Why is it called "Half Life"?

[BassBomb]

Originally posted by: Canai
Why was Doom called Doom and not "Demons running around from a teleporter to hell" and Quake not "Strogg ATTACK!!!!" and Deus Ex not "JC goes to a party"?

I think you just made my week

 

[Maximilian]

So that piece of orange rock they shoved into that beam at the start was radioactive? Thats why they named the game half life?

I think the "because it sounds cool" explanation sounds the most reasonable. Theres tons of those orange rocks on xen and theres nothing to suggest they are radioactive.

 

[JJ650]

Heh, nothing really suggest most clay pots are radioactive, but they are (albeit very slightly).
It just tied into the game.

It's better than "Scientist shoves rock into laser and shit goes crazy!"

 

[Sho'Nuff]

Originally posted by: Glitchny
i think its just a reference to the tests that they are preforming on the alien material in the beginning of the first one. and then they accidentally cause the portals to open etc. With Half-Life referring to the atomic halflife of the alien rock or whatever

As I recall, the tests Gordon was doing in Black Mesa involved a mass spectrometer. In real life, mass spec has little to nothing to do with "half-life," which is a term used to describe the time is takes radioactive material to lose half its radioactivity. The best way to measure half-life is to use a sodium iodide or similar detector and do a simple count test, not use a mass spec. In fact, for longer lived isotopes, I think it would be highly inefficient to make that measuremnent with a mass spec., as it would take a very long time for a measureable different in mass to develop.

I like to think the title, "half life," has to do with the fact that we only know part of Gordon's life. That is, we know what he was like just before the accident at BM and after the accident, but we don't really know anything about his relationship with the G-man. Ergo, we know, "half" of gordon's "life."

 

[jonks]

It's the amount of time you'll spend in your life trying to figure out what the frack is going on in the story.

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: slugg
because it doesn't consume your WHOLE life, like World of Warcraft.

QFT!

 

[incompleteunit]

Poetic license?

 

[thraashman]

Here's the answer.

The lowercase Greek letter Lamba is used in association with "The radioactive decay constant (Connected to half-life of a radioactive isotope in physics)"

The part in quotes is pulled from wikipedia.

The game focuses largely on getting to and then teleporting from the lambda lab to stop the portals.

The name of the game is a play on the Lambda Lab.

 

[skulkingghost]

The titles of Half-Life and its expansion packs are all named after scientific terms. Half-Life itself is a reference to the half-life of a quantity (such as a radioactive material), the amount of time required for the quantity to decay to half of its initial value. The Greek letter lambda, which features prominently on the game's packaging, represents the related decay constant, as well as the Lambda Complex featured in the game. Opposing Force, while it could be named because the player assumes the role of one of the enemies in the original game, is also a reference to Newton's third law of motion, while Blue Shift refers to the blue shifting of the frequency of radiation caused by the Doppler effect, in a similar parallel reference to the name of the shift your character takes. In Half-Life: Decay, the title again references the half-life equation with the Lambda symbol being the decay constant.[11]

 

[BadRobot]

Half-life is a game where scientist created portals.
These portals were created to test how well humans can kill aliens with a crowbar.

the experiment was a HUGE SUCCESS

 

[FerraraZ]

Originally posted by: skulkingghost
The titles of Half-Life and its expansion packs are all named after scientific terms. Half-Life itself is a reference to the half-life of a quantity (such as a radioactive material), the amount of time required for the quantity to decay to half of its initial value. The Greek letter lambda, which features prominently on the game's packaging, represents the related decay constant, as well as the Lambda Complex featured in the game. Opposing Force, while it could be named because the player assumes the role of one of the enemies in the original game, is also a reference to Newton's third law of motion, while Blue Shift refers to the blue shifting of the frequency of radiation caused by the Doppler effect, in a similar parallel reference to the name of the shift your character takes. In Half-Life: Decay, the title again references the half-life equation with the Lambda symbol being the decay constant.[11]

U need friends

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: BadRobot
Half-life is a game where scientist created portals.
These portals were created to test how well humans can kill aliens with a crowbar.

the experiment was a HUGE SUCCESS

:laugh::thumbsup:

 

[theprodigalrebel]

I'm glad it didn't have a lame title like Dimensional Wars or something silly like that. I wouldn't have minded 'Resonance Cascade', 'Black Mesa' or 'Shitstorm PhD' though.

 

[Kev]

Originally posted by: FerraraZ

Originally posted by: skulkingghost
The titles of Half-Life and its expansion packs are all named after scientific terms. Half-Life itself is a reference to the half-life of a quantity (such as a radioactive material), the amount of time required for the quantity to decay to half of its initial value. The Greek letter lambda, which features prominently on the game's packaging, represents the related decay constant, as well as the Lambda Complex featured in the game. Opposing Force, while it could be named because the player assumes the role of one of the enemies in the original game, is also a reference to Newton's third law of motion, while Blue Shift refers to the blue shifting of the frequency of radiation caused by the Doppler effect, in a similar parallel reference to the name of the shift your character takes. In Half-Life: Decay, the title again references the half-life equation with the Lambda symbol being the decay constant.[11]

U need friends

UR RITE BEING SMRT IS GAY LOL

 

[imported_Section8]

Alyx + Gordon = Whole Life

 

[KeypoX]

Originally posted by: Geeker2010
here is the dictionary defintion:

time taken to lose half of radioactivity: the time a radioactive substance takes to lose half its radioactivity through decay.
- time taken to lose half of drug: the time it takes for half a given amount of a substance such as a drug to be removed from living tissue through natural biological activity

If you ever need a definition of something, just type in the word followed by "definition" in google and that's all it takes...

LOL or you could do it the correct way 'define: half life'

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: FerraraZ
Half-Life is the time it takes to split an atom. This describes the beginning event of the game.

I can't tell if you're really uninformed or if you just made a lame joke...

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: soxfan

Originally posted by: Glitchny
i think its just a reference to the tests that they are preforming on the alien material in the beginning of the first one. and then they accidentally cause the portals to open etc. With Half-Life referring to the atomic halflife of the alien rock or whatever

As I recall, the tests Gordon was doing in Black Mesa involved a mass spectrometer. In real life, mass spec has little to nothing to do with "half-life," which is a term used to describe the time is takes radioactive material to lose half its radioactivity. The best way to measure half-life is to use a sodium iodide or similar detector and do a simple count test, not use a mass spec. In fact, for longer lived isotopes, I think it would be highly inefficient to make that measuremnent with a mass spec., as it would take a very long time for a measureable different in mass to develop.

I like to think the title, "half life," has to do with the fact that we only know part of Gordon's life. That is, we know what he was like just before the accident at BM and after the accident, but we don't really know anything about his relationship with the G-man. Ergo, we know, "half" of gordon's "life."

No one said they were MEASURING its half-life with the mass spectrometer. The fact still remains that the isotope was radioactive.

 

[gtd2000]

Back in the day, we used to say it was called Half Life because that was what you ended up with once you started playing it...coincidentally, I'm playing through the French custom game mod "Invasion" right now.

There seems to be a good number of custom games that are very playable

As for HL with the new side-kick Alyx, I think it's a bit like Mad Max 1 & 2 then becoming Mad Max 3...not quite the original flavour

 

[micaturbo]

Originally posted by: dighn
I think it has something to do with the Lambda facility which is central to the plot, and lambda can be associated with half-life which fits into the general theme of the game as well (nuclear materials, barely surviving)

+1

 

[RallyMaster]

Originally posted by: Dream Operator

Originally posted by: slugg
because it doesn't consume your WHOLE life, like World of Warcraft.

QFT!!

I lol'd