What is the YEC answer to the lack of shorter lived isotopes?

Rei, I think the answer is pretty obvious: only isotopes with half-lives over 100,000,000 years are "good" isotopes, so they were the only ones that were created. The decay products of non-good, short-lived isotopes like 93Zr, however, are "good", so 93Nb is substituted for Zr in zircons. God wanted it that way: a perfect crystal lattice is sinful, ya know. Snakey, perhaps, or something.I'm surprised that I haven't seen this "explanation" at the ICR website! Should I submit it to them?

Daughter isotopes. Start explaining.

An example is that of uranium and lead in zircons. When zircons crystallize, they reject lead from their crystal lattices, but can incorporate uranium. And lo and behold, today's zircons have some lead in them - with lead-206 and lead-207 in excess. And those two isotopes are daughters of uranium isotopes. The same sort of thing happens in meteorites, where there's magnesium-26 in aluminum minerals. It's the daughter of Al-26, which is ~1,600,000 year half-life, IIRC.I'll look at the books for zirconium and hafnium daughters when I get the chance. Both should be in zircons, and I'll bet their daughters are rejected.

But, for example, magnesium-26 inside the crystal lattice of an aluminum mineral didn't just crawl there - it came from the decay of aluminum-26. 26Al has a 770,000 year half, is formed by known mechanisms in AGB stars and supernovae, and is absent in today's solar system.
I haven't found anything on the web about niobium-93 (from zirconium-93) in zircons, but if I get up to the library at Texas Tech in the near future, I'll look.....Cerium-142 has a half-life of 5 x 10^16 years, by the way. How much neodymium can you get from that in a couple of billion years?This message has been edited by Coragyps, 05-05-2004 09:37 AM

JP, the Hubble Space Telescope and a variety of large ground-based telescopes have taken many pictures of solar systems being born from nebulae - in the Orion Nebula, the Taurus Molecular Cloud - lots of pictures. The pattern of stony planets in close and gassy ones further away in our own solar system support the "nebular hypothesis".
What else do you want?

Then why drag science into the discussion at all? If this Big Guy in the Sky can make anything happen, why invoke the rules of physics at all?

But why would it affect the ages derived from different processes equally, when alpha decay and beta decay are governed by different forces? Why would uranium series decay (some of each mode) match up in dates with the electron capture decay of potassium-40, the beta decay of rubidium-87, and the alpha decay of samarium-147? Another miracle, to confound the atheistic physicists?Added by edit: it's much worse than what I just wrote! You must accelerate the rates of each isotope to a different degree for that first couple of days of "creation week" to make the ages derived from the all agree. And those different accelerations must be precisely tuned to each other to make the "ages" come out the same.Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.

---

"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD