Nuclear Fission and Radioactivity - Part 3 of 3

Describes the process of radioactive decay and nuclear fission including the calculation of half lives.

[@6Adolf6Hiller6]

Even though your atoms look a little like fried eggs, your method of explaining nuclear physics is highly engaging, very interesting and most informative. I often wonder how Sir Isaac Newton would appreciate the technology and the knowledge we have at our disposal today. I can relate to he, as I too have Aspergers Syndrome and have always been fascinated by physics, astronomy and stellar evolution. Thank you very much for all of your presentations.

[@Benjones96]

dude i cannot thank you enough, these videos help so much and are really good to help with revision! will be telling everyone about them because i think they are an extremely good revision aid!

[@DrPhysicsA]

Yes you are right. I should perhaps have explained that I meant log to the base e. Thanks for your kind comments.

[@DrPhysicsA]

Yes I fear I was a bit lazy at that point. I've added an annotation to clarify. Thanks.

[@JA50N555]

thank you soo much....u are a great teacher :)

[@DrPhysicsA]

The total mass of an atom is not solely the sum of the masses of its nucleons but also the binding energy holding them together.

[@terminate5888]

but a proton does not decay, it is the only know stable hadron.

[@mr_killing]

Shouldn't the Integral of 1 over N be lnN? Here in the video we find LogN at about 2:00, but that implies that the log has a base of 10, which wouldn't lead to just N when we take the exponential of it. Love the work done with the videos, by the way. Well done! Very helpful indeed.

[@alakazam7896]

i have a question why do you lose mass in nuclear fission when you still have the same number of nucleons at the end of the reaction? i know you lose energy,but the total number of nucleons should determine the mass of the products

[@ankit4593804]

Thanks for the help :)

[@IMadeOfClay]

Hello. What do you think could be the explanation for why these atoms decay randomly? I'm thinking along the lines of what a determinist might argue e.g. "It's not random! You just haven't figured it out yet!" This is something that has intrigued me on and off for years. Thanks for your video.

[@DrPhysicsA]

It puzzled Einstein too. He could not accept that things were not deterministic and felt that they only appeared to be based on probability because we were not sufficiently aware of what was really going on in nature.

[@MrKurier1]

I want to ask about one thing... well.... lets say I have a kilogram of particles that have halflife of 1 second.... every second there will be half amount of particles that decay.... what will happen until there will be just 1 particle left? does it mean that every second there is 50% chance that particle will decay or...... ?

[@huzaifayousaf26]

SKGaming Box Though it has been 7 months A radioactive substance won't completely disappear because the decay is applied to the current amount of that substance. If u measure it in mass,It will be like this after every Half-Life 20 to 10 to 5 to 2.5 to 1.25 to 0.625 and so on.

[@leAmispoppia]

you said that the total mass of an atom are not the nucleons but also the energy bonding then together does it mean that energy is mass or how does this work because there are same amount of quarks so there is total of same mass as i understand it or in which kind of form this mass is or does the strong force create some kind of gravitational field like currency creates magnetic field or am i missing something? (sorry english is not my native language)

[@DrPhysicsA]

+Le Amispoppia Mass and Energy are equivalent according to Einstein: E = mc^2. So yes a very small amount of mass is lost in energy.

[@AttaboyIII]

Should be the natural log of N, but never mind.

[@kempster1996]

I'm pretty sure the decay constant is ln(2) over the half life

[@samikooldude]

Physics Unit 5 tomorrow? :p

[@DrPhysicsA]

Sami Farooqui Hope it goes well. All good wishes.

[@kempster1996]

Unit 5 is on Thursday mate :P that is if you're doing OCR Physics B