to exponential decay is the time required for the quantity to decay to half of its initial value.

They say half life because atoms undergo radioactive decay in whole units, and so after enough half-lives the remaining original quantity becomes an actual zero rather than asymptotically approaching zero as with continuous systems. It means after reducing its value into half, there comes many variations of determining the rest of the remnant chemicals which makes it quite difficult to set a rule to predict its value. Thus for reliability in measuring the chemicals level it is safe to depend in its half-life.♥

Answer 5

decay of anything is an exponential process and it does not terminate in zero. that means the process of decay whether it be radioactive decay or microbial destruction or a chemical reaction, can never reach to 100% completion theoretically. Therefore it is necessary to express this rate of reaction in terms of half life...
Half life is the time required for the 50% completion of any reaction.

Answer 6

Half-life applies to radioactive materials.
Since radioactivity emmision is not linear but exponentional, you simply cannot determine 'life.' As it decays, there's always something left.