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Author Topic:   Uranium Dating
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1488 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(1)
Message 28 of 153 (573333)
08-10-2010 9:46 PM
Reply to: Message 21 by archaeologist
08-10-2010 5:31 PM


if everyone set their watches and clocks to the clock in the town square each day, but did not know that the town clock was wrong then yes everyone would have the same wrong time and not be aware of it.
We don't do that, though. Sure, it's easy to suggest that there's some kind of vast conspiracy, and when the radiogeology departments get samples they identify them, call up Our Lord Darwin Jr, and ask "how old should we say this is?"
But consider for a moment how that's impossible for something like Tiktaalik. When Tiktaalik was discovered in 2004, nobody had ever seen one before. That was a completely new discovery of a lobe-finned fish nobody had ever seen before. How would they have known when to date it, if the various dating techniques don't actually work and agree with each other? Who could they have called to find out about what date to lie about? Nobody had ever seen a Tikaalik before.
Let me explain how dating works, roughly, and then you can plainly see it's not a matter of everybody setting their watches by the same clock. They find a fossil of a lobe-finned transitional form that nobody's ever seen before. Everybody gets very excited and they airlift the fossil back to their university.
Archaeologists carefully chip off samples from the surrounding stone, which they ship off to their local geology department and a few others. They don't tell each department about the others. They may tell the department where the stone is from, but they don't mention anything about the fossil except perhaps to say that there was a fossil. The technicians who perform the dating know even less - they're usually not told anything at all besides "run the GC/MS on this" - so, even though they're evolutionists, they couldn't possibly fudge the data to get the dates they want because they don't know what dates they would want. All the geology departments come back with a date, and the archeologists look them over and see that the dates match within a statistical degree of error.
They talk to the stratiographers next, and tell them that they found a fossil at a certain depth in the geologic column, but they don't tell them what kind of fossil it was. The stratiographers return with a date that strata was laid down in that region of the Earth, and that date is consistent with the radiodating. Then they talk to the molecular phylogeneticists and ask roughly when land-dwelling tetrapods would have evolved from lobe-finned fishes, since this fossil has the intermediate characteristics of both. The molecular guys give an estimation of how long ago those species diverged, and that estimation is consistent with the other dates (though the margin of error is a lot larger.)
So you can see that, simply because the people determining these dates share only the fossil, the dates they determine must be based on physical characteristics of the fossil and not their participation in the Great Evo Conspiracy. If not for the real age of the fossil, nobody would know how old to date it because nobody had ever seen a Tikaalik before.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 21 by archaeologist, posted 08-10-2010 5:31 PM archaeologist has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1488 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(1)
Message 33 of 153 (573351)
08-11-2010 12:12 AM
Reply to: Message 30 by archaeologist
08-10-2010 11:13 PM


being independent doesn't mean they are all accurate or support the others' results
Yes, it does. The degree of freedom of a dating technique, after all, is all of the universe's past. When multiple, independent lines of evidence appear to converge on the same date, that can only be one of two things: an incredibly unlikely, vanishing coincidence; or the result of a legitimate physical quantity being measured. Occam's razor, the principle of parsimony, leads us to choose the reliability of our tests over the astronomically unlikely notion that they're all wrong but just happened, by luck, to agree.
the point is that to get the exact correct time there has to be one governing mechanism that states the correct time and if the users have problems with their time pieces then everyone will have the incorrect time.
If people's individual timepieces are broken, then it stands to reason that they'll all be broken in different ways, because they'll have broken for different reasons. Some will be faster. Some will be slower. Some won't be running at all. But when everybody's timepiece is shown to be keeping the same time, and everybody is known to have set their timepieces from different sources, that's a considerable weight of evidence for the current time.
Convergence of utterly random garbage data is so astronomically improbable that when we do see convergence, that indicates that the data is valid and not garbage. That's Bayes' Theorem - the significance of an outcome - the degree to which it is unlikely to have been produced by chance - is higher the less likely the outcome is.
so people use different time pieces to synchronize their clocks and watches but if those sources get their time from one that is wrong then everyone will still have the wrong time. it is possible and facts do not exclude this possibility.
But they don't get it from one. Facts can always exclude this possibility because we can trace sources and show that multiple lines of evidence are truly independent and not affected by each other.
even radio stations get it wrong
Yes. The fact that some people have the wrong time proves that they're not getting their time from the same ultimate source.
they can't date it even with the help of the dating systems as too many mitigating factors apply.
Nonsense. Tikaalik has been reliably dated by multiple, convergent lines of evidence - stratiography, radiometric, and molecular.
they think the truth changes but it doesn't.
The truth never changes, but our ideas about it - which are all that we can know - only become static when, like you, someone abandons the search for truth altogether.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 30 by archaeologist, posted 08-10-2010 11:13 PM archaeologist has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1488 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 42 of 153 (573426)
08-11-2010 11:42 AM
Reply to: Message 36 by archaeologist
08-11-2010 8:04 AM


no observation of it being produced by a lesser form and no observation of it changing into a superior form.
You understand that it's a fossil, right? It's dead bones? It's not even bone anymore, it's the mineralized remains of bones.
Why would it change into anything? That makes no sense. Dead things don't evolve, living populations do.
in other words all evolutionists have is the scientists' conjecture that this is a intermediary
It's not conjecture. It's observation. You can look at the fossil and see that, objectively, it has intermediate, transitional characteristics between fish and amphibians.

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 Message 36 by archaeologist, posted 08-11-2010 8:04 AM archaeologist has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1488 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 46 of 153 (573503)
08-11-2010 5:59 PM
Reply to: Message 43 by archaeologist
08-11-2010 5:29 PM


if i had a dime for every one of these comments i read i could retire.
Maybe you get these comments because you deserve them. Maybe you get them because people who are actually experts in these fields notice that your posts are packed with errors even freshmen students don't make. Is it really so surprising that people accuse you of not knowing things when you make it obvious that you don't know them?
others have millions of years and i will say this for most of these half-lifes people do not live long enough to see if they are correct.
You don't have to observe the entire duration of the half-life to verify the half-life. You just have to use a geiger counter to count the particle emissions over a more observable period of time. If you know how many particles are decaying over a minute, for instance, you can determine how long it will take for half of them to have decayed. It's a simple matter of logarithms.
as i said there is no central governor for the dating systems
Right, so your claim that they're all getting the same false dates from a single fabricated source is false.
if they so happen to agree on one international statement that does not mean the statement is true or that their method is without error.
But of course that's exactly what it means. If all nations, independent of each other, develop laws against murder, that's evidence that murder is wrong, since the law approximates what is right and wrong.
you can read anything you want into old bones but nothing in the fossils indicates that there was a transformation in progress.
It's the pattern of fossils that indicates the transformation. One footprint won't tell you anything about where someone has been or where they were going. There's nothing in a single footprint that can tell you that.
It's the trail of footprints, the pattern, leading from the broken window to the neighbor's front door that tells you that whoever broke into your house last night lives next door. Every fossil is a footprint in a trail that leads from the Last Universal Common Ancestor to every living thing on Earth today.
and they dfound what they were looking for whether it really is one or not.
If it's not what they were looking for, how would they have known where to look for it?
i have already presented the nursery evidence
What "nursery evidence" did you present? You just said we should "go to a nursery." Can you be more specific? Should we look for something in particular? If all the evidence for creation is in nurseries then why are the people who run nurseries so frequently evolutionists?
well you totally missed the point and start talking about absurd things i never said
You said there was
quote:
no observation of it being produced by a lesser form and no observation of it changing into a superior form.
Did you write those words, or didn't you? They appear in your post. How did they get there if you didn't write them?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 43 by archaeologist, posted 08-11-2010 5:29 PM archaeologist has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1488 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 53 of 153 (573526)
08-11-2010 7:32 PM
Reply to: Message 50 by archaeologist
08-11-2010 7:10 PM


no i get them because people like you cannot accept the fact that others will disagree with them and their beliefs.
No, you get them because you say things about science that are false. Like, you say that you can't determine the half-life of an isotope without observing the entire half-life. But, that's stupid.
actually you do or it is all hearsay
"Hearsay"? If you observed it yourself who would it be "hearsay" from? And what, in your mind, is so special about the half-life and not, say, the quarter-life? Or the eighth-life? Or the millionth-life? You seem to think that the millionth-life wouldn't tell you anything about the half-life, but you take it for granted that the half-life tells you something about the other half. Why would that be true?
i am saying it is a very real possibility and a factual one.
You've just said that it's not a possibility:
quote:
as i said there is no central governor for the dating systems and no ultimate time piece to synchronize their works.
Did you write those words or didn't you?
one cannot trust the human dating systems
We don't date fossils by humans, we date them by physical evidence of their date.
orthey may think it is true when it is not.
But that's exactly it - when degrees of freedom are so wide, when everybody arrives at the same improbable consensus, that's an indication that they didn't get there by chance alone but because something is significant and real. Bayes' Theorem, remember. Are you saying Bayes' Theorem is wrong? It's been mathematically proven.
the pattern still is not proof nor evidence
In a court of law it would certainly be evidence, forensic evidence. People have been convicted on the basis of a pattern of footprints connecting them to a crime.
footprints is a bad anaolgy because we can see them take place in front of our eyes when someone walks and know that they are indicating something whereas different items on different fossils are NOT observed and no real pattern is known.
That is false. The features of fossils can be easily observed by people who observe the fossils. It's not like they disappear.
And frequently no, you didn't see those footprints formed. You may be observing them hours or days after they were made. Footprints, like fossils, are a physical record of something that happened in the past, and it's on the basis of physical records of the past that we determine what happened in the past.
It's the basis of forensic science - it's the basis of all science. Science can only study the past - the future is not known to anyone (except your God, I suppose, but he's not telling) and the present is the past as soon as it happens.
please, it was a lucky guess not a prediction.
A lucky guess? They just happened to guess Nunavut, Canada and there it was? Does that make sense to you? The land surface area of the Earth is 50 million square kilometers. The three Tiktaalik fossils that exist are about the size of a laptop computer.
That's a very small needle in a very large haystack. And you expect us to believe they just made a lucky guess? That's like guessing the winning lottery numbers every single time, every day, for one hundred years.
yet you cannot prove it was me who actually wrote them.
Did you write them, or didn't you? It's a simple question, why argue about it? Don't be immature. Don't write things unless you mean them. If we can't even respond to your arguments because you're going to claim you didn't write them, how can we have a discussion?
Is that honest behavior? What does your Bible say about lying?
if science disagrees with the Bible then the science is wrong
Or the Bible is wrong, which is what reasonable people conclude. Science, after all, gets results, and the Bible never has. Nobody used the Bible to build the computer you're on.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 50 by archaeologist, posted 08-11-2010 7:10 PM archaeologist has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1488 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 67 of 153 (573735)
08-12-2010 3:45 PM
Reply to: Message 58 by archaeologist
08-12-2010 5:49 AM


keep in mind that science may only be looking at part of the picture in order to hear what it wants to hear.
You write like you're illiterate, but this, at least, made me laugh.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 58 by archaeologist, posted 08-12-2010 5:49 AM archaeologist has not replied

  
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