Sami

There is a wrinkle worth knowing about, because it is a place where chemists really do talk about proton transfer: acid-base chemistry.

When a chemist says a proton is transferred, they usually mean a hydrogen ion — a hydrogen atom that has lost its electron and is therefore a bare proton. Moving that around is ordinary chemistry, and it is the basis of how acids and bases work.

But notice what is happening: the proton is not being extracted from a nucleus. Hydrogen's nucleus is a single proton with nothing holding it to anything else once the electron is gone, so it can move as a whole particle at chemical energies.

So the terminology collides confusingly. Chemists transfer protons constantly; none of them are removing protons from a nucleus containing more than one.

Your intuition is right, and the phenomenon has a name: creep. A material under sustained load deforms slowly over time even well below the stress that would break it immediately, and given long enough that deformation ends in failure.

The mechanism is that atoms in a crystal are not locked in place. They jump between positions occasionally, driven by thermal energy, and under load the jumps that relieve the stress are slightly more likely than the ones that oppose it. Each jump is negligible; over enough time they add up to measurable stretching, then to thinning, then to rupture.

Rates in low-stress conditions are strikingly small — laboratory tests on steel report elongation measured in tens or hundreds of micrometres per year on specimens a few centimetres long. Small, and not zero, and that is the whole point of your question.

The practical version of this that does matter: the statistics stop being reliable when the number of atoms gets small.

With a kilogram of material, the observed decay rate matches the predicted curve to extraordinary precision, because averaging over that many independent events leaves essentially no fluctuation. With a few hundred atoms, the fluctuations are visible and the smooth exponential curve is only an average.

With a single atom, half-life means only that there is a fifty percent chance it has decayed by then. It may sit there for a thousand half-lives. That case is not exotic — it is the everyday situation in single-atom experiments, and it is where the statistical nature of the law stops being an abstraction.

On the tidal force question specifically, since that was the interesting part of your reasoning: yes, right at the horizon the tidal forces would be immense, and no, it does not matter.

Tidal force falls off very steeply with distance. For an object with a horizon smaller than a nucleus, the region where those forces are significant is correspondingly tiny. A finger approaching it experiences apple-strength gravity right up until it is within a distance far smaller than the atoms it is made of.

That is the general lesson about small black holes: everything dramatic about them is confined to a region so small that ordinary matter never gets there. Bigger black holes are dangerous at a distance precisely because their horizons are large enough for a person to be inside the extreme region.