I don’t understand why changes in decay rates are important.
They say something about the sun and about the elements but I can’t tell what it is on first glance.
Wouldn’t carbon 14 dating issues be related?
We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields).The results show that it's not true; what the connection is isn't clear; it's possible that the correlation (which appears to be cut and dried) will lead to something new in the way of understanding. Of course, it could be swept under the rug, mentioned in passing in undergrad courses, then ignored for a few more decades. :')
They have assumed to be constant... but if they aren't a lot of assumptions are going to have to be changed.
Consider, what if C14's half life of 5730 years were suddenly changed to 1000 years? All of the dating done with the assumption that every 5730 years there would be half the C14 there was before would be wrong and things dated with that technique would be far younger than assumed.
Or worst case scenario: Plutonium's 24,000 year half life is suddenly cut to 2,400 years and 100 (I think that's about the right ratio) times the number of Plutonium Atoms fission in an Atomic bomb... and the critical mass is suddenly 10 times smaller?
Can you say BOOM?
For every bomb in our inventory...
That would be bad.