“Had she not been an immigrant, she might have enjoyed being a mom. ‘Raising you took half my life,’ she would say. ‘You’re living proof of where that half of my life went.’ Chemists know this already. All elements on the periodic table decay. And in one half life, half the original element, called the parent nucleus, decays to a different element, for the daughter nucleus. No son nucleus, of course. No son could ever be a by-product of radioactive decay.”
