Summations Only

Uranium shows the same slow rate of decay when we purify it and measure the decay rate in a lab. So apparently this neutron flux must be all around us.First, this is not what you originally posted. And frankly your scenario is so ridiculous that it is actually insulting that you'd try it here. Among the things I've done in the past is operate a nuclear reactor aboard a submarine. I'm not an amateur on this topic.Neutrons themselves are deadly radiation. We know that we aren't currently living in a neutron flux because we are not dead. Unlike the case with neutrinos, neutrons are quite detectable. This is one reason why your story is bogus.Another problem is that the composition of ordinary objects would be constantly changing. An ordinary iron bar would become radioactive over time, and of course would not contain lighter elements to replace the iron nucleii that have become radioactive.Uranium 235 does not transmute to higher elements when bombarded by neutrons. It undergoes fission roughly into nucleii half roughly original size and releasing lots of energy. This would be quite detectable. The neutron flux would not make it decay or transmute to new elements.Even water would become more radioactive over time as it absorbed neutrons. What replaces the lightest elements?ABE:And please. Stop calling this a "theory"Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

In stars. The neutron flux, temperature, and pressure on Earth at any time during its existence are nowhere near enough to produce your alleged effect. Elements and isotopes heavier than iron are produced only in supernovae, not even in ordinary novae. No way have they ever been produced on Earth. {ABE: under terrestial conditions. Maybe appropriate conditions have been produced in a lab, but I doubt it.}And even after that destroys your argument, you need to have relevant radioactive isotopes produced at a rate that exactly matches their decay rate minus a little bit in order for the various dating methods to be as consilient as we see.From Earth's Magnetic Field Strength - Past 800,000 Years: We see that the strength of the Earth's magnetic field has varied considerably over the last 50,000 years. In your scenario that would have affected the 14C dates in Suigetsu's varves in a highly nonlinear fashion. But the correlation between varve count and 14C dates is pretty darned linear.That's all the occurs to me off the top of my head. Bet others can come up with more gaping holes.All in all, Edited by JonF, : No reason given.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Mindie's fantasy is so wacked out it's really hard to wrap your mind around it. But I bet that if it happened it would really blow secular equilibrium away with 235U fissioning and the decay products forming new elements. But we see lots of rock samples in secular equilibrium.

And once again what you post is simply not true AND another attempt to misdirect attention.Compressed dating scales is as stupid idea as that the Biblical Flood happened. It too, just like the Biblical Flood has been totally refuted for hundreds of years by EVERY branch of Science and no honest person today can make such a claim.And I have produced the evidence to support my position. Humans, cattle, pigs, goats, and the whole list of critters I have given you repeatedly do not show a bottle event neck signature dating to 4500 years ago.Remember, if the Biblical Flood myths were true we would have to see the same event signature in EVERY critter descended from the critters on the Ark. Just one such critter not showing the event signature totally refutes the Biblical Flood.Now I know you keep complaining whenever people point out that you are not telling the truth, but the solution to that is to stop posting falsehoods.

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The theory is that muons cause fusion (and other processes), which maintains the current natural neutron flux which is currently slowing the decay rate through neutron capture.

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We might object that it is well known that the chain-reaction used in fission reactors - and fission bombs - relies on the production of fast neutrons produced by fission. Assuming that neutrons automatically slow decay requires more than assertion.With no numbers - and no evidence of slowed decay rates - this is barely a speculative hypothesis, but let's check the logic.

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The Neutron Capture Process - Windows to the Universe
"Neutron capture can occur when a neutron approaches a nucleus close enough for nuclear forces to be effective. The neutron is captured and forms a heavier isotope of the capturing element."

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THis simply states that an isotope can be changed to a heavier isotope. Nothing about slowing decay. (Also,we note that it is referring to the interior of the Sun where conditions are somewhat different to those on Earth).

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Instead of heavy isotopes steadily decaying, we have a simultaneous process of heavy isotopes being created, or lighter isotopes becoming heavier. This slows down the amount of daughter isotope present in the rock, the parent maintaining its heavy and unstable state.

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This is not SLOWING decay, this is HIDING the evidence of decay! If the daughter isotope is present in reduced amounts then methods which rely on measuring the quantity of the daughter isotope will show LOWER ages!Going off course to argue against yourself is hardly a sign that you have rationally considered your position,

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hal - Archive ouverte HAL
First, neutrons are formed as a result of interaction of cosmic radiation with atomic nuclei of material of the atmosphere and the earth’s crust.

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In fact this paper refers to THREE sources of neutrons:

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Cosmic radiation is currently high (from a weak magnetic field). The neutron background was therefore weaker during periods of strong magnetic fields. This weaker neutron flux would allow more of the parent isotope to decay into a stable state, and we would have had a historical period of rapid parent to daughter transition.

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Would it ? Why ? Wouldn't it depend on the elements and isotopes involved ? And why would it reduce the ages ? Doesn't that depend on the method ? It would be more honest to admit that you HAVEN'T done the necessary work to produce a viable hypothesis - and wiser, too, since you've made it absolutely obvious that you haven't.How can you honestly present this as a serious post ? I would call it desperately clutching at straws, but even that would be giving it too much credit.

One more thought: perhaps neutron capture in a sufficiently high flux could "reconstitute" some radioactive parent elements. I'm not a nuclear physicist. But how would neutron capture "reconstitute" parents that decay by alpha particle (a helium nucleus, two neutrons and two protons) emission? Such as 87Rb and several isotopes in the U and Th decay series.And what of the electron capture decay of 40K?It's all so incredibly laughable.

But as you would know if you'd ever taken the slightest interest in radiometric dating, in not one of the parent-daughter pairs used in radiometric dating is the daughter produced from the parent by neutron emission.

Method	Decay mode
K-Ar	Electron capture & beta-plus
Ar-Ar	Electron capture & beta-plus
Rb-Sr	Beta-minus
Sm-Nd	Alpha
Lu-Hf	Beta-minus
Re-Os	Beta-minus
La-Ba	Electron capture
La-Ce	Beta-minus
K-Ca	Beta-minus
238U-206Pb	Decay chain consisting of alpha and beta-minus decay events
235U-207Pb	Decay chain consisting of alpha and beta-minus decay events
Pb-Pb	Decay chain consisting of alpha and beta-minus decay events
Carbon dating	Beta-minus
Cosmogenic surface dating with 10Be	Beta-minus
Cosmogenic surface dating with 26Al	Beta-plus & electron capture

... and a few more too minor to mention. But that's fifteen methods, not one of them involving neutron emission, and so not one of them would be retarded by neutron capture.And there's a reason, mindspawn, why they don't use isotopes where the daughter is produced from the parent by neutron emission. Which is that the halflives of isotopes that decay in that way can be measured in tiny fractions of a second.There are other things wrong with your hand-waving pretense at a hypothesis, but above all it simply doesn't do what you want it to do --- it doesn't explain away one single date produced by any method of radiometric dating.Again I would point out that none of this is a secret. The information is freely available on the internet, for example in chapter 5 of this book.Did it not occur to you that in order to provide even a quarter-baked hypothesis explaining away radiometric dating, you should first find out how radiometric dating works?

If this were true, then if we were to shield a radioactive element from neutrons, then we should expect that the 'normal' rapid decay of the element would resume, correct?

Actually, this part of the proposal does work in terrestial conditions. Neutrons, having no charge, easily find their way into the nucleus of atoms.

I think the idea is that something like U238 gets coverted to U239 before the U238 can alpha decay, and that some poor U237 atom gets converted into a replacement U238 atom. The process must much happen faster than the 'natural' neutron free decay super fast rate of U238 decay that mindspawn also postulates, which means that a huge current neutron flux would be required. He might just as well blame the whole thing on pixie dust.And of course if I call his 'muon theory' a 'moron theory' then he has an excuse to ignore anything I post.Do posters familiar with geology find mindspawns statements about the Mississippi just as ridiculous as I find his nuclear chemistry?

You don't even have to know much about geology to understand two things; that mindspawns ideas are so silly that they have been nothing but laugh tracks for over two hundred years and that all it takes to disprove most of the is access to Google Earth and even the most basic education about the last 100 years in the US.A great example is to look at the Rio Grande Valley with Google Earth. There you can see literally hundreds of extinct channels of the Rio Grande over time. Look at the Mississippi and see how over the last 100 years we have to limit and control the flow and find all the OLD cutoff and channel remnants.And, too top it all off, absolutely none of mindspawns rabbit holes lead back to the topic he reuses to address, the fact that what we MUST see in the critters living today if the Biblical Flood myths were true is NOT seen.

Yes, and I'm not sure about how to attack this.Edited by petrophysics1, : No reason given.Edited by petrophysics1, : No reason given.

I find mindspawn's objections to radiocarbon dating probably even more ridiculous than you find his comments in your fields.When one has no clue about a scientific matter it is not wise to try to fake it as there are a lot of people out there who know these particular subjects.Mindspawn claims he doesn't get his information from creationist websites, and I believe him! Most of them, as bad as they are, are a good deal more rational than he is.I can't imagine that mindspawn thinks he can fool anyone with the arguments he has come up with. It is clear that he is fooling himself, somehow, but I can't believe he's fooling anyone else -- and perhaps he doesn't really need to. Most likely he just needs to fool himself.

Yes, though he hasn't quite scaled the sublime heights attained by the late Buzsaw, who managed to produce a reasoned argument for why the Mississippi River couldn't possibly have eroded the Grand Canyon. That is, a reasoned argument other than the one that would occur to everyone else.

"I doubt it" is not a strong argument.
"Cosmogenic neutrons, neutrons produced from cosmic radiation in the Earth's atmosphere or surface, and those produced in particle accelerators can be significantly higher energy than those encountered in reactors. Most of them activate a nucleus before reaching the ground; a few react with nuclei in the air" Is there any reason why the effect would not be proportionate?
A lot of consilience in radiometric dating is due to calibrating against existing methods.I have often searched for evidence of how the rates were established in the first place, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems they measure the changing ratio of parent to daughter over time, by literally separating the rock in a mass spectrometer. Its only linear because they already adjust their dates according to the magnetic field effect on carbon dating. The effect is attributed to the changing production of atmospheric carbon during fluctuations in the magnetic field.