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Probability For A Hydrogen Atom To Be 13 Billion Years Old?


rhertz

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Ok.. put it this way, for a hydrogen atom to lose energy is much less in statistical significance to a ground state to gain bonds. The reason why is because ... in a loose sense of the terminology we tend to use, would take an infinite amount of energy for a ground state particle to decay.

 

That's why this is an approximation, I am not going to take the time to calculate the hundreds of complex factors that would give rise to this as it would take me months to solve. I understand that they can not actually decay the hydrogen atoms but it is the math curve I was trying to fit this to rather than do that HUGE calculation to exactly get your answer. I will leave something like that to the OP.

Edited by VictorMedvil
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If you accept what I have said, then the approximation for the ground state atom, is vanishing, simply because it would take far more energy right now required in the observable horizon to decay it. You see, the approximation says, maybe one day such an atom is capable of decaying, but it would take an infinitely long time. These kinds of approximations are called limits and these kinds of limits are really no good unless you want a full picture in a certain model ie. an infinitely expanding space.

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But why concentrate on an atom? There are physics there telling us the same thing about simpler systems, just like an electron. It will not decay into anything else, simply because there are no known working models for it to decay into. And it still remains, that this is fact.

 

That's what the OP wanted so I choose that as my object to be looked at. I could have chosen smaller parts I suppose when doing that calculation.

Edited by VictorMedvil
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That's what the OP wanted so I choose that as my object to be looked at.

 

ok.

 

But again, there are physical reasons why we will never see this decay. And if it takes an infinity to do so, it remains an approximation for a very distant future, and even then it remains a speculation. When we require a system to do an ''infinite amount of phases or steps'' to reach a specific decay mode, it's highly unlikely it will ever occur. Best yet, infinity is not even a number, at worse, it is a very bad application of approximation ie. there are many types of infinity, if you believe in that kind of thing.

Edited by Dubbelosix
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ok.

 

But again, there are physical reasons why we will never see this decay. And if it takes an infinity to do so, it remains an approximation for a very distant future, and even then it remains a speculation. When we require a system to do an ''infinite amount of phases or steps'' to reach a specific decay mode, it's highly unlikely it will ever occur. Best yet, infinity is not even a number, at worse, it is a very bad application of approximation ie. there are many types of infinity, if you believe in that kind of thing.

I agree the chance is near Zero but still not 100% thanks to computer calculations otherwise I would have just said Zero without a computer that could calculate that decay mode's chance or in this case the odds of a atom staying unchanged over billions of years.

Edited by VictorMedvil
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