Posted on 12/02/2017 12:19:56 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Planet Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first primitive forms of life appeared about 4 billion years ago. Natural selection did the rest, giving rise to species increasingly better adapted to their environment. Evidence, as they say, is overwhelming.
Or is it? Imagine planet Earth began its existence a mere 10,000 years ago, with all fossil records in place and carbon-14 well into decaying. From there on, however, evolution proceeded as scientists tell us. How’d you prove this story wrong?
You can’t.
I know it hurts. But hang on there, band aid follows below.
You can’t prove this story wrong because of the way our current theories work. These theories need two ingredients: 1) A configuration at any one moment in time, called the “initial condition,” and 2) A hypothesis for how this initial configuration changes with time, called the “evolution law.”
You can reverse the evolution law to figure out from the present configuration what happened back in time. But there’s no way you can tell whether an earlier configuration actually existed or whether they are just convenient stories. In theories of this type – and that includes all theories in physics – you can therefore never rule out that at some earlier time the universe evolved by an entirely different law – maybe because God or The Programmer assembled it – and was then suddenly switched on to reproduce our observations.
I often hear people argue such creation-stories are wrong because they can’t be falsified, but this makes about as much sense as organic salt. No, they aren’t not wrong, but they are useless.
Last week, I gave a talk at the department of History and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. My talk was followed by a “response” from a graduate student who evidently spent quite some time digging through this blog’s archives to classify my philosophy of science. I didn’t know I have one, but you never stop learning.
I learned that I am sometimes an anti-realist, meaning I don’t believe in the existence of an external reality. But I’d say I am neither a realist nor an anti-realist; I am agnostic about whether or not reality exists or what that even means. I don’t like to say science unveils “truths” about “reality” because this just brings on endless discussions about what is true and what is real. To me, science is about finding useful descriptions of the world, where by “useful” I mean they allow us to make predictions or explain already existing observations. The simpler an explanation, the more useful it is.
That scientific theories greatly simplify the stories we tell about the world is extremely important and embodies what we even mean by doing science. Forget all about Popperism and falsification, just ask what’s the most useful explanation. Saying that the world was created 10,000 years ago with all fossils in place is useless in terms of explaining the fossils. If you, on the other hand, extrapolate the evolution law back in time 4 billion years, you can start with a much simpler initial condition. That’s why it’s a better explanation. You get more out of less.
So there’s your band aid: Saying that the world was created 10,000 years ago with everything in place is unfalsifiable but also useless. It is quantifiably not simple: you need to put a lot of data into the initial condition. A much simpler, and thus scientifically better, explanation, is that planet Earth is ages old and Darwinian evolution did its task.
I’m not telling you this because I’ve suddenly developed an interest in Creationism. I am telling you this because I frequently encounter similar confusions surrounding the creation of the universe. This usually comes up in reaction to me pointing out that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with finetuned initial conditions if you do not have a probability distribution to quantify why the conditions are supposedly unlikely.
People often tell me that a finetuned initial condition doesn’t explain anything and thus isn’t scientific. Or, even weirder, that if you’d accept finetuned initial conditions this would turn science itself ad absurdum.
But this is just wrong. Finetuned initial conditions are equally good or bad explanations than not-finetuned ones. What is decisive isn’t whether the initial condition is finetuned, but whether it’s simple. According to current nomenclature, that is not the same thing. Absent a probability distribution, for example, an initial value of 1.0000000[00] for the curvature density parameter is scientifically equally good as an initial value of 0.0000001[00]… because both are equally simple. Current thinking among cosmologists, in contrast, has it that the latter is much worse than the former.
This confusion about what it means for a scientific theory to be useful sits deep and has caused a lot of cosmologists to cook up stories about the early universe based on highly questionable extrapolations into the past.
Take, for example, inflation, the idea that the early universe underwent a phase of rapid expansion. Inflation conjectures that before a certain moment in our universe’s history there was a different evolution law, assigned to a newly invented scalar field called the “inflaton.” But this conjecture is scientifically problematic because it construes up an evolution law in the past where we have no way of testing it. It’s not so different from saying that if you’d roll back time more than 10,000 years, you wouldn’t find planet Earth but god waving a magic wand or what have you.
A bold conjecture like inflation can only be justified if it leads to an actually simpler story, but on that the jury is out. Inflation was meant to solve several finetuning problems, but this doesn’t bring a simplification, it’s merely a beautification. The price to pay for this prettier theory, though, is that you now have at least one, if not several, new fields and their potentials, and some way to get rid of them again, which is arguably a complication of the story.
I wrote in a recent post that inflation seems justifiable after all because it provides a simple explanation for certain observed correlations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Well, that’s what I wrote some weeks ago, but now I am not so sure it is correct, thanks in no small part to a somewhat disturbing conversation I had with Niayesh Afshordi at Perimeter Institute.
The problem is that in cosmology there really aren’t a lot of data. There are but a few numbers. It’s a simple story already without inflation. And so, the current status is that I just don’t know whether or not inflation is a good theory. (But check back next month.)
Let me emphasize that the concordance model (aka ΛCDM) does not suffer from this problem. Indeed, it makes a good example for a scientifically successful theory. Here’s why.
For the concordance model, we seek the combination of dark matter, normal matter, and cosmological constant (as well as a handful other parameters) that best fit current observations. But what do we mean by best fit? We could use any combinations of parameters to get the dynamical law, and then use it to evolve the present day observations back in time. And regardless of what the law, there is always an initial state that will evolve into the present one.
In general, however, the initial state will be a mess, for example because the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (radiation) are not related in any obvious way to the structures we observe (matter). Whereas, if you pick the parameters correctly, these two types of structures belong together (higher density of matter corresponding to hotter spots in the cosmic microwave background). This match is a great simplification of the story – it explains something.
But the more you try to turn back time in the early universe, the harder it becomes to obey the scientific credo of storytelling, that you should seek only simpler explanations, not more complicated ones. The problem is the story we presently have is already very simple. This really is my biggest issue with eternal inflation and the multiverse or cyclic cosmologies, bounces, and so on and so forth. They are stories, all right, but they aren’t simplifying anything. They just add clutter, like the programmer that set up our universe so that it looks the way it looks.
On some days I hope something scientific will eventually come out of these stories. But today I am just afraid we have overstepped the limits of science.
One approach to radioactive dating is to measure the amount of C14 as well as the quantity of the nuclear decay products. The current quantity of the radioisotope + the decay products tells you the original quantity of the radioisotope. Once you know the original and the current quantities, you can figure out how many half lives have elapsed.
Much C14 dating is done by comparing the ratio of C14 to C12. That also gives a good idea of the elapsed time since the organism died.
C14 is constantly being created through interactions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere, and the quantity of C14 ingested by living organisms is proportional to their size. Once they die, they no longer ingest C14. The rate of formation of C14 is almost constant. It probably varies slightly with the activity of the sun, but since the suns activity also cycles, the variations are evened out over time.
The Khan on-line academy has a couple of lessons on C14 dating. Once you do the math yourself, you get a much better understanding of the methodology.
Just because it happened a long time ago, doesn’t mean it took a long time to happen.
Uranium is embedded deep within rock formations, not neccessarily affected by lightning.
It was here before me. It will be here after. Aside from that, it is a curiosity.
This may be of some interest to you.
The Age of the Universe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3051495/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576941/posts
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/t-rex-blood.html
https://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/
Retarded is making that comment and not looking up the articles yourself.
“Articles” written about something does not make that something any less retarded.
When something dies it becomes isolated from c14 uptake - dead things don't eat. So the steady state level of c14 begins to decay at the ~12,000 year half life. An artifact with half the environmental norm of c14 is 12k years old. One with 1/4 the steady state is 24k years old etc.
Ya beat Me to it!
I was gonna Post cut it open and then count the Rings.
I can’t personally PROVE that anything existed before October, 1948.
However, I willingly rely on those older than I to be telling the truth about things that happened before I was born.-—Just as I assume that my kids and grandkids believe me when I tell them about things before their time.
I have always held to the possibility that God with His infinite sense of humor could have created the world 6,000 years ago and just made everything LOOK old. (And I’m a retired nuclear physicist who should know better)
Take a walk through the Grand Canyon.
But leave your Kool-Aid back at the Rim
TBH, the ending of the Battlestar Galactica reboot is the best origin story for Earth’s human race. ;-)
And I am a lowly engineer with a Doctorate in Theology.
Would you be willing to forego a controllable test scenario for very high rates of predictability?
My general position on meteorology is that if one has the same success rate as great baseball hitters they are considered successful. 0.300 is good enough for both fields. ;-)
My state-side VP boss tried to buck up my hesitance in making executive decisions. He said to think like a quarterback, where anything over fifty percent pass completion was good. I thought of it as making irrevocable decisions based on insufficient information. I later learned that this is the art of business.
Painful to see but incontrovertible proof.
There are however many(most) science fields that still have unknowns. My back fence neighbor is a “gold” geologist. He is very good and highly sought out for investigations of mining site potential yield. He will admit after few drinks that geology is not an exact science. Sure he can lab test specimens but when it comes to some big issues like “how did this form - exactly” that there are some assumptions.
Meteorology suffers from over mediazation. I quit watching TV for weather forecasts, I go straight to my Indian Weather Rock or the weather service.
Since I retired, weather forecasts are only attended to when hurricanes are imminent. Now, I just walk outside and do what needs doing, and if it’s raining, just walk back in. LOL
Not enough Carbon-14 (radiocarbon, C-14, 14C) would be created by lightning to significantly alter 14C dating, however, there are significant fluctuations in the normal 14C creation process (perhaps due to fluctuations in solar radiation or cosmic rays - by which the vast majority of 14C is generated - or other factors like ‘nearby’ novae or supernovae). So there are plenty of reasons to distrust that dating technique, but lightning isn’t a big enough player compared to the Sun to really matter.
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