Radioactive Potassium Demands Ancient Earth?

Good point. Ask NosyNed and RAZD, I don't do well attacking the correlations thing. Neither do I currently think that the Flood just happened to sort out the isotopes (I never thought about that!). I have wondered if there isn't some way for the isotopes to be affected by depth somehow (apart from age) that could create just such an illusion.

There are a couple reasons why the argument from God is discouraged in the science forums:

1. EvC Forum is intended to explore Creationism's claim that it is not religion and that it every bit as scientific as evolution. Creationism claims it deserves representation in science classrooms alongside evolution because it is true science. Invocations of God to explain natural phenomena run counter to this claim.
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2. If EvC Forum permitted the argument from God in the science forums, then the same debate would spring forth in countless threads, for instance about God as jester, or about why God would create one way and not another, and so forth. For this reason, the argument from God is typically limited to the [forum=-1], [forum=-6] and [forum=-11] forums, and now that I think about it, [forum=-4] could probably be included, too.

Some of your questions can still be raised without introducing God into the discussion. For example, you could ask how we know the scientific laws that hold today were the same billions of years ago.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Yup, known colloquially as "Last Thursdayism"; you can't prove that the entire Universe wasn't created last Thursday.Soem of teh possible explanations you listed were interesting, but there's no evidence for any of them, so Occam's razor applies.

People have looked real hard, and haven't found anything. Pressure, temperature, chemical environment, mechanicla agitationof all types, combinations of the above ... pretty much nothing.Very high pressure can affect some types (not all types) of radioactive decay by a percent or two. If we heated the Earth to a few million degrees, turning it into a plasma, electron-capture-type decay would be affected a little ... but I think we would have noticed the Earth being vaporized.It's hard to separate isotopes of an element from each other, there aren't any natural processes that do it to any great degree, and most natural processes don't do it at all. They act almost exactly the same chemically, and their mass is almost the same. Separating ²³⁵U from other isotopes of uranum takes lots of heavy duty industrial equipment (remember those aluminum tubes for Saddam? Centrifuges, supposedly). See Uranium Enrichment.So, no, the Flood couldn't sort the isotopes and no known natural process could have sorted the isotopes ... can you conceive of how much time and money has been spent looking for just such a process? Bombs and nuclear reactors attract lots of research money.

That's easy. The dates produced should be very strongly biased towards the minimum age that the method can measure. That's not what we find, which is why some YEC's appeal to accelerated radioactive decay.

JonF,Can isotopes move about? Seems like Argon could especially be prone to moving about. The other isotopes could, I would think, if exposed to (significant) water movement...but that's a guess.Argon movement would seem to be upward, which might indeed present an illusion of older-to-younger. But it wouldn't necessarily correlate with any other method, if that were the case.

What's that exactly?AbE: Well, I think I know what Occam's Razor is...how would it apply to this situation?This message has been edited by TheLiteralist, 03-11-2005 17:37 AM

Given two theories capable of explaining the same observations, it tells us which one to prefer. That is, the one that is the most parsimonious; the one with the least untestable, needless entities.

I at first thought you might be referring to Ar/Ar dating, but that wouldn't make sense since JonF just explained that isotopes of the same element do not separate via natural processes. So it sounds like you're asking about K/Ar dating and if in the proposed flood of Noah whether Ar might have moved around independently of K and become separated from it, tending to appear in higher levels than K since Ar is a gas.The answer is a most definite yes. Freely suspended sediment in water would likely have released a great deal of the Ar. It would have risen as bubbles through the water and been released into the atmosphere. This would have, in effect, reset the K/Ar clock, causing all proposed flood layers to date very young because 6,000 years is not enough time for appreciable amounts of Ar to accumulate from the decay of K. But the layers Creationists claim to have been deposited by the flood contain increasing amounts of Ar proportional to K with increasing depth, and so the layers date older the deeper you go. Please ignore the following incredibly incorrect comment. --PercyA process which moved an excess amount of argon to the upper layers would cause the illusion of increased younger-to-older, the opposite of what you propose.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 03-11-2005 22:47 AM

Depends. In an un-cracked un-weathered rock at Earth surface temperatures, not much. Enough to throw off isochron methods by a percent or two. Not enough to make 4,000,000,000-year-old rocks look 6,000 years old.In the temperatures that cause metamorphic rocks, yes, especially if there are cracks or the crystal structure has been heavily radiation-damaged. (The latter is why geologists don't like highly radioactive samples much). But in almost all methods except K-Ar, the effect doesn't make the samples look older than they are.The key point is that they don't get isotopically separated when they move. If the argon in the rock consists of X% ⁴⁰Ar and Y% ³⁹Ar, the stuff that moves or escapes consists of X% ⁴⁰Ar and Y% ³⁹Ar, and the stuff that remains behind consists of X% ⁴⁰Ar and Y% ³⁹Ar. The percentages don't change. It isn't really isotopes that move, it's atoms, and the isotopic ratios stay the same.Movement of atoms can screw up K-Ar dating, it can sometimes screw up Ar-Ar dating if enough of it happens (but the method will detect the problem), it can easily screw up isochron dating (but, again, the method indicates the problem) and it seldom screws up concordia-discordia dating. But not only would it not correlate with other methods, it would give the reverse of what we see. Argon moving up would deplete the lower rocks, making them look younger, and enrich the upper rocks, making them look older. We pretty much see the top rocks as being younger and the bottom rocks as being older.

All of this is not the topic of this thread.JonF you have the outstanding issue of the effects of accelerated K decay to support. There is nothing else to be said on this thread. If you aren't going to do that I will close it until you are ready.

OK ... I'm pretty busy and may not be able to get to it real soon. I'm not sure I believe that claim myself. I should have made that clear in the OP. I've asked the original claimant to post his calculations, with no response yet.

Okay...I'll try to stick to the purely ⁴⁰K arguments (although I was intrigued immensely by all the rest). Would a general radiometric-dating discussion be appropriate were that the topic?I'll be going out of town for nearly a week anyways...it'll do me good not to be ABLE to post here...are there any support groups for EvC addictions? EvC Anonymous..."Hi, my name's TheLiteralist and I'm an EvC-aholic. I have to post at least 20 times per day, even if I don't know what I or anyone else is talking about..."Thanks everybody for the great input...off-topic and on-topic...all pretty good discussion I thought.

There are a tonne of such threads in the forum.I thought you had been through that and decided that you had no answers but didn't want to concede anything? Have I implanted a false memory ? Perhaps I am confusing you with someone else. Very few of the creationist side last long in those threads so there are a lot of "left hanging" discussions.Have a good week off - I hope you don't get the shakes from the withdrawal. In the last couple of years I haven't been more than 2 days away from a computer so I don't know if I could go a week.Sure I could! I can take it or leave it anytime.

Ned, Okay...maybe I'll look for one that's appropriate for general radiometric dating discussion, when I get back. Speaking of false memories, the way I remember it, I clearly won that debate...you and RAZD seem to {AbE} have {/AbE} a hard time admitting it, though. Thanks. I'm going to help celebrate the birth of the first child of my best friend from my highschool days. He lives in Tampa; I live in NorthWest Florida. I'll be hitching a ride with his little sister (she was a little 8-year-old-kid when I first met him!). He's Vietnamese...I'm just a regular ol' white guy. I'll get to see lots of his family, including his parents (who don't really speak English). It should be quite fun and interesting. I actually learned to read, write, and speak a very little of Vietnamese. Speaking it is very difficult for a native English-speaker! Heh heh! I try sometimes...went for almost 10 hours one day without posting here...maybe it was only 6 or 8 hours.Catch ya next week sometime.
--TheLitThis message has been edited by TheLiteralist, 03-12-2005 01:13 AM