system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What happens to the last remaining atom in a lump of radioactive material?At which point does it disintegrate?

(from an article in the Journal of Heuristics)


#As this is different from the half -life prediction,shouldn't radioactivity be treated as an 'emergent' phenomenon?

#At which point is 'singleness' and 'manyness' achieved? We can vaporise the initial lump into single atoms -why does this give rise to a scenario different from the single lump?
gpt
Half life is just a a way to represent the probability of an atom to decay.  No matter how many or how few atoms you have in a system, each atom has a 50% chance of decaying in one half life.  These events are all independent, so one atom doesn't change based on the other atoms in the system.  However, since there are around 10^23 atoms in a common object, statistically very close to half of the nuclei will decay with one half-life.  

When you are only left with one atom, it has a 50% of decaying in one halflife, the exact same as it did when there were many atoms.  it's possible for it to never decay, but each half life passed reduces those odds 50%.  

So for radioactive decay, 'singleness' or 'manyness' is irrelevant, there is no difference.