Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[pocaracas]

The neutrons and protons that constitute nuclei, as well as other particles that approach close enough to them, are governed by several interactions. The strong nuclear force, not observed at the familiar macroscopic scale, is the most powerful force over subatomic distances. The electrostatic force is almost always significant, and, in the case of beta decay, the weak nuclear force is also involved.

The interplay of these forces produces a number of different phenomena in which energy may be released by rearrangement of particles in the nucleus, or else the change of one type of particle into others. These rearrangements and transformations may be hindered energetically, so that they do not occur immediately. In certain cases, random quantum vacuum fluctuations are theorized to promote relaxation to a lower energy state (the "decay") in a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Radioactive decay half-life of nuclides has been measured over timescales of 55 orders of magnitude, from 2.3 x 10−23 seconds (for hydrogen-7) to 6.9 x 1031 seconds (for tellurium-128).[2] The limits of these timescales are set by the sensitivity of instrumentation only, and there are no known natural limits to how brief or long a decay half life for radioactive decay of a radionuclide may be.