>Puts Iron-56 in a box.
>checks at the heat death if the universe
>still Iron-56
>mfw box also Iron-56
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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But if you don’t look in side 2 billion years later, it’s both U-235 and lead-207!
Schrödinger’s radioactive decay may or may not have killed his cat.
The lump would still have about 14% uranium still in it. (If my understanding of half-life is correct)
Afaik its always going to have some parts of uranium right? 50% after one half life, 25% after two half lives and it will keep on halving practically forever (or till the last atom decays). In the end it comes down to when you consider it a negligible amount.
after a certain point, you're going to get to where you have to split an atom or two.
fairly sure that'd be far less exciting than normal.
Edit: i decided to try and figure out how long that would take.. and per usual the law of large numbers caused my eyes to glaze over.
half life times log2(amount of atoms), right?
I mean I didn’t get that far, I lost track of how many zeroes were in the half-life.
(It’s 704ish million, right?)
I mean, yes, that's how it would work if there were an infinite number of atoms in the piece. There's a finite amount, though, so eventually there will be a point when all the atoms have completely decayed.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Yeah, thats what I was using to get 14%.
2billion years is about 2.8 halflives, so I calculated (1/2)^2.8 ~ 0.14.
Damn greedy corporations and their shrinkflation
Damn bro, how many times has this happened to you
Enough to post the meme
If you put a cat into the box with the uranium and wait the same amount of time, that cat will be dead. this is true. no questions. thank you.
Unless the uranium in the box caused a mutation in the cat giving it eternal life.
So is Lead-207 special lead, or is it just, like, lead?
The normal lead we know but still special. Is the last stable element in the PSE and there is the theory that it's actually radioactive (unstable) but the decay is so slow that we probably never see a single atom of it decaying.
Schrödinger’s Nucleides.