JonF
Posts: 634
Joined: Feb. 2005
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| Quote (afdave @ June 17 2006,11:22) | Eric... | Quote | | By the way, Dave. I probably shouldn't assume this: do you really understand the difference between 4,500 years and 3 billion years? |
Yes. And 3 billion years is not anywhere near enough to make a jellyfish from a bacteria (your example). 3 billion X 3 billion X 3 billion isn't enough. New information simply does not arise by chance, Eric. |
A common, and long-dubunked, loon claim.
| Quote | Eric... | Quote | | There's not enough C14 left after 10 half-lives to stand out from background contamination! How much clearer can you get? As an electrical engineer, do you understand what signal-to-noise ratios are? |
And you keep closing your eyes to the fact that there is MUCH more C14 in coal over and above the 'background C14' ... there is 0.24 pMC Eric. The 'background C14' is 0.077 pMC. |
You guys are talking about different meanings of "background", and Eric's is the more relevant meaning. The 0.077 pMC is the portion of the background noise that is due to inherent limitations in the lab's measuring equipment. Eric's speaking of the total background noise relative to the signal (which signal is the atmospherically-derived C14 if there is any). The 0.077 pMC is only a part of the overall background noise, which is due to equipment limitations, possibly groundwater contamination, possibly in-situ formation, possibly something else.
| Quote | | Well guess what. The coal comes out to 50,000 using YOUR assumptions of C14 concentration. |
Nope. You need your assumption that the C14 is derived from the atmosphere. Using our "assumptions", the age comes out to be un-measurable.
| Quote | | The problem is that if you go with contamination, you have to throw the whole dating method in the trash, because ANY sample could have contamination. You cannot have it both ways. |
Yup, any sample could have contamination; that's why we cross-check and look for possible contamiantion sources. The correlations with other methods and observations wouldn't come out as they do if we're just measuring contamination. And, due to the power of exponentials, there's no way to get enough contamination into samples 30K years old and younger to mess up the results.
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