Age of the Earth Part 2

The age of the earth, Part II
Radiocarbon dating

I) Things needed to have an accurate clock
    1) The clock must be readable in units
        A) Any clock which we use to time something must be rendered in readable
             units.  They also need to be understandable.
        B) To say that I will be there in 15 quarks makes no sense at all to anyone
        C) Yet to say I will be there in 15 minutes makes perfect sense since the unit
              that is being used is readable and understandable.
    2) It must be sufficiently accurate to measure the time interval in question.
        A) An egg timer would not be a suitable device to time a marathon with any
             accuracy.
        B) An hour glass would not be a suitable device to establish the accuracy of
             the atomic clock.
    3) We have to know when the timer was started to get the final time.
        A) If you are timing the 100 yard dash, yet you start the clock half way
             through the race, you will not get an accurate time.  You will get a
             deceptive reading that would make all others think the individual
             was superhuman.
        B) If, while timing the 100 yard dash, you start the clock 5 minutes before
             the start of the race, you will not get an accurate time.  The deceptive
             reading will indicate to others that the participants are not very good.
    4) We have to know what the reading on the timer was when it was started.
        A) If the reading on the timer was 10 years at the beginning, then the actual
             time is increased by 10 years, rendering a false reading to others.
        B) If the reading was -10 years at the beginning, then the actual time is
             decreased by 10 years.  Again this would render a false reading to others.
    5) The timer has to run at a uniform rate.
        A) If the timer were to speed up during the timing, the event would have appeared
             to have taken longer than it actually did.  If the timer were to be increased
             at the rate, in seconds, by 3 to 1, then the time on the clock would be 30
             seconds when only 10 have actually elapsed.
        B) If the timer were to be slowed down during the event, the event would have
             appeared to have not taken as long as it actually did.  If the timer were to be
             decreased at the rate, in second, of 1 to 3, then the time on the clock would be
             10 seconds when, in reality, 30 seconds have passed.
    6) The timer must not be disturbed or reset in any way while the event is being timed.
        A) If, while timing the 100 yard dash, you turn the timer off one second after the
             gun and restart it at the finish line, the clock will render an inaccurate time.
        B) If, while timing the 100 yard dash, you press the reset button half way through
             the event, the clock will render an inaccurate time.
    7) All these must be accounted for in timing anything.  We usually take these things for
        granted.  The problem is that in the science of determining the age of the earth, the
        majority of these issues are assumed.

II) Radiocarbon dating
    1)How the method works
        A) Radiocarbon (radiative carbon 14 or C14) is a form of carbon created in the
             upper atmosphere by the bombardment of cosmic particles from space.
        B) As radioactive carbon dioxide it permeates the atmosphere and passes into
             the bodies of plants and animals through the food chain.  To any plant or
             animal, C14 is indistinguishable from the common carbon (C12) which
             occurs naturally on earth.
        C) C14 is relatively rare, so of the total amount of carbon in the body of a plant
             or animal, only a minute fraction is C14.
        D) What makes this tiny fraction useful for dating is that the proportion of C14
             is the same for all living animals and plants the world over, and something
             that can readily be measured.
        E) C14 begins to decay as soon as it is formed.  When a quantity of C14 is
             produced in the atmosphere, half of that amount will decay away (becoming
             nitrogen gas) in about 5,700 years.  Half the remainder will decay in a further
             5,700 years, and so on, until an immeasurably small residue remains.
        F) Once a plant or animal dies, it ceases to take in C14 from the outside world,
             so the amount of C14 in its body begins to dwindle through decay while the
             ordinary C12 remains unchanged.
        G) So, 5,700 years after a tree dies, it contains only half the proportion of C14 to
             C12 that exists in a living tree, and in the living world in general.  After 11,400
             years, or two half-lives, it will contain only one quarter the proportion in the
             outside world, and so on.
        H) After about 5 half-lives, or about 30,000 years, only an immeasurably small
              residue remains and so the C14 test is only good for dating remains younger’
              than this natural “ceiling”.
         I)  In essence, to date an organic find (the test only works on the remains of
              once-living things, such as bones in a Neolithic burial, or Roman fence
              post) it is only necessary to measure the amount of remnant C14 with a
              suitable counter and hence deduce when a specimen ceased to take in C14 or
              when it died.
         J) The great value of the test is that only a tiny fragment is needed because it is
             the proportion of C14 to ordinary C12 that is measured and compared with
             the proportions that exist in the living world today.
        K) In the end the whole technique rests on knowing with some precision the ratio
             of C14 to C12 in the living world today, and it was for making these
             measurements as well as developing the dating technique that Willard Libby
             was awarded the Nobel prize.
        L) One other factor for the test to work properly is needed; the standard mix of
             C14 in the terrestrial reservoir must always have been the same throughout
             the lifetime of the test subject and in the years since its death.  An example
             of this would be the case of some archeologists setting out to determine the
             age of a Neolithic woman whose burial chamber they had discovered.  If there
             had been a lot more C14 around during the life of this woman, the reading will
             be falsely inflated-she will appear a much more recent burial than she really
             was.  Had there been a lot less, then the reading will appear falsely diminished
             and she will appear much older.

    2) Problems with the C14 method
        A) In the 1940's, as Libby and his co-workers were developing this new dating
             system, they had every reason to believe that the amount of C14 in the world
             could not possibly have varied during the time that humankind had been on
             the earth simply because the earth was believed to be of immense age, some
             4,600 million years old.
        B) This great age stamps the C14 technique with the seal of respectability
             because of what Libby called the “equilibrium value” for the C14 reservoir.
        C) It was thought that after the earth was formed and acquired an atmosphere,
             there would be a 30,000 year transition period during which C14 would be
             building up.  At the end of this period, the amount of C14 created by cosmic
             radiation will be balanced by the amount of C14 decaying away to zero.  To
             use Libby’s terminology, at the end of 30,000 years, the terrestrial C14
             reservoir will have reached a steady state.
        D) To test this part of the theory, Libby made measurement of both the rate of
             formation and the rate of decay of C14.  He found a considerable discrepancy
             in his measurements indicating that C14 was being created in the atmosphere
             somewhere around 25% faster than it was becoming extinct.  Since this
             result was inexplicable by any conventional means, Libby put the discrepancy
             down to experimental error.
        E) During the 1960's Libby’s experiments were repeated by chemists who were
             able to refine the techniques.  The new experiments revealed that the
             discrepancy was not experimental error- it did exist.  There is strong indication
             that the present natural production rate exceeds the natural decay rate by as
             25 % as reported by Richard Lingenfelter.  Other researchers have confirmed
             this finding, including Hans Suess from USC, and V.R. Switzer.  Others have
             reviewed the data and suggest that it may be as high as 38%
        F) The meaning of these results has two alternate implications.
            1) Either the atmosphere is for one reason or another in a transient build
                up stage in regard to C14.
            2) Something is wrong in one or another of the basic postulates of the C14
                method.
        G) One researcher has gone one step further.  Melvin Cook of Utah University has
             taken the latest measurements on C14 formation and decay and calculated
             from them back to the point at which there would have been 0 C14.  In doing
             so, he is in effect using the C14 technique to date the earth’s atmosphere.
             And the resulting calculation shows that the age of the atmosphere is around
             10,000 years old.
        H) It is true that C14 dating has been tried on objects whose age is independently
             known and scored some impressive results.  Yet anomalous dates have been
             produced from assays that showed that some living things may interact with
             parts of the reservoir that have been anomalously depleted of C14 and thus
             appear to be much older than they really are.
        I) Examples of such happening
            1) In 1991, some rock paintings were found in the South African bush
                and were analyzed by Oxford University’s radiocarbon accelerator
                unit which dated them as being around 1,200 years old.  However,
                publicity of the find attracted the attention of Joan Ahrens, a Capetown
                resident, who recognized the paintings as being produced by her in art
                 class and later stolen from her garden by vandals.
            2) Consider that in recent years “readily detectable amounts of carbon-14”in materials evolutionists suppose are millions of years old “have been the rule rather than the exception” (DeYoung, 2005, p. 49). When geophysicist John Baumgardner and colleagues obtained 10 coal samples from the U.S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank, one of the leading radiocarbon laboratories in the world tested the samples for traces of carbon. The coal samples were analyzed using the modern accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) method. If the coal were really many millions of years old (as evolutionists suggest), no traces of carbon-14 should have been found. “[A]ny carbon-containing materials that are truly older than 100,000 years should be ‘carbon-14 dead’ with C-14 levels below detection limits” (DeYoung, p. 49). But, in fact, traces of carbon-14 were found. “[A] residue of carbon-14 atoms was found in all ten samples.... The amounts of C-14 in coal are found to average 0.25 percent of that in the atmosphere today” (DeYoung, p. 53). Diamonds assumed to be hundreds of millions of years old were also tested—12 in all. Once again, traces of C-14 were found in every sample (see DeYoung, pp. 45-62).
            3) In June of 1990, Hugh Miller submitted two dinosaur bone fragments to
the Department of Geosciences at the University in Tucson, Arizona for carbon-14 analysis. One fragment was from an unidentified dinosaur. The other was from an Allosaurus excavated by James Hall near Grand Junction, Colorado in 1989. Miller submitted the samples without disclosing the identity of the bones. (Had the scientists known the samples actually were from dinosaurs, they would not have bothered dating them, since it is assumed dinosaurs lived millions of years ago—outside the limits of radiocarbon dating.) Interestingly, the C-14 analysis indicated that the bones were from 10,000-16,000 years old—a far cry from their alleged 60-million-year-old age (see Dahmer, et al., 1990, pp. 371-374).
            4) What is C-14 doing in coal, diamonds, and dinosaur fossils, if these
objects are really many millions of years old? Richard Dawkins declared that C-14 dating “is useful for dating organic material on the archaeological/historical timescale where we are dealing in hundreds or a few thousands of years,” not millions of years (1986, p. 226, emp. added). Yet, “readily detectable amounts of carbon-14,” even in coal, diamonds, and various fossils, “have been the rule rather than the exception” in recent years (DeYoung, 2005, p. 49). Why? Evolutionists assert that the specimens in every case must have been contaminated by outside carbon. After all, everyone “knows” coal is millions of years old, right? Using C-14 dating on specimens already believed to be only hundreds or a few thousands of years old is considered acceptable. Scientists expect to find carbon in samples they perceive as young. But, if specimens believed to be millions of years old are tested (e.g., coal), and found to have carbon traces, then they “must” have been contaminated. Or so we are told.
        J) Example #1 has much significance in this debate since it is one of those rare
            occasions when chance grants us some external method of checking the
            dating technique.  Where no such external verification exists, we have to
            simply accept the verdict of carbon dating.
        K) Examples 2-4 show that the assumption of millions of years is flawed since
             these example show C14 in items which should not be present.
    3) Tree rings
        A) For a number of years it was thought that the possible errors were relatively
             minor, but more recent intensive research into C14 dates compared with
             calendar dates, shows that the natural concentration of C14 in the atmosphere
             has varied sufficiently to affect the dates significantly for certain periods.
             Because scientists have not been able to predict the amount of variation
             theoretically, it has been necessary to find a parallel dating method of absolute
             accuracy to assess the correlation between C14 dates and the calendar.
        B) The parallel dating method turned to in order to assess C14 dating involves
             the Bristlecone pine tree which grows at high altitudes in the mountains of
             California and Nevada.  They are the oldest living things on earth, some are
             said to be 5,000 years old.
        C) The tree is useful because it lives to a great age and certain signature sequences
             of tree rings are said to be characteristic of specific years before the present,
             enabling a younger tree to be correlated with older trees to stretch the tree-ring
             chronology further and further back.
        D) Cross-dating from one core to another by means of signatures enabled
             scientists to construct a master chronology that spans a total of 8,200 years
             before the present.  This has been used to check up on C14 dating variations.
        E) Hans Suess of the University of California in San Diego has C14 dated the
             bristlecone pine samples of the master chronology and from this a table of
             deviation has been drawn up which, in theory, allows for the inaccuracies
             of the C14 method to be corrected for up to around 10,000 years ago.
        F) Suess was able to show precisely how variations in the amount of cosmic
             radiation changed the amount of C14 in the atmosphere and his table
             indicates that by about 5,000 B.C., C14 derived dates are around 1,000
             years to young.
        G) Problems with this system
            1) Before the amendments, the dates given by C14 had confirmed the
                widely held belief that culture had spread from Egypt and the Middle
                East via Mycenae and Crete westward into Europe and the Britain.
                However, the new chronology indicate that, for instance, the island
                of Malta was carving spiral decorations and erecting megalithic
                structures BEFORE the supposed cradle of civilizations further east.
            2) A further difficulty has more recently been introduced in to the
                controversy because the fundamental principle on which this system
                is based-that a tree ring forms each year- has been questioned.  Certain
                pitfalls have been discovered in tree-ring analysis.  Sometimes, as is a
                very severe season, a growth ring may not form.  In certain latitudes, the
                 tree ring’s growth correlates with moisture, but in others it may be
                correlated with temperature.
            3) It is also possible for 2 tree rings to grow in a single year, when growth
                begins in spring but is later arrested by a period of unseasonable frost
                and later starts up again.
        H) These climactic variation presumably mean that a fresh set of correction
             tables will be needed to modify the bristlecone pine dates, although no one
             has yet devised a method of calibration for such tables.
    4) The key question for chemistry is how to explain the observed discrepancy
         between the rate of production of C14 and its rate of decay in the atmosphere.
         One possible explanation is that the atmosphere is still in nonequilibrium
          because the required 30,000 years have not elapsed since it was first formed.