Did you read the link I provided?

Well, I know damn well you didn't, because there wasn't enough time.

But read it, in detail. It answers your questions - the honest ones, anyways.

It's already been explained that "an atom" isn't what's being dated.

Maybe a little contribution to this excellent thread. I searched for "calibration" but didn't find it in the context of 14C dating.

There has been a whole lot of issues on the accuracy of 14C dating. Nowadays we seem to have a quite robust calibration scale, INTCAL09 after numerous comparisons with annually countable layers/rings like treerings (dendrochronology), annual coral grow rings, annual lake deposit layers (varves), which validates the method well within 5%.

On the other hand, there seems to be a problem with not-so-constantly logaritmic beta decay.

Very interesting links Andre, thank you. I would have loved to see the talk that went with that presentation.

Weaver wrote:Did you read the link I provided?

Well, I know damn well you didn't, because there wasn't enough time.

But read it, in detail. It answers your questions - the honest ones, anyways.

Sorry. It didn't even begin to address my point as to the difference in the time between the synthesis of unstable atoms and the time when they became part of the planet Earth.

Atheistoclast wrote:

Weaver wrote:Did you read the link I provided?

Well, I know damn well you didn't, because there wasn't enough time.

But read it, in detail. It answers your questions - the honest ones, anyways.

Sorry. It didn't even begin to address my point as to the difference in the time between the synthesis of unstable atoms and the time when they became part of the planet Earth.

Joe knew that without reading it: his Morton's Demon told him so.

Atheistoclast wrote:

Weaver wrote:Did you read the link I provided?

Well, I know damn well you didn't, because there wasn't enough time.

But read it, in detail. It answers your questions - the honest ones, anyways.

Sorry. It didn't even begin to address my point as to the difference in the time between the synthesis of unstable atoms and the time when they became part of the planet Earth.

You going to start studying geology any time soon? You know, the study of rocks, their formation and the processes that make up the earths crust from which the rocks come? Knowledge of geology is pretty important with respect to determining how certain rocks were formed, which has implications for where and when they could have been formed, which has implications for whether they can be used for dating etc.

There's more to this subject that just a couple of isotope ratios. You can't use any rock for dating layers, much less estimating the age of our planet. It's a pretty broad subject with many different lines of evidence converging on a small range. To understand why that age is arrived at takes more than just isotope ratios. Learn about rocks and geologic processes first. That means study geology, not extracting religious conclusions from your hindmost orifice at the instantiation of your investigative process.

Who am I kidding here anyway? You're not here to really find anything out, you're here to "destroy atheistic materialistic darwinist evolutionistic naturalism" or some such preconcieved nonsense.

I thought he was here supporting atheism by showing us why radionuclide dating is inconsistent and why the earth could actually be much older than we currently think, which would make atheistic evilution much more likely.

I remember being told sagely at a religious youth group meeting when I was about sixteen (hey, I was there for the girls and the bowling nights... ), that a "team of explorers had taken a freshly killed seal and subjected it to radio carbon dating, and it showed (hahaha) that it had actually died 300 years before!". The person reading this from some religious magazine laughed and said how stupid the whole idea of carbon dating was.

I pointed out that I had never heard it being used to "date" something supposedly "freshly killed" (and how a team of "explorers" would have a radio carbon dating setup in the field was another question...), and that also, if you are talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of years, 300 years plus or minus is almost literally nothing.

A lot of the more fervent believers in the meeting could not understand how 300 years could be meaningless...but they also believed whole heartedly that the Earth was only about 6000 years old...

johnbrandt wrote:I remember being told sagely at a religious youth group meeting when I was about sixteen (hey, I was there for the girls and the bowling nights... ), that a "team of explorers had taken a freshly killed seal and subjected it to radio carbon dating, and it showed (hahaha) that it had actually died 300 years before!". The person reading this from some religious magazine laughed and said how stupid the whole idea of carbon dating was.

I pointed out that I had never heard it being used to "date" something supposedly "freshly killed" (and how a team of "explorers" would have a radio carbon dating setup in the field was another question...), and that also, if you are talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of years, 300 years plus or minus is almost literally nothing.

A lot of the more fervent believers in the meeting could not understand how 300 years could be meaningless...but they also believed whole heartedly that the Earth was only about 6000 years old...

Actually the carbon dating of the seal (or any marine animal or plant) giving an older result is normal and expected. The C14 is produced in the upper atmosphere and mixes rapidly through the entire atmosphere but this is not the case with the C14 in the Ocean (dissolved in the form of CO2). Essentially it takes a long time for new C14 to dissolve in the Oceans and you also have older C14 mixing from the deep Ocean which gets taken up by phytoplankton at the bottom of the food chain. Marine C14 is "older" than atmospheric C14.

http://www.radiocarbon.com/marine-reservoir-effect.htm

Radiocarbon dates of a terrestrial and marine organism of equivalent age have a difference of about 400 radiocarbon years. Terrestrial organisms like trees primarily get carbon 14 from atmospheric carbon dioxide but marine organisms do not. Samples from marine organisms like shells, whales, and seals appear much older.

Your religiotard instructors would have been well aware of this but most of the sheep wouldn't

I'm trying to understand how radiometric dating accounts for the time lag between the synthesis of radioisotopes and their subsequent deposition on proto-Earth. Assuming that radioisotopes begin decaying soon after they are formed in supernovae, then it would seem that radiometric dating indicates when the isotopes began decaying rather than the age of Earth in which are found today. If all radiometric dating on Earth points to a common starting point, then that could simply mean they all came from the same source supernova. If the time between radioisotope synthesis and the formation of our solar system is very small, then the age of isotopes is a reasonable estimate of the age of Earth. But if time between the synthesis of the isotopes and the formation of Earth is a significant fraction of the age of the isotopes, then Earth would be younger. But how this lag would be determined is not obvious. Please clarify my understanding.

cbm1203 wrote:I'm trying to understand how radiometric dating accounts for the time lag between the synthesis of radioisotopes and their subsequent deposition on proto-Earth. Assuming that radioisotopes begin decaying soon after they are formed in supernovae, then it would seem that radiometric dating indicates when the isotopes began decaying rather than the age of Earth in which are found today. If all radiometric dating on Earth points to a common starting point, then that could simply mean they all came from the same source supernova. If the time between radioisotope synthesis and the formation of our solar system is very small, then the age of isotopes is a reasonable estimate of the age of Earth. But if time between the synthesis of the isotopes and the formation of Earth is a significant fraction of the age of the isotopes, then Earth would be younger. But how this lag would be determined is not obvious. Please clarify my understanding.

Radiometric dating works on the principle of RATIOS of parent isotopes and daughter products (caused by the decay of the parent) to be found in a particular sample. When the parent isotope was first formed is not relevant to this exercise. What is relevant is how much of the daughter element(s) may have been present in the sample at the time of its formation and whether any subsequent contamination by external daughter elements may have taken place. The former is addressed by using multiple isotopic tests upon various minerals within the same sample to establish how much of the daughter products would have been initally present, in order for that variable to be fixed in the age equation.

There is a very good paper (actually written for Christians would you believe) which explains this very well in simple language. I refer you to page 4 of this paper:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/wiens.html#page%201

Blackadder wrote:

cbm1203 wrote:I'm trying to understand how radiometric dating accounts for the time lag between the synthesis of radioisotopes and their subsequent deposition on proto-Earth. Assuming that radioisotopes begin decaying soon after they are formed in supernovae, then it would seem that radiometric dating indicates when the isotopes began decaying rather than the age of Earth in which are found today. If all radiometric dating on Earth points to a common starting point, then that could simply mean they all came from the same source supernova. If the time between radioisotope synthesis and the formation of our solar system is very small, then the age of isotopes is a reasonable estimate of the age of Earth. But if time between the synthesis of the isotopes and the formation of Earth is a significant fraction of the age of the isotopes, then Earth would be younger. But how this lag would be determined is not obvious. Please clarify my understanding.

Radiometric dating works on the principle of RATIOS of parent isotopes and daughter products (caused by the decay of the parent) to be found in a particular sample. When the parent isotope was first formed is not relevant to this exercise. What is relevant is how much of the daughter element(s) may have been present in the sample at the time of its formation and whether any subsequent contamination by external daughter elements may have taken place. The former is addressed by using multiple isotopic tests upon various minerals within the same sample to establish how much of the daughter products would have been initally present, in order for that variable to be fixed in the age equation.

There is a very good paper (actually written for Christians would you believe) which explains this very well in simple language. I refer you to page 4 of this paper:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/wiens.html#page%201

Yes. To add a small thing, one of the key findings is that when a specific isotope is captured in solid rock, it usually stays there because it can't get out. But the point about solid rock is important, because usually what you measure is the age when the rock formed. It could have been part of a lava flow, which means melted liquid rock, from which gaseous isotopes can easily escape. But once the rock solidifies, the radio isotope clock starts ticking.
There can still be challenges involved, because the kinds of minerals the rock contains depends on how hot it once was before it solidified. If the rock barely melted, chances are it contains various forms of crystals that didn't melt, and which therefore contain different isotope radios from the main rock body. Therefore to do a proper radiometric analysis you need make sure your rock doesn't contain these kinds of xenoliths. You'll not be surprised to find out that creationists often include the xenoliths in their dating attempts on purpose in order to give false pictures about the reliability of radiometric dating. In fact, an often cited example by creationists is the solidified lava flows from Mount St. Helens which erupted in the 1980's, but was subsequently dated to be millions of years old. That's because the lava flows contained xenoliths that hadn't completely melted in the lava, and therefore had skewed isotope ratios compared to the rest of the lava. Suffice it to say, scientists know how to look for and find xenoliths in their sample and therefore know when a sample is suitable for radiometric dating or not. Creationists won't tell you this.

Anyway you have molten rock, inside it there's a small piece of a radiactive isotope that slowly decays over time and escapes from the liquid rock. After some time the rock cools and solidifies, so there will be a certain amount of the starting isotope and a certain amount of decayproduct. If the rock is solid, the decayproduct can't escape and therefore you can work back through the ratios and calculate how much of the parent isotope there was in the rock when it first formed. From this you can then calculate the age using the decay-law of course.

Just another drive-by, I guess.

byofrcs wrote:

pcCoder wrote:But, we all know that radioactive decay occurred faster in the past, as was the speed of light. Just a little over 6000 years ago, the decay was many magnitudes higher than it is today, but in such a synchronous way that even today certain dating lines appear to line up when dating old rocks with Uranium, etc. Now don't start with that crap that faster decay or faster speed of light would result in a hotter planet. Scientists are now discovering dark matter and energy, an energy that seems to behave the opposite of regular energy. Regular matter has attraction towards each other (gravity). Dark matter has the opposite, and pushes matter apart, as is evidenced by our expanding universe. In the same way, even though the radioactive decay was many magnitudes higher in the past just before 6000 years ago, dark energy was also more prevalent and therefore prevented the super heating of our planet during the time that caused billions of years of apparent decay in just the first day when Gob created the earth.

Which is why God created Radon gas.

Wonderful, at last I've found another person that knows the mind of God. Given the claim you make is on quite an esoteric subject, you should be more easily capable to be able to answer a more mundane and simple question. Can you tell me why he gave my brother Schizophrenia?

Rigorous, but based on a big assumption: uniformitarianism.

Hobbes Choice wrote:

byofrcs wrote:

pcCoder wrote:But, we all know that radioactive decay occurred faster in the past, as was the speed of light. Just a little over 6000 years ago, the decay was many magnitudes higher than it is today, but in such a synchronous way that even today certain dating lines appear to line up when dating old rocks with Uranium, etc. Now don't start with that crap that faster decay or faster speed of light would result in a hotter planet. Scientists are now discovering dark matter and energy, an energy that seems to behave the opposite of regular energy. Regular matter has attraction towards each other (gravity). Dark matter has the opposite, and pushes matter apart, as is evidenced by our expanding universe. In the same way, even though the radioactive decay was many magnitudes higher in the past just before 6000 years ago, dark energy was also more prevalent and therefore prevented the super heating of our planet during the time that caused billions of years of apparent decay in just the first day when Gob created the earth.

Which is why God created Radon gas.

Wonderful, at last I've found another person that knows the mind of God. Given the claim you make is on quite an esoteric subject, you should be more easily capable to be able to answer a more mundane and simple question. Can you tell me why he gave my brother Schizophrenia?

He was being sarcastic.

Weaver wrote:

Hobbes Choice wrote:

byofrcs wrote:

pcCoder wrote:But, we all know that radioactive decay occurred faster in the past, as was the speed of light. Just a little over 6000 years ago, the decay was many magnitudes higher than it is today, but in such a synchronous way that even today certain dating lines appear to line up when dating old rocks with Uranium, etc. Now don't start with that crap that faster decay or faster speed of light would result in a hotter planet. Scientists are now discovering dark matter and energy, an energy that seems to behave the opposite of regular energy. Regular matter has attraction towards each other (gravity). Dark matter has the opposite, and pushes matter apart, as is evidenced by our expanding universe. In the same way, even though the radioactive decay was many magnitudes higher in the past just before 6000 years ago, dark energy was also more prevalent and therefore prevented the super heating of our planet during the time that caused billions of years of apparent decay in just the first day when Gob created the earth.

Which is why God created Radon gas.

Wonderful, at last I've found another person that knows the mind of God. Given the claim you make is on quite an esoteric subject, you should be more easily capable to be able to answer a more mundane and simple question. Can you tell me why he gave my brother Schizophrenia?

He was being sarcastic.

Me too.

Uniformitarianism is not an assumption. Tis a conclusion.

Fenrir wrote:Uniformitarianism is not an assumption. Tis a conclusion.

We might have had the arrogance to conclude it, but is remains an assumption.

And when Charles Lyell asserted it as a doctrine is was not obvious in any sense. On a godly world, and in a superlunary universe, in which God can assert any change or cause by divine will, the adoption of uniformitarianism was somewhat controversial, denying god is power and enclosing his will in the natural and deterministic world of the necessity of cause and effect.