Half Life

[DianaTrujillo2K]

Can someone explain what the half life of a reaction is? And why would we be interested in a half life of a reaction?

[Sabah Islam 1G]

A half-life reaction indicates how long it takes for the concentration of a reactant to decrease to half of its initial concentration. We would be interested because it is involved in many things, such as radioactive decay, which pertain to chemistry.

[Thuy-Anh Bui 1I]

The half-life of a reaction is the time required for a reactant to reach half its original concentration. This information is helpful to predict the concentration of a substance over time. Another application that Dr. Lavelle mentioned in class is that knowing the half-life can help to identify an unknown substance because this characteristic is unique to each substance (at a given order).

[Luis De La Cruz 1H]

Another important and perhaps real life application for the half life would be for pharmacists and doctors that are prescribing drugs, since they need to know how long that drug will stay in your system, which is something the half life of a reaction would be able to tell you.

[Jessica_Singh_1J]

Half lives can be very useful in determining the approximate age of organic objects via radiometric dating.

[Ryan Sydney Beyer 2B]

Also for medications. It could be useful to know how long a medicine is going to be active in a patient's body and how much is going to be present.

[Diego Zavala 2I]

Hi Diana! The half life tells you how fast/slow a compound decays. It is important because if you are storing a medicine, you might want to know how much is left after a certain time because if you are injecting medicine into a human you will want to know how much you are injecting and also how long the medicine will take to wear off.