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Old 04-13-2004, 07:19 PM   #6 (permalink)
Rangsk
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Location: San Diego, CA
Quote:
Originally posted by Poloboy
In a practical sense, yes. That's why they don't use Mt-268 for dating things thousands of years old. It's impossible to accurately measure how much of it is left.
Also, this isn't a very useful measurement. If you want to know how quickly something decays, then saying "it gets to 0 in 7 seconds" doesn't mean much, since it's an exponential decay, you'd have to do a lot of math in order to know how long it would take to get to, say, safe levels of radiation. By giving the half-life, it makes such calculations much simpler.
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