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The original term, half-life period, dating to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the principle in 1907, was shortened to half-life in the early 1950s. The converse of half-life is doubling time. For example, the medical sciences refer to the biological half-life of drugs and other chemicals in the human body. The term is also used more generally to characterize any type of exponential or non-exponential decay. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive. Half-life (symbol t 1⁄2) is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value.