Why was Half-life titled Half-life?

[Outright Villainy]

Half-Life does not represent the time it takes for a given quantity of radioactive material to decay. It represents the amount of time it takes for half of the quantity to decay. Hence half-life. At the point you reach an isotope's half-life, half of it has become inert. Half of the remaining half decays over the same period, and then half of the half of that half that's left. Then half of that half, etc. (To really break your brain, bring Zeno's Paradox into this.)

Lambda is the symbol used to represent the decay, which is why it's used in the game.

I'm not sure if there's a larger thematic justification of the title.

Could be the headcrab zombies and alien slaves (and human in the second game) suffer a sort of sub standard life themselves perhaps?

I think Valve just love puns really, they're giant nerds.

Nerds love puns.

 

[jboking]

Btw, what does TL;DR mean...see it all the time now and I assume it means "summary" or something but its confusing...

It basically does mean summary, but it specifically stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read"

it was titled half life because the yellow crystalline material that opened the portal to another dimension was a radioactive material therefore they named it half life.

Interesting, you said that with a lot of certainty. Was it something Valve said?

the ps2 version explained what happened behind the scenes with a game called Half life: decay.

I saw the PS2 version at a gamestop. I'm going to go pick this up. This is actually what I was looking for, so thank you!

 

[Levitas1234]

Well half life 1 starts off with the experiment going wrong, unleashing the most fucked up and irreversible shit imaginable.
Now the world is going through an irreversible change where slowly but surley more and more fucked up shit keeps happening, Ie: stuff from the world Xen.
Now the world is being engulfed by this stuff, half of it is regular world and half is all jiggity janked, just like how a uranium isotope turns to lead, the world turns to xen.

this seems like the right answer.

 

[Steve Butts]

Zeno's paradox (The dichotomy paradox to be exact) doesn't apply here because we're not talking about infinately divisable amounts here. We're dealing with atoms. (atom = greek for indivisible). After 79 halflives, for every mol of matter you started out with you are most likely to only have one atom left. After that, for every half-life that passes, the likelyhood that this atom will remain in existance, and not decay, halves.

I was thinking more of the dichotomy paradox, where to get to a whole, you have to proceed by halves. Of course, you're absolutely right that the big break in all this is that we're talking about atoms, which aren't infinitely divisible, which is the question the paradox is meant to address. Thanks for the correction.