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Michael Edmiston wrote:
"Perhaps a minor point, but it initially threw me off, and perhaps
others, was Hugh's use of the letter p for the radioactive decay
constant. There is a standard symbol for the decay constant, and it is
lower-case lambda. Thus, the half life is ln(2)/lambda."
"I guess there is no law saying you have to use lambda, but when there
is a standard symbol, it is helpful to use it. If someone decides to
write an equation using b as the Boltzmann's constant rather than k,
it's going to throw people off for a while. Likewise, the use of p
instead of lambda threw me off."
I'm not a nuclear physicist, so I don't have a keen sense of the
conventions used by nuclear physicists. However, my understanding of
radioactive decay is that, if lambda is the decay constant expressed in
number of nuclei decaying per time unit (e.g. in 1 s), then the
probability (p) of any ONE nucleus decaying in that same time unit is
equal to lambda, so p has "dimensions" of probability per unit time and
is numerically the same as lambda.
Don Polvani
Northrop Grumman Corp.
Undersea Systems
Annapolis, MD 21404
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