- Sobex is right. When you have a lot of atoms and a really good detector, you can detect a few decays per year and determine the half-life of that kind of atom even if it's very long. The longest-lived unstable isotope known, tellurium-128, has a half-life of 2.2 × 10²⁴ years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_tellurium
John Carlos Baez
npub1nf…3nqe4
2025-04-08 22:34:08 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…jnwh
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2025-04-08 22:34:08 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "- Sobex is right. When you have a lot of atoms and a really good detector, you can detect a few decays per year and determine the half-life of that kind of atom even if it's very long. The longest-lived unstable isotope known, tellurium-128, has a half-life of 2.2 × 10²⁴ years!\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_tellurium",
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