Radioactive Pennies:

Brooke Miskowski

1. How many pennies decayed by the end of your experiment?

All of them (200) eventually decayed into the daughter isotope.

2. Compared to the original number of pennies that you started with prior to each shake,
approximately how many were left after each shake?

Roughly around half of the pennies (parent isotopes) were left after each shake had taken place.

3. What does this indicate about the rate at which half-life occurs? Or, do atoms decay at the
same rate?

Each shake represented a half life of the pennies. Typically, from the results of this experiment
you can tell that isotopes decay at a somewhat steady rate (exponentially). Hypothetically, 50%
of the parent isotope should have decayed with each shake of the pennies. The amount of the
parent isotope is changing with each shake, where the amount of time is staying the same.

4. If each shake represented 500 years of time, what would be the half-life of the penny isotope?

500 years

5. What are some of the inaccuracies of this experiment in demonstrating half-life?

During some shakes or “half-lives” more or less than half of the pennies might be flipped over
due to the pure chance of the matter.

Some atoms won’t decay fully as with the pennies. We either had a 50/50 chance of the penny
decaying or staying the parent isotope. The more pennies we would have had the better the
outcome.

The amount of pennies we used was unrealistic to a real-life situation. If this were a real-life
demonstration we would have had to have a massive amount of pennies to be more accurate.

6. Will all of the Carbon 14 in nature eventually disappear? Explain your answer?

No it will not eventually all disappear. It is not until you die that Carbon 14 is unable to be
added anymore and starts decaying into an isotope. Carbon 14 is continually being produced by
other living organisms.
7. Precambrian time is older than 600,000,000 years. Can Carbon 14 be used in dating organic
structures from that era? Explain your answer.

Carbon dating is used to determine the ages of items that are up to 50,000 years old or younger.
This process will not work on older fossils or rocks.

Carbon 14 cannot be used to date bio-organisms that did not get carbon dioxide from the air
which was true of organisms that came before the Precambrian era.

Artifacts that are older than 50,000 years old are hard to date as well because they have
undergone many half-lives and the amount of Carbon 14 left in them is too small and is hard to
detect and determine what age they came from.

An isotope with a longer half life would be needed to date organic compounds found in the
Precambrian era.

8. Can Carbon 14 be used for dating lava flows? Explain your answer.

Carbon 14 can only be used to date objects that were once alive. Lava was never alive, so
therefore Carbon 14 would not help in dating the lava flow. However, if organisms got trapped
within the lava, they may be able to be tested for Carbon 14 and used to predict a relative time
of the lava flow.