Half-life is used to describe a quantity undergoing exponential decay, and is constant over the lifetime of the decaying quantity. Rutherford applied the principle of a radioactive element’s half-life to studies of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206. The original term, dating to Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the principle in 1907, was “half-life period”, which was shortened to “half-life” in the early 1950s. The term is very commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay, but it is also used more generally for discussing any type of exponential decay. Half-life is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value.
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