Refuting Compromise: The Troubling Tone of Creationism

@Steve_Buckley,

You should read some of these articles some time. Here’s one:

This one is published by “phys.org”, instead of “m.phys.org”:

“The fluctuations we’re seeing are fractions of a percent and are not likely to radically alter any major anthropological findings,” Fischbach said.

“One of our next steps is to look into the isotopes used medically to see if there are any variations that would lead to overdosing or underdosing in radiation treatments, but there is no cause for alarm at this point. What is key here is that what was thought to be a constant actually varies and we’ve discovered a periodic oscillation where there shouldn’t be one.”

“Jenkins and Fischbach suggest that the changes in the decay rates are due to interactions with solar neutrinos, nearly weightless particles created by nuclear reactions within the sun’s core that travel almost at the speed of light. It is estimated that about 60 billion solar neutrinos pass through a person’s fingernail every second, but they are so weakly reactive that they pass right through the body without disturbing or changing anything, Jenkins said.”

“We haven’t known the solar neutrino to interact significantly with anything, but it fits with the evidence we’ve gathered as the likely source of these fluctuations,” he said."

But most importantly is this sentence: “The team reported in the journal Astroparticle Physics that the decay rate for both isotopes varies in a 33-day recurring pattern, which they attribute to the rotation rate of the sun’s core.”

The one thing about a nice 33-day recurring pattern is that a million of these patterns averages out to a nice constant number…

Those results have been called into question as newer measurements with more reliable methods have not seen fluctuations in decay rates:

Scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt have now carried out new measurements and have published their results in the journal “Astroparticle Physics”. For three years, they checked the activity of samples with 36Cl in order to detect possible seasonal dependencies. Whereas the US-Americans had determined the count rates with gas detectors, PTB used the so-called TDCR liquid scintillation method which largely compensates disturbing influences on the measurements. The result: The measurement results of PTB clearly show fewer variations and do not indicate any seasonal dependence or the influence of solar neutrinos.
Old textbook knowledge reconfirmed: Decay rates of radioactive substances are constant

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