Radioactivity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Radioactivity - Essay Example The process can be described as occurring randomly such that one cannot be in a position to identify which nuclei will decay at any given time but using probability, we can state the number of atomic nuclei that will decay in a given time. Stable isotopes normally have a long half-life and unstable ones have a short half-life. Half-life refers to the period of time an atom requires to decay to half its quantity (Claudio, 2009). When an isotope that is radioactive in nature undergoes decay, it results into a new product. The amount of time taken to create the new product can be estimated by comparing the parent and daughter atoms. The half-life of any given element estimates the mean time that is taken for half of the parent atoms to decay into daughters but it does not describe the behavior during this process. The process as stated above is known to be random whereby one atom can take one half-life while another could last several hundred lives. This way, radioactivity can be descri bed using probabilistic mathematical methods (Piccion, 2013). Radioactive decay is a very important tool in radioactive decay in estimating the age of rocks. The aim of this report is to demonstrate the concept of radioactivity in atoms. So for every report there are some objectives to do in it, and the objective of this report is to determine the half life of the coins, investigate the relationship between decay and accumulation of coins, to determine the of coins that will be decayed and to know the averages of number of throws to reach to coins 1 or 0 in the second lab. I have expected two hypothesis for this experiment, my first theory for lab 1 is does the number of coins decayed decrease with the number of trials and the second experiment my hypothesis was 16 coins were tossed 50 times and the results used to test for the hypothesis: does it take half the number of coins two trials to decay? From the observations made and the results shown on the graph,