Just as a general question to you all. Have any of you any evidence for the peer reviewed studies that established the half lives of the following parent isotopes:
Potassium 40
Rubidium-87
Uranium-238
Uranium-235
I have battled to obtain the studies that measure the decay rates of these parent isotopes and any direction in this regard would be appreciated.
Iâm not quite sure you got the summary that @jammycakes posted. Letâs take a look at this graph:
So this compares two things. There is the geological slip rate modern-day GPS measurements. The geological slip rate is related to the rate at which continental plates spread over time as well as radiometric dates which increase the farther away you get from any particular fault. They are proportional to each other in exactly the same ratio as modern day GPS measurements. That tells us, despite the fact that there have been various earthquakes and other phenomena over the past 20 million years, this is essentially as good as proof thatâs the present day rates have been constant over the past 20 million years.
You havenât paid the slightest bit of attention to a thing Iâve said here, @Mindspawn. As I have already pointed out, the agreement between radiometric ages and continental drift is not an assumption. It is a test of assumptions. Do you or do you not understand the difference?
In any case, these are not âallegedâ correlations. They are observed and measured correlations.
Youâve also missed another important point here, @Mindspawn. Small variations of a few percent do NOT justify claims that much larger errors on the scale of six orders of magnitude could exist. Measurement simply does not work like that, and if you donât understand why, you need to go back to primary school and learn some basic mathematics. Honestly, the difference between thousands and billions, and the difference between five percent and a factor of a million, are things that kids get taught in school by the time that theyâre eleven.
In any case, if some kind of unknown factor ever had had that large an effect in the past, we would see clear evidence of it. We do not.
âFundamental constants are a cornerstone of our physical laws.â
Sure constants are a cornerstone, but one has to kept an open mind regarding the evidence whether the constant in question is a fundamental constant or not.
I acknowledged the correlation, and yet pointed out that the Japanese tsunami is actual evidence that catastrophe can occur , not all plates move at the same rate, even if those appear to.
Not only that, but any vaguely proportional acceleration of both the decay rate and tectonic movement would create that same graph. Itâs not as if the correlations are perfectly linear, they are vaguely linear.
âSmall variations of a few percent do NOT justify claims that much larger errors on the scale of six orders of magnitude could exist.â
They do justify claims that larger errors could exist. When the effect is unknown, then one just does not know whether it can have an exponential influence in history. Until the cause/effect is established, scientists (and you) are basing the constancy on hopeful guesswork that the whole premise of huge timeframes according to Darwinian expectations are true. .
Hereâs one quick example of a 19 year long experiment:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001670377790206X
Iâm done here for now Wade. The whole paper was about thousands of measurements of different physical laws, locally in the past and present and in distant parts of the universe (also in the past). You just grabbed one phrase from the abstract and then pretended as if physicsts donât actually measure these things, ignoring again the thousands of measurements the author talks about. We do. All the time.
No, @Mindspawn, the rates are not âvaguelyâ proportional. They are proportional within error bars. Measurement does not deal in vagueness. What do you think weâre discussing here, English Literature?
In any case, the idea that both nuclear decay rate and plate tectonics could be accelerated by a factor of a million and still end up in lock-step with each other to within 20-30% at all times is total science fiction.
Oh come on, @Mindspawn. Thatâs patent nonsense. Measurement simply does not work like that.
Even if the cause of the effect is unknown, its extent is not. To propose another much larger effect without presenting any evidence whatsoever for its existence is called âmaking things up.â That might be legitimate in a script for the next episode of Star Trek, but itâs not legitimate in Real Life.
Thank you for that study on Rubidium. Appreciated.
âOh come on, @Mindspawn. Thatâs patent nonsense. Measurement simply does not work like that.â
You say that, but I battle to see any flaw in my logic. To say âcome onâ implies you feel my logic is ridiculous, even though you failed to point out why. My logic stands.
For example, what if exposure to background radiation is keeping parent isotopes (of long half lives) on earth and in space at a near energy equilibrium, with just slight decay over time? What if high air pressure in the past and strong magnetic fields protected the earth from this energising radiation. (as per muon susceptibility to air pressure). Without the energising background radiation the decay in the past could have been rapid.
I am not even putting forward a hypothesis here, I am sure that idea is full of flaws. My only point is that there is a mystery to be solved, until it is solved, we cannot be sure of any conclusions in the field.
Because, as I said, measurement simply does not work like that. You cannot propose the existence of effects larger than the sizes of your error bars. Every area of science works that way. If you could propose effects larger than those justified by your error bars, then you could legitimately claim anything that you liked. In such a reality, the very concepts of facts and lying would have no meaning. You would even be able to claim that cats turn into dogs when youâre not looking if you were that way inclined.
Itâs also that you seem to have no sense of scale whatsoever. You certainly donât understand the implications of differences of scale of that magnitude. The difference between thousands and billions is the equivalent to the difference in size between an ant and an elephant, or between your thumbnail and Mount Everest. When youâre dealing with that kind of differences, completely different laws of physics predominate. If you want to see some examples, just read the essay âOn Being The Right Sizeâ by JBS Haldane.
These effects have all been tested in laboratory conditions. The effects that they have on nuclear decay rates have been shown to be negligible.
Again, it simply doesnât work like that. The fact that we donât know everything doesnât mean that we donât know anything. We can put limits on what could plausibly have taken place in the past, and accelerated nuclear decay on the scale needed to squeeze 4.5 billion yearsâ worth of evidence into six thousand far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far exceeds those limits.
Just going back to this post, how would we see that decay in nature, if all decay had always been rapid?
For starters, we wouldnât even have been born, because our ancestors would all have been killed off by radiation poisoning long before they could go forth and multiply.
The background radiation in the environment to which we are subjected is about 10 ÎźSv per day. In order to squeeze the evidence into six thousand years, that would have been raised by a factor of a million. In other words, 10 Sv per day. It takes just 8 Sv to kill you. Adam and Eve would have been dead in less than 20 hours.
You talk about squeezing, I see it as stretching. A few km of sedimentation and deposition and fossilisation is stretched into 600 million years. Now that is the far fetched concept. Iâm not sure if you have quite got your head around that one 
I could say plenty about sedimentation rates, but that would be a different topic. Feel free to start a separate thread to discuss it if you like. But when it comes to radioactive decay, itâs unequivocal: thereâs evidence for 4.5 billion yearsâ worth of it, end of story. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying to you or doesnât know what theyâre talking about (and in any case, the YEC RATE project itself admitted that there really had been that much decay). To get that down to six thousand years, you simply have to squeeze. And the amount of squeezing you need is well and truly in the realms of science fiction.
You say we would all be dead from radiation poisoning, this shows that you still donât understand my point about equilibrium. Your concept is illogical unless you apply it to our current world in which there is a build up of unstable isotopes. But would not apply to a world which was experiencing decay as fast as the formation of unstable isotopes on the surface of earth.
You cannot have more radiation than the unstable isotopes being formed at any given moment. If everything was decaying quickly, this does not mean more decay, but it means more stable isotopes proportionally to unstable ones.
But of course few see this point. Oh well.
I think Iâll just let the ridiculousness of that statement speak for itself. Iâm outta here.
If you guys donât understand, that does not make it illogical.
If you throw one body a day into an open grave, whether those bodies take a year to decay into a skeleton, or 10 years, in both cases they decay into skeletons at an average of one skeleton a day.
Same with parent and daughter isotopes, the decay rate is irrelevant in the long run, whether fast or slow, the earthâs surface eventually reaches the same equilibrium in the long run. to claim that there would somehow be more parent isotopes to decay, if the decay is faster, makes no sense. And to claim that there can be more decay than the parent isotopes that exist, makes no sense either.
So this theory that if decay on the earthâs surface in times past was a lot faster, humans would not survive, does not take into account that there would never be a build up of radioactivity in conditions when it all decays quickly.
Your analogy is invalid, @Mindspawn. Radioactive decay does not work like that.
Only carbon-14 in the atmosphere is replenished by cosmic rays. Potassium-40, rubidium-87, lutetium-176 and so on in the Earthâs crust are not. There is no equilibrium involved in those cases, only residual quantities of those isotopes left over from the formation of the Solar System.
Iâd recommend that you go and learn how radiometric dating works from people who actually do it for their day jobs, rather than from people who stand on the sidelines criticising some kind of garbled cartoon caricature of it that deviates wildly from what real scientists actually do in reality.
âLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.â -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.
