Radioactivity

Real World Example

Imagine you have a wobbly stack of books on a shelf, teetering on the edge, ready to fall at any moment. This stack is like an unstable atomic nucleus, where the instability drives the books, or in the case of the nucleus, energy, to release in an attempt to reach a more stable state. Just as the books inevitably topple off to reduce the precariousness of the stack, an unstable nucleus emits radiation to achieve stability, shedding its excess energy like the books shedding their imbalance.