Did anyone of you think that the first sentence of our previous post named “New Doom LVL and Plasma Conductivity” had nothing to do with the rest of the text, and it was just a clumsy introduction? Well, think again!
Half-Life is a Sci-Fi first person shooter (FPS) video game, developed by Valve which became a major company in the gaming industry just by releasing Half-Life in 1998 in cooperation with Sierra Studios.
In the game you are Dr Freeman, a guy who looks suspiciously a lot like Walter Heisenberg White, who is a scientist in a weird Super High Tech Research facility. After the longest introduction in a game ever (you are getting on a “train” wagon and slowly go through the entire facility), you are doing something extremely wrong on an experiment and Hell breaks loose! After that, geared up just with a crowbar you need to stay alive against these lovely creatures that jump on you face! If you ever pass this slightly TERRIFYING stage you find guns and grenades and other cool stuff that can keep these and other loving creatures away from you!
On the other hand in science, Half-life is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value. 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.
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. 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 equation that describes Half-Life is the one on the left, where λ is the positive number called the decay constant of the decaying quantity(dimensionless). This “λ” (the Greek Letter “Lamda”) is also the game’s main Crest.
In our next post we are going to go further the first Half-Life game. Till then use our solver or play some Half-Life but stay close!