I know it is old

 So, here is a new post.

In a Facebook argument with some creationists there was the false claim "the layers of strata were already assigned ages before absolute dating was invented. all absolute dates that do not fit within the relative ages are discarded.
circular reasoning.
when Mr Hurd aquire a sample to test does he know anything about said sample?
like where it came from?"

And, "all radiometric dates are compared to the time frame assumed in the strata. which is an assumption on its own." 

 

 

 

 

This little bit of sediment in the photo above was from a job I did with Mike Macko nearly 30 years ago. It was an excavated trench in Borego Canyon for the Foothill Transportation Corridor in Orange County California. The red lines I added show the more obvious stream channels in this top part of the canyon sediment. They show us that there was a fairly rapid deposit of sands and gravels with the occasional boulder and cobble movement in floods. The stream channels weave back and forth across the canyon.

The only "Date" is that the higher deposit is mostly youngest.

And the project got big!

 

 

This photo was taken near the end of the project. The deep trench is actually being filled and compacted. The two fellows perched in the side of the cut are my crew members still recovering data from prehistoric occupations. The "strata" for all that stuff and about 20 feet lower was just "Holocene" or, the after the most recent ice age.

So, what we did was to get an exact elevation relative to a single point, and collect charcoal from prehistoric fire pits.

Here I am in the dirt;

So the creationists also lied that;

"they will refuse to date an object unless you tel them exactly where it was found. this is because they throw out any date that doesn't line up with their preconceived timeliness.

And, " they compare various dating methods with strata and discard any readings that do not fit."

We collected 23 samples and paid for 13 radiocarbon dates. There was no site data needed, or requested. Just the sample catalog number. I plotted the results returned against the elevations from the two deep trenching cuts. The Sequence 2 was further up the canyon and in a more narrow slot. In that geological setting the stream carried sands piled up faster.

 

 

Perfect!

For some folks more interested, the various terms above "Late Pre-Historic," and so on are references to cultural groups defined by their differing technologies. They line up with Carbon-14 dates very well as shown below;

I had decided to limit the time I waste on Mrs. Chatman's foolishness. She seems to have no readers other than a few pro-science readers like myself. Her nonsense turns up in my news feed since I have it look for anything with "creationism" and a half-dozen other buzz words. So, I wanted to pick just one of the last 5 of her "evidences" to debunk. It was too hard to chose.

Item #5 of her "evidences" was about radiocarbon dating. There are five gross errors, and three minor errors. There was only one lonely true statement she made, radiocarbon is made in the upper atmosphere from nitrogen, and decays back to nitrogen. There is a qualification to even that: minor amounts of C14 are generated from neutron capture. I didn't even count this as an error.

Here is her claim:

5. Does carbon dating prove the earth is millions of years old? NO! The sun's radiation hits the earth during the day. That energy is able to convert 21 pounds of nitrogen into radioactive carbon 14. The radio active carbon 14 eventually decays and turns back into nitrogen. Laboratory tests have shown that about half the C-14 molecules have a life of 5,730 years, and the remaining half will decay after another 5,730 years. Tests reveal that there is more C-14 now than there was 40 years ago. This proves that the earth is not even 30,000 years old and its atmosphere has not reached its equilibrium yet.

Her first gross error is particularly amusing because it was accidentally a true statement: "Does carbon dating prove the earth is millions of years old? NO!"

Radiocarbon dating is theoretically limited to about 100,000 years. Technical limitations in our field conditions, and laboratory instruments reduce this to commonly reported dates between 50 and 60 thousands of years. So, even if we had perfect field conditions, and perfect laboratory measurement, we could only "prove" that the Earth was more than 100,000 years old- just 1/10 of a million. Even when Mrs. Chatman is right, she is wrong. Nobody ever has used radiocarbon dating to "prove the earth is millions of years old." That would be stupid.

Back in 1948 when the radiocarbon dating method was first proposed, the assumption was made by Willard Frank Libby that the production of C14 in the upper atmosphere would reach a break-even point with the decay of C14 back to nitrogen. This would have made radiocarbon dating a very tidy, and easy method to apply. However, nature is rarely tidy. Our sun is a variable star, so that the amount of solar radiation producing C14 in the upper atmosphere is also variable. This does lead to the first minor error, that 21 pounds of C14 are produced annually. The production of C14 is variable over the millennia. Then, there are physical, geochemical events that can store carbon, and release carbon. These can effect the available mix of C12, and C14 particularly in marine animals. This can under some conditions substantively change the radiocarbon age of an object. This was discovered in the 1960s, and the first calibrations were being published in the early 1970s. This means that for over 50 years we have known that the "equilibrium" of atmospheric C14 was meaningless. I wish creationists like Mrs. Chatman could catch-up with the rest of us.

The first calibrations were made by counting tree-rings, and taking measure of the amount of C14 in the wood of known age. Over the many years of work, we have a very solid calibration from dendrochronology for the last 12,000 years. The most recent calibration published just this month was "A Complete Terrestrial Radiocarbon Record for 11.2 to 52.8 kyr B.P." (Science 19 October 2012: 370-374. [DOI:10.1126/science.1226660} This research used the annually deposited algal, and sediment layers (varves) in a Japanese lake. Other calibrations have used trapped carbon in ice caps, and marine sediments, and cross-correlation with Uranium/Thorium decay. The measurement errors have been reduced to less than 5% of the age of the material.

Here is the single most stupid thing Mrs. Chatman wrote since I first encountered her many stupid claims, "The sun's radiation hits the earth during the day." The sun's radiation hits the earth somewhere all the time except for the tiny fraction of time our sun is eclipsed by the moon. Upper atmosphere circulation effectively mixes gasses including carbon dioxide loaded with C14. There isn't anything I can say that can make it any better.

Mrs. Chatman wrote that the half-life of C14 was known as, "... C-14 molecules have a life of 5,730 years, and the remaining half will decay after another 5,730 years." We have one minor error, and one gross error in these few words. Above average even for a creationist. The minor error (and I am being charitable) is that there are "C-14 molecules." C-14 is an isotope, and atom of carbon with an excess of neutrons making it radioactive. It is not a "molecule." The gross error is about what a half-life is. If we start with some amount of a radioactive isotope, X, the amount left after one half-life will be X/2. After a second half-life there will be X/4, or one half of that from before. Then after the next interval, there will be X/8 or one half of X/4.

And finally, we have the true but misunderstood statement that, "Tests reveal that there is more C-14 now than there was 40 years ago." There is a considerable excess of C14 over the amount generated by solar radiation currently circulating in biosphere. It was produced by the insanity of open atmospheric atomic weapons exploded between 1945 and 1963 when they were limited by international treaty (France continued until 1974 China continued until 1980). Increasing amounts of ancient C14 depleted carbon released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, and by volcanic eruptions has not significantly diluted the atomic test C14 signal. The last gross error associated with Mrs. Chatman's lack of science reading skills is that this excess could possibly be confused as something that "proves that the earth is not even 30,000 years old."

Are Constants Constant?

Central to the problem of teaching science in America’s classrooms is the issue of creationists that are active in denying the validity of the sciences. Children are exposed to this dogma for years before they ever enter a science classroom.

The more commonly self-professed creationists believe that the universe was created about 6000 years ago based on the various “table of generations” (Hebrew toledot) scattered in the Bible. And this places them squarely against the sciences of geology, and astronomy which conclude that the universe is 13.73 billion years old (to within 1% accuracy), and the Earth was formed much later, 4.55 billion years ago (to within 1%) (1, 2). The most recent cosmic age is 13.82 billion years discovered by the Planck CMB Mission just concluded in 2013.

Young Earth Creationists have attacked these results in several ways. They have argued that radioactive decay was much faster in the past invalidating radiometric dating methods such as the Uranium/Lead, or Potassium/Argon series (3). And they have argued that the speed of light was much faster in the past, making the distances from the Earth to far away stars misleading (4). There are many individual problems with these arguments. For example, if radioactive decay were sufficiently rapid for 4.5 billion years to appear like 6,000 years, enough energy would have been released that the Earth would still be a glowing cloud of gas. However, both of these arguments can be addressed within the single question, Is the Speed of Light Constant?

There is in fact a single answer, “Yes.”

The Fine Structure Constant Alpha is the strength of the electromagnetic force. It is expressed as Alpha = e^2/(h/2Pi)c, where e is the electron charge, Planck's constant h, divided by 2Pi, and c is the speed of light. So a direct measurement of the fine structure constant over time entails measuring the constancy of the speed of light. Creationist publications were the loudest promoting some preliminary results from a team led by John Webb, University of New South Wales, which reported in 1999 that the "fine-structure constant," appeared to have changed by about six parts in a million over the last 12 billion years (5). YE creationists saw this as confirmation their “YEC physics” of inconstant constants might be supported by real data.

The notion of inconstant constants was not only a theoretical challenge, there are critical technologies in electronics, and new “nano design” that are threatened. Teams of researchers sought to find the exact parameters of the fine structure constant. After years of effort they found that (to their relief) constants are constant. Alpha variation is limited by earth bound measurement to less than –1.9 +/- 2.3 X 10^16 per year (6). Astronomical measurements of quasar B0218+357 yield a variation in Alpha less than 1.8 x 10^–6 (95% confidence level) at approximately half the universe's current age, or ~6.2 billion years (7).

Compare two numbers, 0.00000018, the largest possible variation in the speed of light for the last 6.2 billion years, and 2,288,333 the factor that the speed of light must have gone faster for “Young Earth physics” to invalidate an ancient universe. They are over a million millions apart, which is the gap between science and creationism.


1) “Age of the Universe,” NASA, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html

2) “Ancient Earth, Ancient Skies: The Age of Earth and its Cosmic Surroundings” Dalrymple, G. Brent, 2004 Stanford University Press

3) ”Scientific Creationism” Morris, Henry M. 1985, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, p. 139.

4) “The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time” Norman, Trevor G. and Barry Setterfield, 1987, Flinders University of South Australia, School of Mathematical Sciences, Technical Report. "Has the speed of light decayed?," Aardsma, Gerald E., 1988, Impact #179, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, CA.

5) See, "Further Evidence for Cosmological Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant "J. K. Webb, M. T. Murphy, V. V. Flambaum, V. A. Dzuba, J. D. Barrow, C. W. Churchill, J. X. Prochaska, and A. M. Wolfe, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 091301 (2001) - Published August 9, 2001, "Changing Constants Cause Controversy" Charles Seife, Science 24 August 2001: Vol. 293. no. 5534, pp. 1410 - 1411 DOI: 10.1126/science.293.5534.1410b, and "Skewed Starlight Suggests Particle Masses Changed Over Eons" Adrian Cho, Science 21 April 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5772, p. 348 DOI: 0.1126/science.312.5772.348,

6) “Frequency Ratio of Al+ and Hg+ Single-Ion Optical Clocks; Metrology at the 17th Decimal Place” T. Rosenband, D. B. Hume, P. O. Schmidt, C. W. Chou, A. Brusch, L. Lorini, W. H. Oskay, R. E. Drullinger, T. M. Fortier, J. E. Stalnaker, S. A. Diddams, W. C. Swann, N. R. Newbury, W. M. Itano, D. J. Wineland, and J. C. Bergquist Science 28 March 2008 319: 1808-1812; published online 6 March 2008 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1154622] (in Reports)

7) “ Strong Limit on a Variable Proton-to-Electron Mass Ratio from Molecules in the Distant Universe” Michael T. Murphy, Victor V. Flambaum, Sébastien Muller, and Christian Henkel Science 20 June 2008 320: 1611-1613 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1156352] (in Reports)