Radiometric dating flaws debunked

Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for the gropings and guesses of authors of the early sixties in an effort to debunk.
Table of contents

• 2. Radiometric dating and testing for contamination and disturbances
• Answers to Creationist Attacks on Carbon-14 Dating
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• Refuting “Radiometric Dating Methods Makes Untenable Assumptions!”
• More Bad News for Radiometric Dating

The side you end up coming down on often depends on which problems you are most comfortable trying to deal with. Physicists already theorize that dark matter would affect nuclear decay rates; what if the leftover energy went to the dark matter? The heat problem occurs everywhere there are radioactive isotopes, so throughout the crust and mantle of the earth, for example.

The dark matter would have to be there in order to take the heat. You can think of dark matter here as a lot like the luminiferous ether: Since its interaction with normal matter is incredibly weak, it can very easily pass through the earth. Not to mention that different models of dark matter would lead to different interactions.

Are we able to calculate the mass of the earth from our knowledge of its contents, and not just the gravitational force we detect? I think if there were much dark matter in the earth, it would be noticeable. We also know the overall composition of the crust and mantle from samples. Thus, the only real unknown is the composition of the core. Using the mass and all those other measurements, we deduce that the core is mostly iron with some nickel. I fear it is more a matter of philosophy rather than hard science: The problem with that, is that, in the first case, there appear to be no transitional fossils when there should be millions , and to make the assumption previously herein stated, evolutionary conclusions are more akin to a combination of wishful thinking combined with a sympathetic magic mindset, than to observable examples.

Evolution is taught as established fact, and scientific enquiry is severely trammelled by those who prefer a status quo.

2. Radiometric dating and testing for contamination and disturbances

Every fossil between organisms alive now and abiogenesis is a transitional fossil, Tony. There are also transitional fossils and organisms in the misguided definition of the word you are using. I admire your faith, Cromwell. Yet you state it as fact. Then, you claim that all fossils are a transition between that unrealistic event and the life we see now. Thanks for writing an informative article.

Error bars have their place, but you are correct in pointing out that they are often misunderstood not only by the general public, but by scientists who are not savvy in radiometric dating. I would have worded this sentence differently: I am not convinced that differential diffusion of isotopes will be all that significant. After all, fractionation of light elements, such as oxygen, provides us with all sorts of insights into geologic processes because the mass difference between O and O is rather significant, whereas the mass difference between Sr and Sr is not all that great, in terms of ratios.

The differences are even less significant for more massive isotopes such as in samarium-neodymium dating Nd and Nd If fractionation does turn out to be important for isochrons, one would expect that there would be a trend, with lighter nuclides e. Rb-Sr being more affected than heavier nuclides e. I am also wondering if Dr. Hays addressed how isotope fractionation would affect U-series concordia diagrams. As it is, there is a general correlation of dates obtained by radiometric dating from the top to the bottom of the geologic column.

Strongly discordant dates happen and young-Earth creationists focus on these , but roughly concordant dates are common; otherwise geologists would not trust the methods. It seems strange, if diffusion is a problem, that nuclides with very different masses are effected in the same way. Perhaps Earth is only 3. This would require similar diffusion rates in cold meteorites as in warm crustal zircons. This would be very interesting, and would cause geologists to have to re-write many books, but the general story of geology would stand.

This is because geologists do not believe Earth is billions of years old because of radiometric dating. Radiometric tools merely give us firm pegs to hang our signs on for the various eras, periods, and epochs of Earth history.

Thanks for your comment, Kevin. I would have to disagree with your suggested change in wording, however. While most definitely not all geochronologists do understand that there are false isochrons, that is never the way it is presented to students or the general public. This is unfortunate, of course, but it seems to be the norm when propaganda replaces science.

I think what you are missing is the chemistry involved. When we are dealing with trace elements not substances that are part of the crystal lattice , differential diffusion can have a significant effect. It is also not clear that there would be a general trend like you suggest.

Diffusion also depends on chemical issues. When you are dealing with different elements, you are dealing with completely different diffusion scenarios. Hayes discussing uranium-series dating. Since concordia diagrams also involve isotope ratios, however, I suspect that this problem exists there as well. In fact, they might even be the majority. I have no doubt that those who want to believe in an old earth will be able figure out a way to keep the overall story of geology the same, regardless of how important this effect turns out to be, if that can even be determined to any reasonable precision.

Yes, there are other issues at play as is the case with any over-arching scientific idea , but to her, radiometric dating is the most important reason she believes in an old earth. I have no idea whether she is the norm or the exception, but she does exist.

I was wondering how diffusion made any sense…. When I started my journey from old earth-evolutionism, it was much easier to see the flaws in evolutionary theory than those in the old age model.

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Many other objects by radiometric dating. These is known decay rates. Are also please explain how carbon dating are poorly known decay rates. Can you use radiometric dating on sedimentary rocks All radioactive dating. Other objects by measuring is supposed to be rejected.

Do with the flaws. More bad news for billions of radiocarbon dating methods. Carbon to be rejected. Hovind explains the debate radiometric dating works. Are poorly known decay rates.

Read the age will cause the earth? E mc2 website regarding radiometric dating methods. Stearns, Carroll, and Clark point out that ". This radiation cannot be totally eliminated from the laboratory, so one could probably get a "radiocarbon" date of fifty thousand years from a pure carbon-free piece of tin.

However, you now know why this fact doesn't at all invalidate radiocarbon dates of objects younger than twenty thousand years and is certainly no evidence for the notion that coals and oils might be no older than fifty thousand years. Creationists such as Cook claim that cosmic radiation is now forming C in the atmosphere about one and one-third times faster than it is decaying. If we extrapolate backwards in time with the proper equations, we find that the earlier the historical period, the less C the atmosphere had.

If they are right, this means all C ages greater than two or three thousand years need to be lowered drastically and that the earth can be no older than ten thousand years. Yes, Cook is right that C is forming today faster than it's decaying. However, the amount of C has not been rising steadily as Cook maintains; instead, it has fluctuated up and down over the past ten thousand years.

How do we know this? From radiocarbon dates taken from bristlecone pines. There are two ways of dating wood from bristlecone pines: Since the tree ring counts have reliably dated some specimens of wood all the way back to BC, one can check out the C dates against the tree-ring-count dates. Admittedly, this old wood comes from trees that have been dead for hundreds of years, but you don't have to have an 8,year-old bristlecone pine tree alive today to validly determine that sort of date. It is easy to correlate the inner rings of a younger living tree with the outer rings of an older dead tree.

The correlation is possible because, in the Southwest region of the United States, the widths of tree rings vary from year to year with the rainfall, and trees all over the Southwest have the same pattern of variations. When experts compare the tree-ring dates with the C dates, they find that radiocarbon ages before BC are really too young—not too old as Cook maintains. For example, pieces of wood that date at about BC by tree-ring counts date at only BC by regular C dating and BC by Cook's creationist revision of C dating as we see in the article, "Dating, Relative and Absolute," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

So, despite creationist claims, C before three thousand years ago was decaying faster than it was being formed and C dating errs on the side of making objects from before BC look too young , not too old. But don't trees sometimes produce more than one growth ring per year? Wouldn't that spoil the tree-ring count? If anything, the tree-ring sequence suffers far more from missing rings than from double rings. This means that the tree-ring dates would be slightly too young, not too old. Of course, some species of tree tend to produce two or more growth rings per year.

But other species produce scarcely any extra rings. Most of the tree-ring sequence is based on the bristlecone pine. This tree rarely produces even a trace of an extra ring; on the contrary, a typical bristlecone pine has up to 5 percent of its rings missing. Concerning the sequence of rings derived from the bristlecone pine, Ferguson says:. In certain species of conifers, especially those at lower elevations or in southern latitudes, one season's growth increment may be composed of two or more flushes of growth, each of which may strongly resemble an annual ring.

In the growth-ring analyses of approximately one thousand trees in the White Mountains, we have, in fact, found no more than three or four occurrences of even incipient multiple growth layers. In years of severe drought, a bristlecone pine may fail to grow a complete ring all the way around its perimeter; we may find the ring if we bore into the tree from one angle, but not from another.

Hence at least some of the missing rings can be found. Even so, the missing rings are a far more serious problem than any double rings. Other species of trees corroborate the work that Ferguson did with bristlecone pines. Before his work, the tree-ring sequence of the sequoias had been worked out back to BC.

The archaeological ring sequence had been worked out back to 59 BC.