Posted on 08/17/2012 11:21:22 AM PDT by fishtank
More Fluctuations Found in Isotopic Clocks
by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Aug. 17, 2012
Age-dating a rock using its radioactive isotopes only works by assuming that the rate at which that "clock" ticks was constant in the past and essentially identical to that in the present. Not long ago, scientists discovered excess helium in crystals1 and "orphaned" polonium radiohalos,2 both of which imply that the decay rates of isotopes commonly used to date earth rocks were dramatically accelerated in the past. Even today, researchers are finding small but significant changes in isotope decay rates, and these add credibility to the idea that isotopic processes were once very different from today's processes.
One standard isotopic clock system uses decaying uranium isotopes. Uranium spontaneously and slowly decays to lead (Pb on the Periodic Table of Elements). Two different uranium isotopes, 235U and 238U, decay into lead at different rates. Geologists assume that the ratio between these is constant and known, giving a convenient shortcut to uranium dating, which only requires that the two uranium amounts be measured.
Of course, this shortcut age-dating method assumes that 238U and 235U have decayed at today's rates throughout the past. It also assumes that the relative amounts of the two have been constant. Physics Today editor Johanna Miller recently wrote, "Standard Pb-Pb dating protocol uses a 238U/235U ratio of 137.88 with zero uncertainty. But several recent studies have cast doubt on that number."3
Miller cited one experiment that found that the uranium ratio (the heavier 238U to lighter weight 235U) is not constant. The study authors wrote, "Our observations have a direct impact on the U-series and U-Th-Pb chronometers," meaning that dates "determined" by uranium decay will need revision.4
Yet another study reported natural variation in the uranium ratio. These authors suggested that natural processes separate the isotopes from one another and skew the ratio, thereby skewing the ages gained by the assumption that the ratio was constant. These authors wrote, "The discovery that 238U/235U varies in nature also has implications for the precision and accuracy of U-Pb dating. The total observed range in U isotope compositions would produce variations in 207Pb/206Pb ages of young U-bearing minerals of up to 3 Ma [million years old], and up to 2 Ma for minerals that are 3 billion years old."5
Two to three million years are not a huge part of three billion. So, adjusting already-published dates to reflect these new and larger error margins will not displace billion-year-old age assignments. However, if today's comparatively tame natural processes affect isotope ratios, then ancient and much more violent processes could have affected those ratios and rates much more, just as the helium in crystals and orphaned radiohalos imply.
Another isotope system used for dating, though more rarely that uranium, is that which occurs when a radioactive samarium isotope decays to the element neodymium. A 2012 Science report re-measured samarium's decay rate, finding that it occurs only about 66 percent as fast as "the currently used value" for age dating.6 This is a huge discrepancy! It means that all published samarium-dated rock ages need to be re-evaluated.
In addition, Purdue University just applied for a patent on a solar flare warning system that relies on ways in which the earth-sun relationship somehow alters nuclear decay rates. Purdue News reports that "Advance warning could allow satellite and power grid operators to take steps to minimize impact and astronauts to shield themselves from potentially lethal radiation emitted during solar storms."7 Their invention would rely on detecting changes in the rate of manganese 54 decaying to chromium 54. Researchers observed the decay rate changes occurring about a day prior to solar flares.
Even carbon dating is in hot water. Scientists typically use this method to age-date carbon-containing objects thought to be only tens of thousands of years old. The relevant radioactive carbon isotope (14C) decays so fast that it should no longer exist in earth materials that are a million or more years old.8 Recently, researchers measured elevated levels of 14C in correlated tree rings and attributed the spike to an unidentified "massive cosmic event."9 If natural processes did alter carbon isotope ratios, then why trust dates that assume the ratios were never altered?
Science shows that isotopic clocks are not all trustworthy.10 The isotope ratios and rates upon which they depend are variable, even on today's comparatively calm earth surface. During the tumultuous Flood, when immeasurable quantities of mantle material were ejected onto earth's surface and water potentially contaminated everything, isotopic clocks ticked much, much faster.11
References
Humphreys, D.R. 2005. Young Helium Diffusion Age of Zircons Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay. In Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, Vol. 2. Vardiman, L. et al., eds. El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research and Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society.
Gentry, R.V. 1974. Radiohalos in a Radiochronological and Cosmolocial Perspective. Science. 184 (4132): 62-66.
Miller, J. 2012. Time to reset isotopic clocks? Physics Today. 65 (6): 20-21.
Stirling, C.H. et al. 2007. Low-temperature isotopic fractionation of uranium. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 264 (1): 208-225.
Weyer, S. et al. 2008. Natural fractionation of 238U/235U. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 72 (2): 345-359.
Kinoshita, N. et al. 2012. A Shorter 146Sm Half-Life Measured and Implications for 146Sm-142Nd Chronology in the Solar System. Science. 335 (6076): 1614-1617.
Venere, E. New system could predict solar flares, give advance warning. Purdue News. Posted on purdue.edu, August 13, 2012. Despite this, 90 instances of C-14 in supposedly million-year-old earth materials were reviewed and 10 more were presented in Baumgardner, J.R. et al. 2003. Measurable 14C in Fossilized Organic Materials: Confirming the Young Earth Creation-Flood Model. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism. R.L. Ivey, ed. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., 127-142.
Lovett, R. A. Mysterious radiation burst recorded in tree rings. Nature news. Posted on nature.com June 3, 2012, accessed August 10, 2012.
Austin, S.A. 2005. Do Radioisotope Clocks Need Repair? Testing the Assumptions of Isochron Dating Using K-Ar, Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and Pb-Pb Isotopes. In Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, Vol. 2.Vardiman, L.et al., eds. El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research and Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society. When heated to plasma, bare nuclei of rhenium radioisotopes decay a billion times faster than normal. See Bosch, F. et al. 1996. Observation of Bound-State β- Decay of Fully Ionized 187Re: 187Re- 187Os Cosmochronometry. Physical Review Letters. 77 (26): 5190-5193.
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on August 17, 2012.
Sister BooP you nailed it ..... YET AGAIN...
You have a “habit” of doing that...
[ So . . . Why ask me? ( ^8 } ]
I suspect, because you’re not as dumb as you look... d;-)...
I thought he was being sarcastic, actually. But then I was having a Hebrew moment ... studying my Hebrew don’tchaknow.
Thank you for your kind words, dear brother ‘Pipe!
To the same degree they are joking by putting him on that list posted at 32.
Anything using DNA is incapable of staying the same. DNA cannot replicate without error.
Is a coyote not a coyote if it has 5% wolf ancestry? It can BE just fine without fitting nicely into one neat category.
Humans want things to be clearly defined. Nature is usually not so obliging.
I find you arrogant in thinking that I have not read every word of the Bible AND that doing so would change my acceptance of science.
The Pope is a renowned Biblical scholar and accepts evolution. Would you suggest he should read the Bible until his opinion changes?
I have no idea whether Newton was a Young Earth Creationist. But I have no doubt at all that he was a Creationist — in the sense that he believed that God created the Universe, that God is "the Lord of Life [Who Is eternally] with His Creatures."
That latter characterization indicates that Newton believed that God not only created the Universe, but is constantly, eternally "in contact" with it.
And a further thought that touches on MrB's earlier observation: It was Newton's understanding that the intelligibility of the Universe owes exclusively to the "fact" that it is the product of the will and mind of the eternal God. It could have no order except as the manifestation of the Logos of divine creation. And if it had no such order, then scientific discovery would be impossible.
Like Einstein (who loved Newton), Newton's motivation as a scientist was to discover the laws that God built into the world.
So I think it's pretty clear that Newton would have rejected Darwin's theory, had he ever heard about it. Which, of course, he hadn't.
And yet in this matter, it appears you want Nature to "oblige" you, by conforming to your ideological commitments.
You a mindreader now? It has nothing to do with me that nature often doesn’t conform to fitting in well defined boxes. If you want to argue that nature always does or should I can oblige you. If you want to make the argument about me, as apparently you do, I am uninterested.
Indeed, I aver that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences is like God's copyright notice on the cosmos.
God's Name is I AM.
That's probably true.
But I would think the relevant question would be whether he would have rejected radiometric dating, since that is the subject of the article. I don't think an assumption that because he would reject one means he would have to reject the other is valid.
Also keep in mind, “steady decay rate” is only ONE of many assumptions one must make in order to “date” rocks radiometrically. Three others are assumption of “initial” state, contamination of the sample, or leaching out of the elements/atoms in question.
For instance, although general relativity and the inflationary model are widely accepted by scientists we rarely see age of the universe measurements supplemented by the phrase "from our present space/time coordinates."
[ “Quantum moment” has a nice ring to it, dear hosepipe, especially when thinking about quantum entanglement. ]
Quantum “Balls of String(S)” better called “matter”...
Is an interesting subject.. agreed..
In my “vision” that I had, I saw it as (A)”Designated matter/energy” and (B)”UN-designated energy/matter”...
(A) being balls of strings...
(B) just strings.. whatever they are..
Whoever gave me the “vision” seems to know.. I choose to call “it” the Holy Spirit(giver of visions) but any name will do since the Holy Spirit has no name anyway..
Seems to me the money concept is, who designates and UN-designates “stuff”.. AND if stuff can be designated From un-designated what is the un-designated(stuff) <<- “Dark Matter???”..
Neither is that my assumption at all, dear tacticalogic!
The two are not at all directly comparable. One — Darwin's theory — is based on a speculation regarding the historical evolution of the biota which some people find "intuitive" and "emotionally satisfying."
Seems to me this has more to do with proving Nietzsche's dictum — "God is dead" — is correct than with showing how species actually evolve. Plus it goes without saying that historical events are precisely those which are not known and cannot be known by means of direct observation. But genuine science must stick to the latter.
To the extent that radiometric dating relies on direct observation, and can be validated by replicable experiments, Newton probably would have approved of it.
But bear in mind that Newton had no knowledge whatever of relativistic and quantum effects that bear on the behavior of material bodies. And it is also true — as Alamo-Girl and MrB have already pointed out — that a fundamental presupposition WRT radioactive decay rates is that they are "steady" and uniform over time. But if actual observations indicate that this may not be the case — the thesis of the article at the top of this thread — then on what principle does this presupposition rest?
Newton's sublime work describes the behavior of material bodies at all scales, which he expressed in terms of mechanical action. But he was the very first to say that any mechanistic system would generate and accumulate errors over time, which would tend to "derange" the systems so described. Implicit in Newton's work is the idea of Final Cause, otherwise known as purpose or goals operating in Nature: For Newton allowed that God himself would have to step in every now and then to set matters aright again, to restore the order of material systems over time.
Compare this with the Darwinist belief that biological systems evolve by chance + selection. Looking to the logic of Newton's reasoning, it would appear that he would say instead that living systems evolve according to their Limit (the Aristotelian Final Cause) and not ever by "pure, blind chance," as Jacques Monod put it.
Anyhoot, back to the problem of radiometric dating, and its expectation that decay rates are steady and therefore predictable. This may not be the case.
A similar problem for physics these days is that, even though the expectation is the expansion of the universe proceeds at a steady rate, recent observational data indicate that this expansion has actually accelerated in "recent" times. Which tends to show that the expectation of a steady expansion rate has no basis in observational fact. Likewise, recently observed anomalies in the behavior of material objects in the vicinity of the event horizon of black holes do not conform with expectations (scientific predictions).
It seems to me that physics itself has bumped up hard against its own self-imposed limitations, the most critical being the banishment of Final Cause from its field of study, which was arguably the entire point of Francis Bacon's scientific revolution.
Science retains the other three Aristotelian causes: Formal, material, efficient. But Final Cause — again, which deals with purposes, goals, limits in Nature — is totally gone from its permissible methods.
In my very humble opinion, science has to being back Final Cause if it expects to make any further progress. It seems to be at a dead end without it.
It seems to me that issues of relativistic and quantum behavior could be further illuminated by the reintroduction of Final Cause to science.
JMHO FWIW
Thanks so much for writing, dear tacticalogic!
Just a note: radiometric dating assumes a large enough ‘gaggle’ of atoms such that the unpredictable decay of individual atoms is averaged out for the ‘gaggle’ as an average rate of decay. Of course ‘sampling’ can have an effect, as in where in the ‘gaggle’ the sample is taken and the localized effects on ‘neighborhoods’ in the gaggle.
Dear 'Pipe, my brother in Christ, I take the "vision" you had as further evidence in support of my own thesis about the fundamental duality implicit in the natural world, which consists of: (a) The "designated" component — that which eternally does not change (e.g., Being, Truth, Logos); and (b) the "undesignated," or "free" component — that which is capable of changing (all existent natural systems, which have no real Being "in their own right," but only as participants in divine Being, and thus, though "undesignated" in advance, still must behave according to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God").
Eric Voegelin commented about the "indefeasible integrity of the [human] soul." I think you're proving him right there, too.
Thank you, dear brother in Christ, for sharing your marvelous insights!
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