Why Do Half Life Decay

I found out from this experiment that half-life means just what it sounds like. After each cycle of half-life, the number of coins left was about half. Each coin represents an atom and just like in nature the half-life of decay is half depending what the element’s half-life is. If each of the scatter test was 10 years, the element we are testing would have a half-life of 10 years. The amount of time for a half-life depends on the elements, and how tightly the atoms are packed together. Some other factors could be other conditions in nature like temperature. Because the graph of decay is at a regular rate this means that an elements half-life can be used to determine something’s age. Scientist use decay to find out how old really old fossils are by looking at the decay rate and the amount of original substance is left.
Elements with longer half-life’s are used to find the age of even older objects like the earth. One question that was asked in this lab was, “All isotopes of radon (a harmful environmental problem) have half-lives shorter than four days, yet radon is still found in nature. Explain why all of the radon has not already decayed.” This is because as other larger elements decay they can change in to other elements. Radon is a smaller element so it is one of the last elements to