Question

Question 4: Carbon dating (3 points) Archaeologists use the exponential, radioactive decay of carbon-14 to estimate the death dates of organic material. The stable form of carbon is carbon-12, and the radioactive isotope carbon-14 decays over time into nitrogen-14 and other particles. Carbon is naturally in all living organisms, and the carbon-14 that forms in the upper atmosphere enters into living things as long as they are taking in material (food, air, etc.) that contains carbon. We can estimated how old a fossil is by comparing the content of carbon-14 in the fossil to an equivalent living sample, through the equation below: N(1) = n(1) 12 where N (t) is the amount of carbon-14 as a function of time, No is the base carbon-14 amount at t = 0, and t1/2 is the "half-life", which is the time after which half of the original amount of a radioactive substance remains. The half-life is a known physical property of the isotope and cannot be changed by the environment. The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years. Your goal is to write a while loop to simulate the decay of carbon-14 over time. When the amount matches the target fraction, halt the simulation and print when in years after its death the fossil was found. The target fraction for your fossil is 35% of the carbon-14 of a living sample.

Using Python 3...

Answer 1

#since it involves fraction, if the answers dont match, please let me know. In that case i will remove the round function

year=1
targetFraction=.35
thalf=5730
currentFraction=1
while currentFraction!=targetFraction:
currentFraction=round(.5**(year/thalf),2)#rounding it to 2 decimal points
year=year+1
print('year:',year-1)
print('Current fraction: ',currentFraction)

In [11]year-1 targetFraction=.35 thalf-5730 current Fraction=1 while currentFraction ! =targetFraction: currentFraction=round(.5**(year/thalf),2)#rounding it to 2 decimal points year=year+1 print('year: ', year-1) print('Current fraction: ',current Fraction) year 8562 Current fraction 0.35