Re: Conversion of Half-life Years to Seconds

[BobCherry@AOL.COM]

I agree with the erudite Bill Lipton on this one. The uncertainty in a half-life of several years or more is significantly greater than the differences among the choices for the number of seconds per year.



I generally use 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 = 31,536,000 as the number of seconds in a year.



But, on occasion I will use 365.25 instead of 365 to account for leap years if the half-life is longer than a few years. I suppose that I should also account for no leap year when the century number is not divisible by 400 and the half-life is very large, but see first paragraph.



I would like to hear from NIST on this, too.



Bob

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