What is nuclear decay?
I understand decay is a word measuring the reduction of "something", but what exactly are we observing/measuring?

/Sci/ banned me for critizing their libertarian space god ZogLon MuskSteins love of Jeet shit eaters.
Help me /b/ you might be humanities last hope, as sad as it pains me to write those words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay

>>936770780
So what spin? It's spinning and it slighty stops spinning?
Huh?

It's orbiting? It's point particle materializing?
It shoots out more photons than it absorbs?
What is "it" doing exactly specifically.

>>936770632 (OP)
>reduction of "something",
the atoms are losing protons and neutrons, and decaying into different isotopes or elements

>>936771156
"Losing"? Did they take a vacation?
Why do they leave after a specified amount of predictable time?

>>936770905
>>936770992
>>936771356
The problem with things happening at these scales is there's no meaningful way to observe what is happening. Instead you have little choice but to look at what the results are and try and guess explanations for it until you find something that matches what you see. The models we use are just that, models, and the terms we use do not necessarily correspond to what the sub-atomic particles are actually doing. They're just useful ways to to explain their behaviour in particular scenarios. They're almost certainly not actually "spinning" or "orbiting" in the way you would expect macroscopic objects to.

A big tl;dr is the nucleus of an atom wants to be in a stable configuration.
Too many nucleons (protons or neutrons) results in instability and that creates immense "pressure" that forces either other nucleons to convert or the atom rips apart in the worst case scenarios.
We don't know the full details of it yet as most of the subatomic world is beyond our precision to measure accurately. Maybe one day we will figure it out, the best we've got right now is indirect measures like >>936772767 mentions.

I sure hope we figure out how to make exotic matter out of multiple quarks, or even outright quark matter.
If we could make quark matter we could make insanely smaller and more complex things.
Imagine a whole ass supercomputer cluster in the space of a needles tip.