but this is the problem: we cant know what happened in the past. in the past several methods gave a 100my result. but now its chaged to 4.5 bilion. so how do we know that this age is true?
The RATE team have been totally discredit by members of their own team. RATE results are wrong.
Radiological dating with todayâs technology is accurate to under 0.1%.
For the simple reason that older methods (e.g. salt in the ocean) have far, far greater uncertainties, and are based on rates that are much harder to measure and that fluctuate wildly over time.
By contrast, modern methods are based on processes whose time-invariance has been established rigorously both theoretically and experimentally. Concordance between different dating methods whose assumptions are independent of each other provides solid evidence that those assumptions are valid, and sets numerical limits on the effects that those assumptions can have on the results.
Could you cite a source for this please? As far as I can tell, theyâre sticking to their guns. Also, are you saying that they are wrong in saying that isochron discordances happen at all? Thatâs not what Iâve been reading in the reviews of the RATE project (e.g. this one).
However, my point here is that they have not established that these discordances really do point to fundamental flaws in radiometric dating rather than just edge cases. Specifically, they need to answer two questions:
- If discordances mean that radiometric dates are totally meaningless, why is there so much concordance? In fact, why is there any concordance at all?
- How do discordances of less than 20% justify the claim that the results can be in error by up to six orders of magnitude?
You are citing a 2007 review paper? It is nearly 2016. The new technologies used in radio-isotope dating have revolutionized the field. Accuracies are in the 0.1% range. RATE has been an utter failure to produce any source of inaccuracies in dating.
not realy. they base on simple extrapolation like the current methods.
not realy. we know that those methods can have a variation of about 10^9 from the real age. so its very speculative.
again- the old methods also agree with each other. but they all wrong.
Whatever the starting assumptions are, we would expect concordance in many cases. If we measure many samples from the same rock, we would expect concordance between various samples when the same method is used. Would we expect discordance between methods? I donât know if we could legitimately have any expectations about comparisons between methods. But if the rule is used that only one or two methods are legitimate for something of a particular age, then we have the logical problem: we are saying that something is a certain age, so letâs use a particular method to show us how old it is⌠The examples of discordances give a much larger gap than 20%. Sarfati, in âEvolutionâs Achilles Heelsâ, gives isochron ages for one sample, that range from 270,000 yrs to 3.5 my for K-Ar dating. This is a factor of ten difference. The same sample or material dated by three other methods, (Rb-St, Sm-Nd, Pb-Pb) gave ages of 133 my to 3.9 by, a range of a factor of 30, but a factor of 10,000 difference from the K-Ar method. And that is for rock known to have formed less than 100 years ago. (Ngauruhoe lava, Snelling et.al.)
Does this mean that no matter the actual age of the rock you are testing you will always get an âoldâ age?
You arenât answering my question here. Quote me some numbers please. Specifically: exactly what percentage of samples report discordance? What is the magnitude and standard deviation of all discordances reported in the scientific literature? Exactly what limits do these figures place on the reliability of radiometric dating as a technique?
The half-life of K-40 is 1.248 billion yearsâ350 times the larger figure that youâve quoted here, and 4,600 times the smaller. This example is like trying to use a weighbridge, designed for weighing cars and lorries, to measure how much butter to use when making flapjacks for a family of four. Youâre talking about âgarbage in, garbage outâ here, not discordance.
Assuming that these figures are correct, they do warrant some explanation, and I will leave it to those better versed in the techniques than I am to comment. However, they do not invalidate radiometric dating as a wholeâto do that you must show that they are representative and not just an edge case. Has the interpretation of these results been peer reviewed by an independent professional geochronologist? And have the findings been replicated, or similar findings reported, by other independent researchers?
You still need to know the uncertainties.
I hope you realise that accelerated nuclear decay of this magnitude is science fiction? Even the RATE team themselves admit that the amount of heat released by this much decay would be enough to vaporise the earthâs crust.
Decay rates of isotopes used in dating have been tested in the laboratory and shown to be highly resilient to factors such as temperature, pressure and electromagnetic fields. Variations detected in the laboratory are small (of the order of 5% or so) and only apply to short-lived isotopes not used in dating. Variations of the order 10^9 only happen in the kind of conditions you find in the centres of stars. Astronomical observations also provide evidence that decay rates have not changed with time.
Itâs not a case of being wrong, itâs a case of having much larger uncertainties.
true. so how do you know that this heat never effect the decay? maybe all those atoms appear in the early universe\earth before it evolve to the current condition.
Youâre talking about tens of millions of degrees and very contrived laboratory conditions hereâconditions needed to strip the atoms concerned of all their electrons. These are not conditions that have ever occurred naturally on earth. Not even during the Flood.
no on earth but maybe before the earth even evolved. its possible.
Yes but thatâs not what radiometric dating measures. Isochron dating measures the time since the rock in question solidified. It also allows you to determine the original ratio between parent and child isotopes, so you donât have to make any assumptions in that respect.
So, you are arguing that God created pre-aged matter. Did God also create rock and soil with fossils already in it?
George
no. but the roch during their formation already get the speed up decay.
not sure. how we can know what peocesses those atoms get?
Take a look at the article âRadiometric Datingâa Christian Perspectiveâ by Roger C Wiens. The section on rubidium-strontium dating illustrates the isochron method, or three-isotope plot as the article calls it.
The article is an essential read for anyone interested in this aspect of the origins debate. It explains in detail how scientists verify the various assumptions involved in dating, and addresses a lot of common young-earth misconceptions about the subject.
1 Like
It depends on what you mean by âoldâ, but for K-Ar, the error range is about 200,000 yrs, based on the theory and the accuracy of measurement. So if K-Ar dated something at less than 200,000 yrs, it would be similar to dating it as possibly zero years, or 100 years, or 1000 yrs. However, when it dates this rock as 3.5 my, it is well outside the error range. So the question is, how accurate is an error range of 200,000 yrs? And error ranges for other methods are greater. And if they are not greater error ranges, then that really begs the question how another method can date one hundred year old rock as more than 100 million years old or more than 3 billion yrs?
You cannot really date rock with the C14 method, since you need biological material to create the C14/C12 ratio, which is the indicator for age. Volcanic rock (igneous) does not contain this carbon. Sedimentary layers cannot be dated directly with any radiometric method, since the processes necessary for a radiometric timeclock have been disrupted.
1 Like
I canât answer this question. that would be a major time consuming study. But remember that even when there is not discordance, this by itself does not discount the discordances. If numbers were simply random, one would also expect a number of concordant numbers. And the numbers become concordant partly because of the large overlapping error ranges. However, again, under any theory imaginable, one would expect a large number of concordant results from the same method on the same type of rock.
While the half-life is large, this is immaterial to the point made. It is the error range of measurement that is the issue, not the half life. As a parallel example, just because a personâs half life is 50 years, does not mean that he cannot measure the length of a minute of his life reasonably accurately. The half life of K40 cannot be directly measured, but is inferred from the amount of decay occurring in a considerably shorter period of time; that is why the error range is much smaller than the half life.