hi dcarraher, welcome to the fray. How's the pile on going?
1) C14 is assumed to be in equilibrium, otherwise C14 dating is invalid. Measurements contradict this assumption, yet it is used anyway.
Let me add to what PaulK said in his reply.
Curiously, it is a known scientific fact that C14 is not,
and never will be, in equilibrium. This is a creationist canard. C14 is produced in the atmosphere as a result of solar radiation, which is known to be cyclic. The result is that the levels of C14 are also cyclic, they vary around an average value but can never reach a single equilibrium level. You can look up this information yourself to verify this simple fact. This should also tell you that anyone that claims there should be an equilibrium level is telling falsehoods, or is ignorant of reality, and should not be trusted as a source of information.
Strangely, using the average value gives remarkably consistent results. Facinatingly scientists are able to calibrate "C14 age" against ages from layering systems, so that C14 dates can be corrected for the amount of C14 in the atmosphere at the time the fossils formed. Amazingly all C14 dates are on the
young side when corrected, the fossils are actually older. In other words the error in the C14 system are
consistently too young.
3) Accelerated nuclear decay would affect all isotopes uniformly, "to the same degree" as you put it. I was not proposing an ad hoc acceleration of various isotopes.
Now I'll add to what Coragyps said.
There are many significant problems with this typical creationist
ad hoc attempt to explain reality. I'll start with just four:
(1) The Oklo natural reactors
http://oklo.curtin.edu.au/
quote:
In 1972 the very well preserved remains of several ancient natural nuclear reactors were discovered in the middle of the Oklo Uranium ore deposit.
To keep it simple, what you had was a natural reactor, with a series of reactions occurring. If you accelerate the rate of decay what you are doing is increasing the nuclear reactions, it would be similar to increasing the purity of any radioactive substance. Double the rate and you have doubled the number of reactions in a set time frame, just as would occur with twice the purity of the element.
We know from Chernobyl that when reactions speed up and get out of hand you have a melt-down of the reactor, and this is part of the evidence at Oklo, but you are talking about much more than doubling the rate of decay, you are talking about a factor of thousands.
The problem you have with Oklo is that this kind of increase would have meant the deposit there would have reached critical mass and turned into an atomic bomb: this did not happen.
(2) the uranium halos
The energy of alpha decay is related to the decay rate by an inverse exponential relationship -- change the rate of decay and you change the alpha decay energy of the ejected particle.
See
Are Uranium Halos the best evidence of (a) an old earth AND (b) constant physics?quote:
Very simply put, if you change the decay rate, you change the decay energy, and the diameter of the halo changes.
There should be no characteristic uranium halos with the unique energy of uranium alpha decay from fast decay.
The existence of (common) uranium halos then is evidence that shows the physical constants have not changed while they were formed, and their formation in turn is evidence that the earth is old, at least several hundred million years old.
Thus with accelerated decay you should not have any distinct uranium halos, and incredibly they exist in profusion. Thus the energy of alpha decay has not changed while they formed, and this means the decay rate has not changed.
(3) the Devil's Hole calcite vein
There is a correlation between two different radioactive isotopes AND deposit layer depth in a calcite deposit in Devil's Cave.
Message 9quote:
So what exactly do we have here? Water dripping down a cave wall, depositing calcite and various other minerals and impurities, elements that are soluble in water, including trace levels of radioactive isotopes of uranium. Material that gets deposited as the water evaporates, forming layer after layer of similar deposits, each one trapping the material in their respective layers. The calcite forms a matrix that holds the impurities, minerals and trace elements in a position related to the time the calcite was deposited.
...
Radioactive elements decay into other elements, and some of these are not soluble, and thus the presence of these insoluble daughter elements is evidence of decay of the soluble parent elements. These daughter elements are still trapped in the layers of calcite that the parent elements were depositied in, so their position also relates to the age of the daughter elements in the calcite layers. We are interested in four isotopes of these matrix constrained elements, two radoactive - thorium-230 and protactinium-231 - and two not radioactive - oxygen-18 and carbon-13 - and what they can tell us about climate and age.
...
Using the half-lives of thorium-230 (75,380 years) and protactinium-231 (32,760 years), we can now draw the exponential curves for these isotopes (with % on the y-axis and time in k-yrs on the x axis, thorium in blue and protactinium in red):
. . . . (see link for graph) . . . .
This means we have a series of data with three different pieces of information: calcite layer age, Thorium-230 content and Protactinium-231 content. We also note that Thorium-230 has a half-life of 75,380 years, while Protactinium-231 has a half-life of 32,760 years - less than half the half-life of Thorium-230. This means that layer by layer the ratio of Thorium-230 to Protactinium-231 is different:
Read the post for more information, read the thread for a lot more information on basic problems with YEC age concepts, but the thing to note here, is that if the rate of decay was different then it is perfectly matched, not just between the decay of Thorium-230 and Protactinium-231, but also with the rate of deposit and evaporation to form the calcite deposit, again a variation not of a factor or two or so, but compressing 567,700 years into 1 or 2 thousand, and this should show up in the thickness of the layers formed by other elements that
don't decay. The rate of deposition of calcite is tied to the rate of evaporation of water, and this would have to be varied exponentially in a manner that perfectly matches the decay rates in perfect synchrony. Other non-radioactive elements trapped in the calcite show the effects of climate, and from these we can tell that the rate of evaporation was not varied by factors necessary to create this deposit to match an accelerated decay rate.
(4) the SN1987A supernova
By a curious set of circumstances we can measure the actual distance to supernova SN1987A.
Dave Matson Young Earth Additional Topics Supernova » Internet Infidels
quote:
The distance is based on triangulation. The line from Earth to the supernova is one side of the triangle and the line from Earth to the edge of the ring is another leg. The third leg of this right triangle is the relatively short distance from the supernova to the edge of its ring. Since the ring lit up about a year after the supernova exploded, that means that a beam of light coming directly from the supernova reached us a year before the beam of light which was detoured via the ring. ... The lag distance between the two beams, of course, is just their present velocity multiplied by the difference in their arrival times. With the true distance of the third leg of our triangle in hand, trigonometry gives us the correct distance from Earth to the supernova.
The other interesting thing is that we see evidence of radioactive decay in the light wavelengths and gamma ray emissions of the supernova, as well as the wavelengths of non-radioactive elements. There is no difference in the relationships of these wavelengths to those known today for the same elements, and we can actually see the decay of Cobalt in the light and it matches the decay curve we see for this isotope today:
Evidence about Constants Being the Same in the Distant Past
quote:
Nickel-56 decays with a half-life of 6.1 days into cobalt-56, which in turn decays with a half-life of 77.1 days. Both kinds of decay give off very distinctive gamma rays. Analysis of the gamma rays from SN1987a showed mostly cobalt-56, exactly as predicted. And, the amount of those gamma rays died away with exactly the half-life of cobalt-56.
That decay curve does not show any acceleration of the decay rate, and thus, even if you add the
ad hoc conjecture that light has slowed down (so that this supernova occurred in the time frame of your young earth\universe), it is
still the same rate of decay as today. If you counter with the
ad hoc conjecture that this occurred after the change in decay rate, then you are stuck with the event occurring 170,000 light-years away, and an old earth, so this doesn't help you either. Or you are changing different universal constants at different times and in different ways...
Conclusion
When you make an
ad hoc conjecture to explain one piece of inconvenient truth, what you find, instead of a simple explanation that resolves the issue, is that it creates more problems than it solves. When you make the common conjecture that the rate of decay was accelerated, this may "explain" the inconvenient truth of the radioactive age of the earth, but it creates several new problems that each need to be explained by other increasingly extraordinary mechanisms ... and when you create another
ad hoc explanation for those problems, they will most likely create more problems that need to be explained. It's like telling a lie, and then having to tell more, and more, and more lies to cover the original lie.
And when you are done with all of that frantic conjecturing, then you still have not explained the other evidence of an old earth (see
Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 for several independent measures of an old earth, and how they correlate data for climates with ages and other data).
There was no significant variation in decay rate during the Oklo reactions, there was no significant variation in decay rate during the formation of uranium halos, there was no significant variation in decay rate during the formation of the calcite deposit in Devil's Cave and there was no significant variation in the decay rate since the formation of SN1987A. Four entirely different bits of evidence show a lack of variation in the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes, and any explanation of ONE is useless to explain the OTHERS, so you need MULTIPLE explanations all coordinated to produce the same results.
If there was a period of significant variation in the decay rate it occurred before any of these things occurred, which means the earth is was and will be old. That's reality.
As I said, if you start with the premise that God ...
... created reality, then you end up studying reality to see what was created, or you believe in a trickster god.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : gamma
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