Radiocarbon Dating Dinosaurs?

http://www.worldbydesign.org/research/c14dating/datingdinosaurs.html ^

[stormer]

The point is, when you measure something, you need to know if your measuring device is capable of providing an usable result. Carbon dating is can only measure within a certain window. When using that tool and measuring things beyond its capacity, the results will be invalid. That’s not to say you didn’t measure anything, but that the results have no meaningful value.

[tacticalogic]

Assuming I have been there as long as the rock has might be reasonable in either case. However assuming that the rock started with uranium and no daughter elements of uranium at that point of time seems to be the issue, not the location of the rock or its proximity to a particular dead thing.

As I said earlier, it is possible for a given sample to form with exactly the right daughter elements present in exactly the right ratios to present a false age reading, but it is irrational to belive that they all did.

Just having daughter elements present is not enough. They must be present in the proper ratios to be consistent for a specific age, or amount of decay time. Having an excess of one would show up as being inconsistent with the existing proportions of the others.

[woofie]

Testing is hard on a dinosaur’s self esteem

[Tread EZ]

Also, I do not think that if we should find that some dinosaurs existed only a few thousands of years ago it would necessarily be a miracle

Then you do not understand science at all. We would literally have to throw out whole branches of science starting with geology. As a mathemetician, you would have to throw out statistics too.

[AndyTheBear]

Then you do not understand science at all. We would literally have to throw out whole branches of science starting with geology. As a mathemetician, you would have to throw out statistics too.

Oh bull. Don't back up weak assertions with more desperate ones. Its just silly, and never convinces an objective observer.

[AndyTheBear]

As I said earlier, it is possible for a given sample to form with exactly the right daughter elements present in exactly the right ratios to present a false age reading, but it is irrational to belive that they all did.

Oh heck! I would not assume a magic eight ball was always false either. I am trying to see how this method is better than using a magic eight ball. And if we have no idea how the ratios between isotopes were when the dino bones came into proximity of the rock, then I don't see how the current ratio between isotopes is any help at all.

[AndyTheBear]

The point is, when you measure something, you need to know if your measuring device is capable of providing an usable result. Carbon dating is can only measure within a certain window. When using that tool and measuring things beyond its capacity, the results will be invalid. That’s not to say you didn’t measure anything, but that the results have no meaningful value.

Yes, well according to what I have read the acceptible window in the case of Carbon Dating is roughly up to 50,000 years or so with respect to enough C14 being around to be detectable. All the readings on dino bones I have read about have been within this.

[Cronos]

I believe in the literal words in Genesis. All of this dating of dinosaurs is sheer speculation

[Cronos]

:=D

[tacticalogic]

And if we have no idea how the ratios between isotopes were when the dino bones came into proximity of the rock, then I don't see how the current ratio between isotopes is any help at all.

Go back a look at the decay chart, and imagine what is happening there. Decay begins at the top of the chain. The daughter elemnt from that is created and it begins it's own decay, then the next, and the next. All different half-lives, accumulating and decaying a different rates.

Also realize than any daughter elements originally present are also decaying, until eventually the only daughter elements present are from the decay of the element at the top of the chain. All must be present in specific ratios relative to their half-lives if the rock is old enough for those original daughter elements to have decay out to a stable state.

Uranium ore is not sedimentary rock. It is brought up from the Earth's interior and deposited by volcanic action. In it's molten state, rock tends to separate out into areas of different elements according to their weigh. This is how we come to have veins of ore and different types of rock, rather than just one homogenous kind of rock.

When a given sample (a sample being a small enough piece to break down completely in the lab and determine how much of what is in it), it may have the parent element and some, or none of it's various daughter elements present.

Given that, and the knowlege of the decay rates and the equipment to do the testing, you find that in samples gathered from all over the world, in no case can you find any that have rations so out of balance that it could only have been formed in the last several thousand years, and in fact they all have ratios consistent with billions of years of decay, can you logically deduce what kind of time frames we're dealing with?

[Agamemnon]

I "walked straight into" an unsupported assertion that it was impossible for radiometric dating to be objective.

A scientist who uses a test article as a standard rather than an objectively qualified standard can make the "results" of his "assay" say anything he wants them to say and draw any conclusion that he wants to make simply on the basis of his chosen bias, because it is not measured against an unbiased, objective standard.

And that's just not good science.

Credible scientists understand the value of data acquired, measured, and evaluated objectively. Subjectivity has little to no scientific value, since it is inherently biased.

Radiometric dating techniques used to "date" artifacts outside of the interval that a qualifiable and formally qualified standard may measure can render only subjectively interpretable "results."

Radiometric dating utilizing U-235 may be used to objectively measure rates of decay for the last ~70 years, provided that a qualifiable and formally qualified standard was available ~70 years ago and there is also a qualifiable and formally qualified standard which is available today, and is suitable for that purpose within a credible statistical confidence interval.

Any use of U-235 for dating an article presume-ably older than 70 years is a purely subjective measure.

Radiometric dating in most instances and for most purposes it is commonly used today provides only subjectively interpretable results.

Even the RATE project couldn't reconcile that evidence with a "young Earth" conclusion.

You are not familiar enough with the evidence of the RATE project to be able to comment.

Why don't we hear just a little bit from the lead researcher on the RATE study shall we?

per Russell Humphreys, PhD

Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic "ages" to a few years.

Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay.[1] "Squashed" Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time scale.[2] "Orphan" Polonium-218 radiohalos, having no evidence of their mother elements, imply accelerated nuclear decay and very rapid formation of associated minerals. [3,4]

Too much helium in minerals.

Uranium and thorium generate helium atoms as they decay to lead. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research showed that such helium produced in zircon crystals in deep, hot Precambrian granitic rock has not had time to escape.[5] Though the rocks contain 1.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay products, newly-measured rates of helium loss from zircon show that the helium has been leaking for only 6,000 (± 2000) years.[6] This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for episodes of greatly accelerated decay rates of long half-life nuclei within thousands of years ago, compressing radioisotope timescales enormously."

[1] Gentry, R. V., Radioactive halos, Annual Review of Nuclear Science 23:347-362 (1973).

[2] Gentry, R. V. , W. H. Christie, D. H. Smith, J. F. Emery, S. A. Reynolds, R. Walker, S. S. Christy, and P. A. Gentry, Radiohalos in coalified wood: new evidence relating to time of uranium introduction and coalification, Science 194:315-318 (15 October 1976).

[3] Gentry, R. V., Radiohalos in a radiochronological and cosmological perspective, Science 184:62-66 (5 April 1974).

[4] Snellling, A. A. and M. H. Armitage, Radiohalos: a tale of three granitic plutons, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (2003), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 243-267

[5] Gentry, R. V., G. L. Glish, and E. H. McBay, Differential helium retention in zircons: implications for nuclear waste containment, Geophysical Research Letters 9(10) :1129-1130 (October 1982).

[6.] Humphreys, D. R, et al., Helium diffusion age of 6,000 years supports accelerated nuclear decay, Creation Research Society Quarterly 41(1):1-16 (June 2004).

Seems that where the conclusions of the lead researcher on the RATE studies is concerned, you've walked straight into a mass-balance problem too.

[Agamemnon]

* Correction : U-238

[tacticalogic]

A scientist who uses a test article as a standard rather than an objectively qualified standard can make the "results" of his "assay" say anything he wants them to say and draw any conclusion that he wants to make simply on the basis of his chosen bias, because it is not measured against an unbiased, objective standard.

If that were true, he could run a piece of calcium through a mass spectrometer and make it come out gold.

You talk a lot about "unbiased objective standards" and make a lot of proclamations about who does and doesn't use them without ever saying what you think is an unbiased objective standard is. It's a pile of rhetorical FUD waved around like it means something.

[tacticalogic]

Uranium and thorium generate helium atoms as they decay to lead. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research showed that such helium produced in zircon crystals in deep, hot Precambrian granitic rock has not had time to escape.[5] Though the rocks contain 1.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay products, newly-measured rates of helium loss from zircon show that the helium has been leaking for only 6,000 (± 2000) years.[6] This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for episodes of greatly accelerated decay rates of long half-life nuclei within thousands of years ago, compressing radioisotope timescales enormously."

Your idea of "good science" here is to take an anomolous reading produced from a very specific set of circumstances, hypothesize about what it might mean and submit that hypothesis should be accepted over the massive amount of evidence from other samples that does not support that hypothesis.

[tacticalogic]

.[6] This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for episodes of greatly accelerated decay rates of long half-life nuclei within thousands of years ago, compressing radioisotope timescales enormously."

And since there's seems to be a least one person following this thread with the intention of learning something, what the people that post little tidbits like this and try to make it appear that the scientists are engaged in some kind of grand conspiracy to cover up this data don't tell you is that if the kind of accelerated decay they're talking about actually had happened in the last few thaousand years, right now the Earth would still be millions of years away from cooling off from it enough to even have a crust.

[Agamemnon]

If that were true, he could run a piece of calcium through a mass spectrometer and make it come out gold.

You clearly don't understand the operational theory of mass spec.

You have just affirmed my point with that statement. Subjective "science" is about as credible as the alchemy that only a pretend-chemist might imagine.

You talk a lot about "unbiased objective standards" and make a lot of proclamations about who does and doesn't use them without ever saying what you think is an unbiased objective standard is/

No competent industrial chemist wonders what is meant by the term, "objective standard." What you don't seem to understand is the term "objective." Either that or you're just not much of a chemist.

Seems that you need to take a rudimentary course in quantitative analysis and method validation.

In the case of uranium, no objective standard can possibly exist at a time before ~70 years ago, because formal quantitative studies related to radio decay are only that old. The theory of radio-activity itself is little more than 100 years old.

If you do not understand the most elementary principles of quantitative analysis, you simply don't know what you are talking about.

[Agamemnon]

Your idea of "good science" here is to take an anomolous [sic.] reading produced from a very specific set of circumstances, hypothesize about what it might mean and submit that hypothesis should be accepted over the massive amount of evidence from other samples that does not support that hypothesis.

Anomalous, you say? Are you challenging the methodology used in the Journal of Geophysical Research citation, and if so on what basis?

Again, argumentatively speaking I produced an accounting of data as interpreted by a renowned Los Alamos scientist from a study that you don't happen to like, and simply on the basis that it confounds your premise, all you seem able to produce is some kneejerk response which only appeals to sense of false consensus.

If you had a study which actually refuted the findings of the Journal of Geophysical Research one would have expected you to produce it. But you didn't. And I suspect it's because you can't. Far easier it is to appeal to false consensus -- it's the intellectually lazy man's way out.

It only stands to reason I'd trust the perspective of an accomplished scientist like Humphreys as opposed to some subjective unsupported opinions of a demonstrably scientifically un-accomplished thinker like yourself.

That's not science, but then again, that's how most evolutionists play the game.

If you were much of a scientist at all you'd know that objective science makes every effort to minimize the bias posed by variables. But again, it comes as no surprise that evolution bases its premise on the happenstance of alleged "favorable" variabilites (i.e., "mutations").

Subjectivity is at the heart of all the non-science espoused by evolutionists. Since evolution is the premise which defines your world view your perspective in this discussion is similarly unsurprising.

[Agamemnon]

...to make it appear that the scientists are engaged in some kind of grand conspiracy....

Unaccomplished thinkers such as yourself sadly, are too often paranoid as well, even as you painfully demonstrate here.

[tacticalogic]

In the case of uranium, no objective standard can possibly exist at a time before ~70 years ago, because formal quantitative studies related to radio decay are only that old. The theory of radio-activity itself is little more than 100 years old.

Why not? We don't define the laws of physics, we only observe them in operation. You don't seem to have any problem at all posting research claiming evidence of accelerated decay several thousand years ago that nobody ovbsrved.

[tacticalogic]

Perjoratives an epithets are not reason.