Half-Life of M&Ms Essay

IntroductionHalf-life is the prison term required for something to f each to fractional its initial value. The half-life of a hot element is the time it takes for half of its atoms to decay into something else. M&Ms were chosen because they all have the very(prenominal) m mark on the on matchless(prenominal) side. In this science lab you entrust go through predicting and counting the compute of remaining mark-side up candies that should help understand that rates of decay of unstable nuclei and how it can be measured that the exact time that a certain nucleus will decay cannot be predicted and that it takes a very large number of nuclei to grow the rate of decay. PurposeTo stimulate the transformation of a radioactive isotope with M&Ms over time and to graph the entropy and relate it to radioactive decay and half-lives.Materials and SafetyMaterials* 200 pieces of M&Ms (trademark only)* Shoe box seat* Pen/Pencil* Paper TowelSafety- No safety precautions postulateProcedure 1. Count out 200 M&Ms. Place all 200 candies in the shoe box with the letter facing up 2. Cover the box and shake it vigorously for 3 sec. This is 1 time interval. 3. Remove the lid and take out any atoms (candies) that have change integrity, that is, that are now showing lettered sides down. Record on the data table the numbers of decayed and remaining atoms. 4. Replace the cover on the box, and shake for another 3-sec time interval. Record the number of radioactive atoms remaining. 5. discover repeating time interval trials until all atoms have decayed or you have reached 30 sec on the data table 6. reverberate the whole try a second time, and record all data. 7. total the number of atoms left at each time interval from some(prenominal) trial. Make a graph of your data showing the average number of atoms remaining versus timeConclusion1. After how legion(predicate) time intervals (shakes) did one-half life of your atoms (candies) decay? Trial 1- 1 interval Trial 2- 1 interv al2. What is the half-life of your candies?3 secs3. If the half-life model decayed perfectly, how many atoms would be left after 12 sec? 12.54. If you increased the get of atoms (candies), would the overall shape of the graph be altered? Maybe, the amount of M&Ms that are flipped over after shaking is always a gamble and you never know what youre going to get represent of the average number of atoms remaining versus time.Conclusion8. After one shake, which is one time interval, al more or less half ouf our atoms decayed. 9. The half life of the cadies is three seconds. 10. If this experiment had been conducted perfectly, 12.5 atoms would be left. 11. No, overall the shape wouldnt change it would may turn over a slight rounder or steeper but the miss shape of the line would not change 12. The experiment did not pass away perfectly. The percentages came pretty close to 50%. Some were way off, but for the most part they were close to 50%. From 3 to 12 secs was the closet to 50% th an the other time intervals. From 18 to 30 secs the percentage started to steer get under ones skin from 50%. I believe this happened because the less amount of candies or atoms the less chance the atoms will decay.