Eric Aitchison wrote: As a historical revisionist I am very interested in the possibility that "carbon dating" of artefacts can be wrong due to changes in Earth's experience over time.
My only letter from Velikovsky was about the error in carbon dating mats from Tutankhamen's tomb. He is in the 1300's yet the sample tested puts it in the 800's.
Thus I think that CD is a most important topic and that if EU can provide answers then such should be sought.
I tried sending the link to this thread to the David Rohl Forum called "The New Chronology" but my post was rejected as of no interest. If corrections to CD will remove the ever present 600-year Dark Ages that abound should we not open dialogue with any scientist who can show the pitfalls of CD?
Eric Aitchison, Australia.
I agree that this is a VERY important problem that should be solved by EU. If it can show that the time-frame is actually a lot shorter for the Earth's creation then this changed the game completely. I really need to know if I can trust the dates of the ocean floor data? Is the oldest part of the ocean floor 180 million years old? I need to know if this is true or if the time-frame is shorter or longer then they say... I would have to say that the time-frame is distorted to show longer periods then they should be.
Peter
I have heard revisionist history that attempts to remove the Dark Ages. I have watched the videos (Much like I watch creationist videos) for any grains of truth. It seems that the makers of the 'No Dark Ages' works are literally removing large chunks of history. I would watch works by James Burke that explore those 600 years (from the Fall of Rome to beyond Constantine's empire). I would avoid putting too much stock in those revisionist works. This argument of Radio-Carbon dating should not be mistaken as proof of that proposition.
Now, onto the ages of the rocks on earth, we should not think that the ages are all circumspect, the timeframes themselves are shorter, but the frames themselves exist. Sufficed to say that, noting the timeframes of King Tut's tomb-wares are slightly reduced, we apparently had higher electrical charge the further back in time we go, the timeframes would be even more reduced the further back we go.
But they still exist. That would mean that, after accounting for local strikes at certain times, we should still a general trend back in time, like we do. The timeframes are shortened, but it doesn't mean that they are moved from millions of years ago to thousands. There is still distinct patterns over time, even if the rate of decay is different than it is now.
Interestingly, EU theory does solve the 'Creationist Argument' called "Radio-Halo Discrepencies". They can be solved by rocks that did form in seconds as opposed to the geological timeframes normally associated with rock formation. I'm sure that's another thread however
remelic
Re: Carbon Dating Results
That sounds fair to me. So the time frame is shifted slightly shorter the longer back you go because the Earth had more charge back then. I agree that Earth had more charge the farther back we go. That is logical. Is it also logical to assume that it can have that charge again or will the charge decay from then on?
Peter
nick c
Re: Carbon Dating Results
Some information on carbon (and radiometric) dating: Here is a link to radiometric variability correlated to distance from the Sun: http://arxivblog.com/?p=596
remelic wrote: That sounds fair to me. So the time frame is shifted slightly shorter the longer back you go because the Earth had more charge back then. I agree that Earth had more charge the farther back we go. That is logical. Is it also logical to assume that it can have that charge again or will the charge decay from then on?
Peter
Like all planets, we will continually attempt to attain equilibrium with our solar environment. However, should an interloping planet, or other catastrophic event occur with regards to the earth, we could become caught in a circuit which pumps us up with charge. In reality, it seems unlikely we will do anything but lose charge for the forseeable future.
allynh
Re: Carbon Dating Results
Remlic, atoms are far more interesting than consensus likes to admit, and radio-decay rates are variable. Look at the Geological time scales, and notice that the farther in the past you look, the longer each time frame is.
What you are seeing is the "Geological Finger of God" pointing to the present.
In essence, the farther back in time you look the larger the time scales appear to become. All of the dating systems depend on constant rates of decay for an undisturbed sample, which is why they fail. Each layer of crust laid down, each fossil, started its individual clock ticking, and consensus thinks that the clock runs undisturbed. The problem is, each of those clocks were accelerated as each new event occurred. So the oldest clocks are showing pulse after pulse of accelerated time, making each age seem greater than it is.
This is the list of Transmutation threads I've found along the way that discuss the issue.
I understand completely now thank you this will help immensely with my next project.
webolife
Re: Carbon Dating Results
If you truly understand "completely", you need read this post no further. Radiocarbon dating correlates well with known historical events back to about 5000 BP, but this correlation is based on the assumption that rates of C14 production and assimilation are in equilibirum, roughly what is observed today. "Roughly" is a key word here which leads to an error range that increases with smaller and smaller amounts of radiocarbon, ie the further you run the process "back in time." Now if, as some data shows, the current rate of production to assimilation is not in equilibrium, ie. there is less production than assimilation, then dating of fossils will produce larger numbers than is accurate. By the same token, if the atmosphere was less "mixable" in the past [as I believe...there was more of a greenhouse climate, evidenced by subtropical flora/fauna found in every fossil "layer"], then there was less mixing of the C14 from above with creatures on the surface; in this case radiocarbon dates will also be exaggerated, and increasingly moreso as you try to date objects that lived and died closer to that time of less mixing. Whatever catastrophic events are put forth to describe this radical change in the atmosphere, rapid changes in the past had apparently nearly leveled out [to today's ratios] by around 5000BP, but there is no way to know how long before... was it a few centuries, or several millenia, or millions of years? My premise is one of catastrophic change happening in the arena of circa 7000 BP give or take a millenium. When I read a radiocarbon result of say 50,000 BP, I think <~7000 BP>... when I see 7000BP I think <~5500 BP>, and so on. Regardless of any of these assumptions, it is very difficult to draw accurate conclusions from radiocarbon anyway. This is because the ratio of C14 to C12 is about 1/1000000, so in one half-life [less than 6000 yrs], this ratio decreases to 1/2000000, and obviously even tinier with successive half-lives. So often radiocarbon dates are only taken in accordance with assumptions from uniformitarian stratigraphy, subject of another thread.
Lloyd
Re: Carbon Dating Results
Radioactive Decay Not Constant * Here's a message from Fred Jueneman
- In 1974 John Anderson and George Spangler of the Univ. of Tennessee demonstrated that the Poisson distribution decay rate of carbon-14 could be varied by impressing a 90 volt potential across a monolayer of carbon, much to the discomfiture of Willard Libby. This was brought out at the McMaster Symposium radiocarbon session in 1974 devoted to Velikovsky's work, which was decried by several members of the establishment who were present. Radiologist H. C. Dudley himself privately cited several other decay instances where such anomalous behavior of radioelements were noted to have occurred. - Some decades ago, Ralph Juergens almost casually mentioned that an electromagnetic disruption of the Coulombic barrier within a radionuclide would alter the decay rate. On a massive scale, such disruption could cause a decay rate to accelerate, where for example uranium would disintegrate into its daughter products within a fraction of the time currently measured. This raises the problem: For what time was the nuclear clock set before it was reset? - A place to start is an article by Anderson and Spangler if you can acccess the publication is: J. Phys. Chem., 1973, 77 (26), pp 3114–3121. (There are others if one can dig deeper, but I don't have the time.) - As for Juergens, there are oblique references from Pensée II (1974), Parts I & II, "Of the Moon and Mars": http://saturniancosmology.org/juergensa.htm http://saturniancosmology.org/juergensb.htm - And, from a posthumous reference compiled by Earl Milton from Kronos VIII:2 (1983): http://www.kronos-press.com/juergens/k0802-electric-ii.htm - You might also be interested in a H.C. Dudley abstract in Lettere al Nuovo Cimento, although he assumes and ascribes a somewhat different mechanism for nuclear decay than Juergens. I didn't have full access to the article. http://www.springerlink.com/content/hn062m85127k5257 - Fred
Former Velikovsky disciple Leroy Ellenberger notes that
the Terminal Cretaceous Event 65 million years ago, whatever it was, left unambiguous worldwide signatures of iridium and soot. The catastrophes Velikovsky conjectured within the past 3500 years left no similar signatures according to Greenland ice cores, bristlecone pine rings, Swedish clay varves, and ocean sediments. All provide accurately datable sequences covering the relevant period and preserve no signs of having experienced a Velikovskian catastrophe.*
MY thought is- it is simply one more paper from the orthodoxy. The point of this whole thread is to call into question the very dating methods they use to assert such claims.
When was the irridium and soot laid down- "65 million years ago"? And there is a 'Great Extinction' every 65 million years? Odd happenstance, wouldn't you say- how gravity and sunlight alone might account for a cyclical regularity of global extreme change like that?
Radiocarbon dating is questionable, and is not the yardstick by which Mankind should measure times past on our planet.
Former Velikovsky disciple Leroy Ellenberger notes that
the Terminal Cretaceous Event 65 million years ago, whatever it was, left unambiguous worldwide signatures of iridium and soot. The catastrophes Velikovsky conjectured within the past 3500 years left no similar signatures according to Greenland ice cores, bristlecone pine rings, Swedish clay varves, and ocean sediments. All provide accurately datable sequences covering the relevant period and preserve no signs of having experienced a Velikovskian catastrophe.*
See Lloyd's post of the quote by Jueneman concerning radiometric clocks. This of course applies to the long range geological clocks as well as radiocarbong dating. So the dating of the Terminal Cretaceous event at 65 mya is a conclusion arrived at via the uniformitarian assumptions of constant decay rates and slow depositon. As strange as it may sound to those of us that have had a lifetime of having this dogma pounded into us, the end of the dinosaurs and beginning of homo sapiens may have overlapped. So it is possible in the catastrophic paradigm that the K-T event may very well be the remnant of a Velikovskian type catastrophe involving humans. Electrical discharges during such planetary encounters would have wreaked havoc on decay rates rendering the subsequent dates derived from radiometric clocks irrelevant, layers of strata could have been laid down in days, and preexisting layers could have been removed. Some parts of the Earth may have escaped serious damage from a particular event while other areas were obliterated.
What Ellenberger and Mewhinney have done is apply uniformitarian theory to a catastrophic scenario. The fundamental evidence negates Ellenberger and Mewhinney's analysis definitively but supports Velikovsky's scenario completely!
Nick
StevenJay
Re: Carbon Dating Results
nick c wrote: This of course applies to the long range geological clocks as well as radiocarbong dating.
A Freudian slip, if ever there were one!
And, who knows? You may have coined a new phrase with regards to radiometric reliability.
nick c
Re: Carbon Dating Results
Sounds like something illegal
webolife
Re: Carbon Dating Results
What Nick said [previous two posts]. Can't get the image of the couple in the back seat with the radio blaring out of my head.
When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.
But what if a well-known — and apparently constant — characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?
This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates — these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.
This is the conclusion that researchers from Stanford and Purdue University have arrived at, but the only explanation they have is even weirder than the phenomenon itself: The sun might be emitting a previously unknown particle that is meddling with the decay rates of matter. Or, at the very least, we are seeing some new physics.
Many fields of science depend on measuring constant decay rates. For example, to accurately date ancient artifacts, archaeologists measure the quantity of carbon-14 found inside organic samples at dig sites. This is a technique known as carbon dating.
Carbon-14 has a very defined half-life of 5730 years; i.e. it takes 5,730 years for half of a sample of carbon-14 to radioactively decay into stable nitrogen-14. Through spectroscopic analysis of the ancient organic sample, by finding out what proportion of carbon-14 remains, we can accurately calculate how old it is.
But as you can see, carbon dating makes one huge assumption: radioactive decay rates remain constant and always have been constant. If this new finding is proven to be correct, even if the impact is small, it will throw the science community into a spin.
Interestingly, researchers at Purdue first noticed something awry when they were using radioactive samples for random number generation. Each decay event occurs randomly (hence the white noise you'd hear from a Geiger counter), so radioactive samples provide a non-biased random number generator.
However, when they compared their measurements with other scientists' work, the values of the published decay rates were not the same. In fact, after further research they found that not only were they not constant, but they'd vary with the seasons. Decay rates would slightly decrease during the summer and increase during the winter.
Experimental error and environmental conditions have all been ruled out — the decay rates are changing throughout the year in a predictable pattern. And there seems to be only one answer.
As the Earth is closer to the sun during the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere (our planet's orbit is slightly eccentric, or elongated), could the sun be influencing decay rates?
In another moment of weirdness, Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed an inexplicable drop in the decay rate of manganese-54 when he was testing it one night in 2006. It so happened that this drop occurred just over a day before a large flare erupted on the sun.
Did the sun somehow communicate with the manganese-54 sample? If it did, something from the sun would have had to travel through the Earth (as the sample was on the far side of our planet from the sun at the time) unhindered.
The sun link was made even stronger when Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics, suggested that the Purdue scientists look for other recurring patterns in decay rates. As an expert of the inner workings of the sun, Sturrock had a hunch that solar neutrinos might hold the key to this mystery.
Sure enough, the researchers noticed the decay rates vary repeatedly every 33 days — a period of time that matches the rotational period of the core of the sun. The solar core is the source of solar neutrinos.
It may all sound rather circumstantial, but these threads of evidence appear to lead to a common source of the radioactive decay rate variation. But there's a huge problem with speculation that solar neutrinos could impact decay rates on Earth: neutrinos aren't supposed to work like that.
Neutrinos, born from the nuclear processes in the core of the sun, are ghostly particles. They can literally pass through the Earth unhindered as they so weakly interact. How could such a quantum welterweight have any measurable impact on radioactive samples in the lab?
In short, nobody knows.
If neutrinos are the culprits, it means we are falling terribly short of understanding the true nature of these subatomic particles. But if (and this is a big if) neutrinos aren't to blame, is the sun generating an as-yet-to-be- discovered particle?
If either case is true, we'll have to go back and re-write those textbooks.
