The decay of Carbon $into stable Nitrogen$ does not take place in a regular, determined fashion: rather it is governed by the laws of probability and statistics formalized in the language of quantum mechanics.
As such, the reported half life of 30 \pm 40$years means that$ years is the standard deviation for the process and so we expect that roughly $percent of the time half of the Carbon$ in a given sample will decay within the time span of 30 \pm 40$years. This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musks companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. Radioisotopes are widely used in medicine, industry and scientific research, and new applications for their use are constantly being developed. Ca dating is not a common radioactive dating method for metamorphic rocks. Geochronologists call it radiometric dating, not radioactive dating. This explains why the Wikipedia article on Carbon$ lists the half-life of Carbon 14 as 30 \pm 40$years. Other resources report this half-life as the absolute amounts of 30$ years, or sometimes simply 00$years. This task examines, from a mathematical and statistical point of view, how scientists measure the age of organic materials by measuring the ratio of Carbon$ to Carbon \$.