Half Life

 When a radioactive particle emits an alpha or beta particle, it transforms from one element
to another.
 For this reason, the mass of our first element is constantly decreasing as it turns into more
and more of our second element.
 Consider this figure:
 The first image (completely in orange) shows a mass of uranium, a radioactive element
that undergoes alpha decay to become thorium.
 In the second image, we show how particles of uranium emit alpha particles and start
turning into thorium. We represent this by turning some circles purple.
 I’d like to point out, this process is scientifically random. This means there is no way to
predict which particle will collapse first or second or last. They all will collapse, but we
can’t predict their order.
 After a certain amount of time, half of our original mass of uranium will have been lost.
It exists as thorium now. This amount of time is called the half life of the element.
 Different elements can have very different half lives. Uranium takes 4.5 billions years to
lose half its mass, but polonium only takes 3 minutes.
 The half life for an element is constant. Under standard conditions, uranium will always
take 4.5 billion years to lose half its mass and polonium will always take 3 minutes.
 It’s also worth noting that half life does not change with the mass of a sample. 1 gram of
uranium will take as long to decay as 1 ton.
 This is because the number of neutrons that are collapsing per second is constant.
 Consider this figure:
 The first mass of the radioactive element consists of 64 particles, 16 of which are
collapsing at a specific moment. The sample is collapsing at a rate of 25% of its mass per
moment.
 The second mass consists of 16 particles, 4 of which are collapsing at our specific
moment. It still only lost 25% of its mass per moment.
 Despite starting with different masses, our two samples lose mass at the same rate, and
so it takes them the same amount of time to lose half their starting masses.
 Thus, half life is the same for any sample of a certain element regardless of starting mass.
 So if you had two samples of the same element, they would both lose half of their mass
in the same amount of time.