ericmurphy
Posts: 2460
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (afdave @ June 16 2006,14:51) | Eric... | Quote | | Established radiometric procedure states that C14 dates cannot be accurately determined for dates older than ~50,000 years. |
I know that. I'm not using it do date anything >50,000 years. I'm using it to date something which I suspect is less than 10,000 years old. |
But you're not dating anything that's less than 10,000 years old, Dave. You still haven't grasped the fundamental point here: radiometric dates correlate extremely well with figures derived from multiple other independent methods. Your phony radiometric dates don't correlate with anything else, other than your desire to have a young earth. Your "suspicions" are, quite simply, wrong.
| Quote | Eric... | Quote | | There's a reason C14 is not used to date objects hundreds of millions of years old. It's because C14 dating is known to be useless for those kinds of ages. It's not because the amount of C14 in objects of those ages is undetectable. It's because there are other sources of C14 that cannot be controlled for at those low levels. |
No. If you read the pre 1980's literature you will find that geochronologists thought there was too small a quantities to detect in coal and diamonds. This all changed when AMS came along. Guess what. They were surprised. They thought their meters were wrong. They thought there was some contamination. They still don't know why it is so high. |
That doesn't make the earth 6,000 (or 50,000) years old, Dave. It means there are sources of C14 that are not well-understood. Not unknown. Not clearly understood. There's a difference. Real scientists want to know what those sources are. They don't just jump to the completely unwarranted assumption that the earth is 6,000 (or 50,000) years old.
| Quote | | And silly them. Most of them never even consider the possibility that earth might not be flat (er ... that their dating systems might be wrong ... sorry ... my mind slipped back a few centuries). |
Freudian slip, Dave? But you're still wrong. The idea of a young earth has (of course) occurred to these guys. But it wouldn't be a few radiometric dates that would have to be wrong. All of them would have to be wrong, and all the rest of the mountains and mountains and mountains of data pointing to an old earth would have to be wrong. The odds of that being the case are too small to compute, Dave, and subsequently, all real scientists understand that the old age of the earth is a fact, not a guess, nor wishful thinking.
| Quote | Eric... | Quote | | One more thing, Dave. If you think the earth is 6,000 years old, how does it help you to find coal and diamonds that date to 50,000 years? |
You're lost. Go back to square one and read my original C14 post, then get back to me. |
Don't need to. You tell me how results indicating that the earth is 50,000 years old helps your argument that it's only 6,000 years old. You're still missing my point. Your "evidence" for a young earth gives all kinds of discordant values. By contrast, the evidence in favor of an old earth all points to the same value.
| Quote | | Now, JonF ... how can you say 'Oh, we can date this cave painting reliably or whatever, but we cannot date this coal reliably.' Why is the coal subject to 'radioactive contamination' or whatever, and the cave painting is not? They got many samples from widely varying loacales and depths. It seems that if you always go about saying 'Oh, that's contaminated but this is not, how can anything be reliably dated by C14?' |
If Jon doesn't mind, I'll answer this one: it's simple, Dave. When you're dating a cave painting that's 20,000 years old, you're dealing with four half-lives or less. In other words, much of the C14 should still be there.
When you're trying to date coal, you're dating something that's hundreds of thousands of half-lives old. The amount of C14 left is too small to be outside the error bars imposed by other sources of contamination. That's why you don't use C14 dating for things known (for entirely different reasons) to be hundreds of millions of years old.
Why do you think there are over 40 different methods of radiometric dating, Dave? Some are usable in some circumstances and not in others. You can't use Kr/Ar dating for things that are only a few hundred years old, and you can't use C14 dating for things that are hundreds of millions of years old. Re-read my post about the saw, the screwdriver, and the cutting torch. Do you understand the analogy?
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2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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Now, how much in percent does your one sq. cm throw off your surface area estimation? 
