Posted on 09/16/2010 3:35:58 AM PDT by decimon
Recent puzzling observations of tiny variations in nuclear decay rates have led some to question the science of using decay rates to determine the relative ages of rocks and organic materials. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with researchers from Purdue University, the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Wabash College, tested the hypothesis that solar radiation might affect the rate at which radioactive elements decay and found no detectable effect.
Atoms of radioactive isotopes are unstable and decay over time by shooting off particles at a fixed rate, transmuting the material into a more stable substance. For instance, half the mass of carbon-14, an unstable isotope of carbon, will decay into nitrogen-14 over a period of 5,730 years. The unswerving regularity of this decay allows scientists to determine the age of extremely old organic materials—such as remains of Paleolithic campfires—with a fair degree of precision. The decay of uranium-238, which has a half-life of nearly 4.5 billion years, enabled geologists to determine the age of the Earth.
Many scientists, including Marie and Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford and George de Hevesy, have attempted to influence the rate of radioactive decay by radically changing the pressure, temperature, magnetic field, acceleration, or radiation environment of the source. No experiment to date has detected any change in rates of decay.
Recently, however, researchers at Purdue University observed a small (a fraction of a percent), transitory deviation in radioactive decay at the time of a huge solar flare. Data from laboratories in New York and Germany also have shown similarly tiny deviations over the course of a year. This has led some to suggest that Earth's distance from the sun, which varies during the year and affects the planet's exposure to solar neutrinos, might be related to these anomalies.
Researchers from NIST and Purdue tested this by comparing radioactive gold-198 in two shapes, spheres and thin foils, with the same mass and activity. Gold-198 releases neutrinos as it decays. The team reasoned that if neutrinos are affecting the decay rate, the atoms in the spheres should decay more slowly than the atoms in the foil because the neutrinos emitted by the atoms in the spheres would have a greater chance of interacting with their neighboring atoms. The maximum neutrino flux in the sample in their experiments was several times greater than the flux of neutrinos from the sun. The researchers followed the gamma-ray emission rate of each source for several weeks and found no difference between the decay rate of the spheres and the corresponding foils.
According to NIST scientist emeritus Richard Lindstrom, the variations observed in other experiments may have been due to environmental conditions interfering with the instruments themselves.
"There are always more unknowns in your measurements than you can think of," Lindstrom says.
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* R.M. Lindstrom, E. Fischbach, J.B. Buncher, G.L. Greene, J.H. Jenkins, D.E. Krause, J.J. Mattes and A. Yue. Study of the dependence of 198Au half-life on source geometry. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. doi:10.1016/j.nima.2010.06.270
Deja vu (again) ping.
So, what’s the consensus on the 6,000-year human existence model?
I though this was about some form of internet dating I hadn’t heard of.
In all seriousness, it can call into question the outer end of radiometric calculations. But probably in the neighborhood of making the error margin plus or minus a hundred million years more than it already is.
And you still have all of those geological formations that have to be explained by more than fanciful attempts at science.
The “less-than-one percent” variation was not repeatable in the controlled experiment, per the article, however.
Are geological formation processes reliable in dating history?
In other words, the level of change in radiometric decay would have to be astronomically more rapid to even begin to move the age of the Earth to the same zip code as 6,000 years.
That said IMO it's not so much a problem in the variation of radioactive decay but a possible variance in Time itself, especially at different points across the universe.
So would that also change the very nature of geological processes that formed basement rock, deformed it, infused it with igneous intrusions, laid sedimentary rock on top of it, tilted that, eroded it, and then laid thousands of feet on top of that? As inthe Grand Canyon?
And that's a rather simple geological landscape compared to other locales.
C-14 and other radioisotope dating techniques now provide more evidence for a young earth than an old one. It's now the old-earthers that are forever excusing the results and crying 'contamination' and so forth because they can't accept the raw data. Let's stop the pretense that they believe in 'science.'
I should clarify that my ire is not directed at the scientists involved here, but at the media who cite overarching ‘reliability’ because of one small aspect of the factors affecting geochronometry. The significance of these results merely shows that radisotope decay is not some sort of fundamental, unalterable constant - but the scientific community has known that for years outside of the propaganda channels.
Uh, yeah, sure. C-14 is used for dating organic objects in the ranges of thousands of years ago. Try tacking K-Ar dating and get back to me. As well as the rate of decay of U-238.
You distort the science, yet say the old-Earth folks are the ones who aren't serious about addressing such?
Let's see how much that constant would have to change for a young Earth.
90 percent change - Earth is 450 million years old.
99 percent change - Earth is 45 million years old.
99.99 percent - Earth is 4.5 million years old.
99.999 percent - Earth is 450,000 years old.
99.9999 percent - Earth is 45,000 years old.
So in other words, the rate of fluctuation in radiometric decay would have to be greater than 99.9999 percent to get to a 6,000 year old Earth.
Not back to 4.5 billion years, too much of the geological record from the early days of the Earth has been eradicated by natural processes of erosion and tectonics.
But it definitely correlates, reasonably well, to the inferred ages of the Phanerozoic formations (Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic).
Have you all considered that the creator of time could have made a million year old earth six thousand years ago?
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