Half-life

Real World Example

Imagine you've just brewed a pot of coffee, and it's sitting on the kitchen counter slowly cooling down. This process is similar to the concept of half-life, where the coffee loses half of its heat over a certain period, much like radioactive isotopes lose half of their atoms through decay. Just as you can predict when your coffee will be half as hot by observing the rate it cools, scientists can determine the half-life of a radioactive substance by measuring how long it takes for half of its atoms to decay.