The synbol on Half-Life

That symbol on Halflife is the Pride symbol for Lambda.
What the hell is with that??

Remember the last episode on Earth in Half-Life? It was the Black Mesa´s government secret subdivision known as Lambda Complex. If you look at the textures, you´ll find that little pic used as the lab´s logotype.

The Half-Life symbol was takin from the symbol of a power tool, my dad has one of the cordless screew drivers that has this symbol, I go check what one it is l8r.

No perferator, it is not the symbol from a power tool. It is the Pride symbol for Lambda. Apparently Half-Life based the Secret Government on that. Half-Life wasnt really bad, I like it. I just dont like Half-The poeple who played it.

Actually, the symbol is CALLED a Lamba, and it is the 11th letter of the greek alphabet. MANY different organizations have adopted the use of the symbol, everything from electronics companies to college sororities.

By the way, just out of curiosity, does anyone know what Half-Life really is? I do, I just want to see if anyone else out there knows =) Hint: It deals with mathematics, science, and radiation (what a give away, hehe).

The time it takes for a radioactive substance to decay by 50%... or something like that.

The half life symbol is the Greek leter Lamda. It is used in science to represent Wavelength of photons of light. Half-life is the length of time required for half of a given number of initial number of atoms of that isotope to decay. After isolation from uranium, decays to half its original radioactive intensity within 25 days. Each individual radioactive substance has a characteristic decay period or half-life; because their half-lives are so long that decay is not appreciable within the observation period, the diminution of the specific-decay rate of some isotopes is not observable under present methods. Thorium-232, for example, has a half-life of 14 billion years

EllipsusD said:

The time it takes for a radioactive substance to decay by 50%... or something like that.

Yes, a half-life is the time it takes for a toxic substance to weaken by 50%.

Radioactive substance actually, not toxic...

And the Lambda is also quite appropriate for half life because its looks sort of like both a H and an L, as in the initials for Half Life. Go figure.

S./

AndrewB said:

Yes, a half-life is the time it takes for a toxic substance to weaken by 50%.

The exact thing is that it's the ammount of time for half of the stuff to change (ie go kaput. ;).

if you have 100 g of something, and it reaches it's hl, then there's only going to be 50 g of it left, but if you leave that and it reaches it's hl, then it's 25 g, and so on and so on, so in technical terms, it's never really gone... but I doubt 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 of a substance is very useful. :^)

Test-0

actually lambda is not even the symbol for halflife. lambda is the symbol used to represent the decay constant, or the rate at which a radioactive substance decays. Half life is the time taken for a substance to decay to 1/2 of its previous strength. The two values are related through the equation

decay constant(lambda) = ln(2) / halflife

Test-0 said:

The exact thing is that it's the ammount of time for half of the stuff to change (ie go kaput. ;).

if you have 100 g of something, and it reaches it's hl, then there's only going to be 50 g of it left, but if you leave that and it reaches it's hl, then it's 25 g, and so on and so on, so in technical terms, it's never really gone... but I doubt 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 of a substance is very useful. :^)

Test-0

you seem to be confused. the half life is the time taken for the _radioactivity_ of a substance to decrease, not the _mass_, although there may be some change in mass because of the reactions taking place.