A half-life of 336 hours
Every figure on this page is a function of one number: 336 hours. Five of those is 70 days, and down to one percent takes about 2232 hours. No compound is named here and none is implied.
Educational arithmetic only. Not medical advice and not a dosing protocol.
| Half-lives elapsed | Remaining, exactly | Elapsed | Which is |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 50.0000% | 336 hours | 14 days |
| 2 | 25.0000% | 672 hours | 28 days |
| 3 | 12.5000% | 1008 hours | 42 days |
| 4 | 6.2500% | 1344 hours | 56 days |
| 5 | 3.1250% | 1680 hours | 70 days |
| 6 | 1.5625% | 2016 hours | 84 days |
| 7 | 0.7813% | 2352 hours | 98 days |
| To | Remaining | Hours, about | Which is about |
|---|---|---|---|
| Down to a half | 50% | 336.0 hours | 14 days |
| Down to a quarter | 25% | 672.0 hours | 28 days |
| Down to a tenth | 10% | 1116.2 hours | 46 days 12.2 hours |
| Down to a twentieth | 5.0% | 1452.2 hours | 60 days 12.2 hours |
| Down to a hundredth | 1.0% | 2232.3 hours | 93 days 0.3 hours |
| Interval | Intervals per half-life | Surviving the gap | Limit the peaks approach | Intervals to within 1% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 hours | 0.02 | 98.4% | 61.09x | 280 |
| 12 hours | 0.04 | 97.6% | 40.90x | 187 |
| 24 hours | 0.07 | 95.2% | 20.70x | 94 |
| 48 hours | 0.14 | 90.6% | 10.61x | 47 |
| 72 hours | 0.21 | 86.2% | 7.24x | 32 |
| 168 hours | 0.50 | 70.7% | 3.41x | 14 |
| 336 hours | 1.00 | 50.0% | 2.00x | 7 |
What is particular to this half-life
A fortnight, the longest value here. Five half-lives is seventy days. At every interval in the table the gap is a fraction of the half-life, so a large share survives each one and every limit is high. This is the regime where the number of intervals to approach the limit - thirty-three at a weekly interval - is the figure worth reading rather than the limit itself.
Reading the third table
The second column is the whole story. It is the
interval divided by the half-life, and it is the only input to the three columns after it:
the fraction surviving a gap is 0.5 to that power, and the limit is one over
one minus that fraction. Two rows with the same figure in column two have identical
arithmetic however different the clock times are.
At a 336-hour half-life and a 24-hour interval, 0.07 half-lives pass between repeats, about 95.2% of one amount survives the gap, and the peaks approach about 20.70 times one amount after roughly 94 intervals. Every one of those four figures comes from the ratio and from nothing else.
Why the first table is exact and the other two are not
At whole multiples of a half-life the exponent is a whole number, so the remaining fraction is exactly one half to the power n - a rational number, computed as one. That is why the first table has figures like 3.1250% in it rather than 3.13%.
Everywhere else the exponent is fractional and the value is irrational. There is no exact decimal to print, so those tables are computed in floating point and labelled approximate. Exact and approximate sets out which figures across this whole site are which, and why the distinction is worth making rather than papering over.
What this page is not
It is not about a compound. No substance has a 336-hour half-life as far as this page is concerned; 336 hours is a number, chosen as one of ten points spanning the range this arithmetic is useful over. A published half-life belongs to the species, formulation, route and assay that measured it, and this site holds no such figure for anything.
It is also not a schedule. The intervals in the third table are parameters swept across a plausible range so that the shape of the function is visible. None of them is a proposal, and what this does not do is explicit about that.
Elsewhere on this site
- The worksheetAny half-life and any interval, rather than the seven tabulated here.
- The other nine half-life valuesSame three tables, a different number at the top.
- The same grid by intervalHold the interval fixed and sweep the half-life instead.