Half-Life Simulation Practical

In conclusion I have discovered that by using dice it can actually model the process of radioactivity decay and that there are actually relations between the use of dice and actual decay of a substance. This is because the number of dice I “take out” from the first few shakes takes out more than half of the dice in the box. Later on, the number of dice is taken out in a smaller number and it eventually gets to zero. This is because when we do the experiment with dice, it is impossible to get to infinite because we can’t break the dice into halves. The half-life of a substance is the time taken for half the atoms to decay. In terms of real decay, the half-life for atoms will go on forever because it never gets to zero. I have also found out the half-life of the source which is about 3.5 shakes (from looking at my graph. This means that when I shook the box with dice three times, it reached to the half of its original amount of nuclei. I also drew out four more half-lives after the first one. It took 13.25 shakes to get to the fifth half-life.

Evaluation:

If I were to do this experiment again, I would try to actually do the experiment many times with more dice in the box from the beginning to make my results more precise as I can observe the patterns. The reason for this is because in terms of real decay, it is random just like how the dice works. The only thing that’s different is that in real decay, the half-life goes on forever, but with the use of dice, eventually the last die will be “picked out”.

I should also shake the box more to mix up the dice to make it fair so that I won’t have the same numbers showing again. The errors of this experiment could be that the dice are not all the same because some dice may have slight problems on it which won’t make the roll fair. Next time I can use new dice to do this experiment.