Half Life Accuracy?

tiny-tim

cool!

russ_watters

1. There is no such thing as "complete decay" for most substances: the universe would end before every atom decayed. This is the nature of the half life.
2. Also due to the nature of the half life, there is no "age" for a single radioactive particle, so no basis for a rate change. If you have a particle with a half life of 10 years and you wait 10 years, there's a 50% it will have decayed. If it didn't decay and you wait another 10 years, odds are still 50%. Just like with flipping a coin -- it has no memory.

Borek

Sigh, I ate "thousands". Corrected.

chill_factor

Since this is a nuclear process, absolutely none of the things you've said will affect half lives in the slightest, since all of them work on electrons. Atmospheric pressure pushes the bond distance away from equilibrium towards the nuclear side, water is a solvent (electrons in the water interacts with electrons in the material), and the nucleus simply has no heat capacity in condensed phases.

Now if you had a plasma of these things at 99999999 degrees K, then fission might occur in the high nuclear mass atoms from thermal energy and nuclear collisions, just a guess. However that's not really "decay" anymore.