this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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Happens every time (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Afaik its always going to have some parts of uranium right? 50% after one half life, 25% after two half lives and it will keep on halving practically forever (or till the last atom decays). In the end it comes down to when you consider it a negligible amount.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

after a certain point, you're going to get to where you have to split an atom or two.

fairly sure that'd be far less exciting than normal.

Edit: i decided to try and figure out how long that would take.. and per usual the law of large numbers caused my eyes to glaze over.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

half life times log2(amount of atoms), right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I mean I didn’t get that far, I lost track of how many zeroes were in the half-life.

(It’s 704ish million, right?)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

I mean, yes, that's how it would work if there were an infinite number of atoms in the piece. There's a finite amount, though, so eventually there will be a point when all the atoms have completely decayed.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Yeah, thats what I was using to get 14%.

2billion years is about 2.8 halflives, so I calculated (1/2)^2.8 ~ 0.14.