Are Uranium Halos the best evidence of (a) an old earth AND (b) constant physics?

I believe it is mathematically impossible for the situation you need to occur. If a correlation exists between high decay energy and short half life, then a correlation must also exist between short half life an higher decay energy.We are talking about quantum tunneling through a barrier, with the idea being that lowering the barrier height will increase the probability that a decay particle can tunnel through the barrier, thus increasing the decay rate (short half life). Conservation of energy considerations imply that an escaped particle must have higher kinetic energy if the barrier is lowered. Conservation of energy would also require that raising the barrier height would have the opposite effect.I agree with Zen Deist. Halos are great evidence that the energy of alpha particles from decay has not changed. If you have evidence for a hypothesis that allows some other mechanism for decay other than tunneling, let's hear it.I'd also have to ask why the barrier height would be expected to change with time. Is there some kind of matter aging effect at work?

Noone has made such an argument. What has been shown is that higher decay energies are correlated to shorter half lives. Fast light cures all eh?I'm game to entertain the idea that you are not grasping at straws. Why don't you describe a mechanism for lowered light speeds to affect alpha particle decay rates, such that the mechanism does so without affecting decay energy, some evidence that such a mechanism ever existed, and some evidence that the speed of light has changed in the last few hundred million years. Then perhaps we'll discuss supernova 1987a.And by the way, your proposed mechanism should affect decay rates in such a way that dating methods which overlap in date range give comparable results.You don't have to do all the work yourself. You can cite someone else's work. I'd be happy to rip into it.

To be fair to foreveryoung, he seems to be proposing that some property that we are taking as constant might have changed with the result that the known relationship between decay energy and decay rate would also change.Of course the obvious question to ask before pursuing such a possibility is why would the decay energy remain constant under a change in the relationship? After all, that is the value that affects the halos. In other words, if some property of the universe is not constant as we assume, then why is decay energy fundamental and constant?And the explanation also has to work out for a number of different nuclides. In those cases, we might not have to explain a constant decay energy, but we should be able to predict that their decay rates were faster by the same factor at a particular time in the past.So yeah, I'm skeptical that foreveryoung might be right. But...Maybe the answer would pop out of the analysis of Gamow's equations. If so then foreveryoung's question would seem to be on topic. He's fixed on the speed of light, but even the speed of light is based on other constants (permeability and permittivity of free space) that define some kind of "stiffness" of the space-time. And we might come up with other possibilities like charge or mass of some fundamental particle(s).I've gotta get to doing some real work, but I'm going to take a look at those links of yours real soon.

This kind of humility is completely unnecessary and should be avoided when engaging in online discourse.A more correct and apparently well practiced approach is to remind us that you were referring of course to a normalized decay rate based on a 1kg mass of the radioactive material under discussion. The normalized decay rate is of course inversely proportional to the half life of a radioactive substance.Where is your hubris dude? Did you forget you were online?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I'm sure that foreveryoung would be willing to allow c to change to avoid that issue. Remember that some of the proponents of a relatively young universe want to believe in "tired light" explanations that just don't fit with the observational evidence that c is constant.

The above is what happens when you let the accountants run the company. Yes it is true that net profits were low because the difference between revenue and expenses was not sufficient, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the company should eliminate its R&D department because the scientist in R&D only consume money and never actually sell anything and don't produce anything other than expensive prototypes and notebooks full of stuff nobody else in the company even understands.Similarly, is true that we can calculate the amount of energy released using E=mc*c, but that does not tell us anything about the source of the released energy. For example, in an exothermic chemical reaction, the energy released could in theory be calculated by finding the tiny difference in mass between products and reactants, but the explanation for where the energy actually comes from is completely unrelated to any mass difference, and is instead related to the bonding energies and forces.The physical properties that are related to the decay rate and the decay energy of the decay particle were discussed in a fair amount of detail in a previous thread. I don't mind discussing it again.Also here is a paper titled "The Quantum Mechanics of Alpha Decay".http://web.mit.edu/8.13/www/JLExperiments/JLExp45.pdfIf I were going to make a short response to your proposal about changing the values of 'c', 'G', and the mass of a proton, it would be that those changes are going to have consequences that require changing other constants if we want to avoid problems that show up in things we can observe. If you want to convince someone that changing a few constants will allow only the change rates you favor changing to be different, but will all other things stay the same, you have your work cut out for you.

Why should I entertain what appears to be technobable. Before you get around to explaining how to make photons travel at infinite speed, let's look at your proposition that gravity is just a drag on the zero point energy field. If that were the case, then something else other than gravity must be causing the actual apparent attractive force between masses. But would we not have called THAT mysterious force gravity?Further, there is no need to jiggle anything to produce gravity and no amount of jiggling that we do can produce more of it.If this technobabble does not improve l am out of here.

Never mind.Edited by NoNukes, : Already covered. Dogpile avoidance.

Just to expand on what Dr. A is saying, it is necessary that any new theory give results that match the old theory in places where the old theory is known to work. It is not fatal if some notions of the new theory involve a little handwaving, but it is fatal if those notions don't lead to a theory that matches the old theory in domains where the old theory is good.It is also fatal if the notion cannot be used to make any calculations at all, but perhaps such a failure is only due to the lack of skill of the notioneer.In addition, if the new theory is going to replace the old theory, then there need to be some observations where the new theory explains things that the old theory cannot. And despite the wishes of some, Biblical interpretations of Genesis are NOT scientific observations.For both types of predictions, we need to be able to proceed from notion, no matter how hand-wavy to calculation in a rigorous way. It is not enough to say "light comes in quantized energies", but we must be able to show that such quantization requires a given result that matches a known observation. For example, when Plank postulated the energy of photons to be hf, he was able to mathematically produce a prediction of the spectrum for black bodies that matched reality extremely well.Applying those principles to fy's notion that vacuum energy affects the speed of light or any other physical, a convincing argument would require:1. A rigorous calculation showing that the notion leads to predictions known to be true.2. A rigorous calculation showing that some known observation not predicted by current theory follows directly from the given notion.Again the notion itself might involve some handwaving and plausibility based argument. I would suggest that something like the equivalence principle or invariance of physical laws would serve such a role in General Relativity. But Einstein's was able to proceed from those notions to accurately account for the orbit of Mercury including motions not modeled using Newtonian physics.Fy has not yet done a convincing job of hand waving. Alternatively, it would be okay to use the known speed of light as a constraint or boundary condition. But you'd still need to make some calculations that have the predictive power I oulined above. After making those calculations, and only after, we might take a look at what your notion leads to in domains that we cannot currently observe. That's it in a nutshell. Exactly so.