Incidentally, we will henceforth keep the ‘quotation marks’ to a minimum: readers will have probably realized by now that the dice are
not really decaying because they are not really radioactive
Imagine that we were to throw and count the dice at the leisurely rate of once every hour. The simplest way to conduct the experiment is to start with 1000 dice which are all thrown simultaneously at the end of the hour. So one- sixth of them will be removed at the end of the first hour, leaving 833 undecayed if the statistics work perfectly. In general terms the number remaining undecayed after the first simultaneous mass throw is given by