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Author Topic:   The great breadths of time.
gigahound
Inactive Member


Message 1 of 62 (313321)
05-18-2006 7:40 PM


To be posted in Geology/Flood forum if accepted.
I won't profess to be a christian, though I do lean in that direction and I don't want to get into an argument about who's right or wrong, but I was reading the Grand Canyon thread and would like to know why the layers of the earth require such great breadths of time.
Is it really so unrealistic that hot rock could cool within years/centuries? Maybe I'm missing something (and with only a Highschool education I'm sure I'm missing a lot)but if laboratories can simulate the formation of layers in a human lifetime, then what evidence is there that millions of years are a requirement for the formation of the Earth's layers?
Is there any direct evidence available?
My greater concern is that, once you get past the details in Cosmology, Geology, and Evolution, one is left with what appears to be an assumption of great breadths of time required to see what we see. We can scarecly deduce what has occured even 5,000yrs ago, let alone millions or billions.
I suppose the greater question here would be, are the great breadths of time considered Fact in science, or is it simply the Model that best defines our universe, such that scientists are actually open to other ideas, so long as the evidence makes sense and the "anti scientists" are simply making assertions under a misunderstanding?

Replies to this message:
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 Message 7 by Coragyps, posted 05-20-2006 10:08 AM gigahound has replied
 Message 8 by NosyNed, posted 05-20-2006 10:57 AM gigahound has replied
 Message 9 by jar, posted 05-20-2006 12:48 PM gigahound has not replied
 Message 10 by Matt P, posted 05-20-2006 4:27 PM gigahound has replied

  
AdminPD
Inactive Administrator


Message 2 of 62 (313438)
05-19-2006 5:11 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by gigahound
05-18-2006 7:40 PM


Join the Thread
quote:
but I was reading the Grand Canyon thread and would like to know why the layers of the earth require such great breadths of time.
The Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up thread is still open. Why not ask your question there and see what response you get before starting a new topic?

Usually, in a well-conducted debate, speakers are either emotionally uncommitted or can preserve sufficient detachment to maintain a coolly academic approach.-- Encylopedia Brittanica, on debate

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  • This message is a reply to:
     Message 1 by gigahound, posted 05-18-2006 7:40 PM gigahound has replied

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    gigahound
    Inactive Member


    Message 3 of 62 (313618)
    05-19-2006 6:39 PM
    Reply to: Message 2 by AdminPD
    05-19-2006 5:11 AM


    Re: Join the Thread
    As this has more to do with Earth and Time in general, I didn't want to derail the other thread with a tangent.

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    AdminNosy
    Administrator
    Posts: 4754
    From: Vancouver, BC, Canada
    Joined: 11-11-2003


    Message 4 of 62 (313785)
    05-20-2006 1:01 AM
    Reply to: Message 3 by gigahound
    05-19-2006 6:39 PM


    I agree
    I think the estimates of time is a worthy topic in its own right. Promoting to dates and dating.

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    AdminNosy
    Administrator
    Posts: 4754
    From: Vancouver, BC, Canada
    Joined: 11-11-2003


    Message 5 of 62 (313789)
    05-20-2006 1:04 AM


    Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

      
    JonF
    Member (Idle past 168 days)
    Posts: 6174
    Joined: 06-23-2003


    Message 6 of 62 (313836)
    05-20-2006 8:41 AM
    Reply to: Message 1 by gigahound
    05-18-2006 7:40 PM


    Is it really so unrealistic that hot rock could cool within years/centuries?
    Yes. Heat transfer is simple and well-understood. Under appropriate conditions "in the wild", hot rock cools in a few hours (e.g. underwater volcanic eruptions) or in a few hundred thousand years (e.g. large plutons, which are underground intrusions of magma that never make it to the surface) and everything in between.
    if laboratories can simulate the formation of layers in a human lifetime, then what evidence is there that millions of years are a requirement for the formation of the Earth's layers?
    I am not aware of any laboratory simulations or field observations of lithified (= turned into rock) layers in a human lifetime or longer. But the answer is that that there is lots and lots of other evidence, such as the many metamorphic rocks we see (sedimentary or igneous rocks that have been caried underground by subduction; spent millions of years down there turning into other kinds of rock in ways that take great time, temperature, and pressure; and finally returned to near the surface by uplift). Another good example is paleosols, layers of fossil soil; soil takes a long time to form, and there are lots of paleosols. And hardgrounds ... we don't want to ignore hardgrounds. And reefs, and ... and on and on and on. There's some good stuff on paleosols and plutons at Radiometric Dating, Paleosols and the Geologic Column: Three strikes against Young Earth Creationism. Hardgrounds at Hardgrounds and the Flood. See also Reefs and Young-Earth Creationism, Fossil Reefs, Flood Geology, and Recent Creation, A Paleosol Bibliography
    I suppose the greater question here would be, are the great breadths of time considered Fact in science, or is it simply the Model that best defines our universe, such that scientists are actually open to other ideas, so long as the evidence makes sense and the "anti scientists" are simply making assertions under a misunderstanding?
    It's sort of simultaneously fact and the best model. In science, there is always the possibility that other ideas will replace current ideas. This is true for any and all scientific conclusions. However, some conclusions are so well established that it's foolish to expect them to change, and we might as well call them facts. One example of such a conclusion is "if I jump out of my third-floor window and there's nothing there to stop me falling to the ground, I'm going to fall to the ground". Other examples of such conclusions are "The Earth is about 4.55 billion years old, life on Earth is about 3.5 billion years old, all life on Earth is descended from one or a few common ancestors, and evolution is the process by which the panoply of life arose".
    So far, nobody has offered any evidence that makes sense and contradicts an ancient Earth. About the closest anyone has come is the RATE group's helium diffusion results (see, e.g., Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 Years Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay ). But there are still some severe problems with their model. They have a long way to go to establish helium diffusion as a valid determination of age, and to establish that the few samples they studied are typical and that we understand their history (the times they spent at various temperatures in particular environments) well enought to apply the method. They have to come up with a better explanation than "God did it", because that's just magic and "it's magic" is not acceptable as a scientific explanation, even if it's true. (If magic does really exist, science is forever doomed to ignore it). There are other, more techncial problems; see Young-Earth Creationist Helium Diffusion "Dates": Fallacies Based on Bad Assumptions and Questionable Data but be warned it's quite technical.
    For the most part, the "anti-scientists" are simply making assertions under a misunderstanding. Alas, there's evil in the world, and some of them understand and are lying, and some are outright frauds.
    You didn't mention radiometric dating, which is probably the premier evidence for the age of the Earth, consisting of hundreds of thousands of observations that are consistent with each other and other measurements. You might want to read Radiometeric Dating Does Work!. If you are interested in the basics of how it works, Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective is the classic on-line resource. The Agfe of the Earht, G. Brent Dalrymple, Stanford University Press, 1991 is a pretty technical expostion. There's gobs and gobs of other information I could provide if desired.
    I bet the real geologists around here will also have something to say; I'm not all that conversant with feild geoilogy.

    This message is a reply to:
     Message 1 by gigahound, posted 05-18-2006 7:40 PM gigahound has replied

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    Coragyps
    Member (Idle past 735 days)
    Posts: 5553
    From: Snyder, Texas, USA
    Joined: 11-12-2002


    Message 7 of 62 (313855)
    05-20-2006 10:08 AM
    Reply to: Message 1 by gigahound
    05-18-2006 7:40 PM


    one is left with what appears to be an assumption of great breadths of time required to see what we see.
    There's also just about no "assumption" left in the universe being very, very old. Distances to even nearby galaxies are huge - so far that their light takes millions of years to reach us. The actual distances have been measured, in some cases, by methods that depend only on geometry and on the Doppler Effect - the same one the traffic cop uses to give speeding tickets.
    And then there are distant galaxies that look just like nearby galaxies, but small and dim. Similar to how the cows over past that second fence look like these twelve feet away, but small (all cows seem pretty dim to me). Measurements of objects in these distant galaxies pretty much makes it 100% certain that they are billions of light years away, and that we're seeing them as they were billions of years ago.
    And welcome to the zoo, Gigahound!

    This message is a reply to:
     Message 1 by gigahound, posted 05-18-2006 7:40 PM gigahound has replied

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    NosyNed
    Member
    Posts: 8996
    From: Canada
    Joined: 04-04-2003


    Message 8 of 62 (313870)
    05-20-2006 10:57 AM
    Reply to: Message 1 by gigahound
    05-18-2006 7:40 PM


    Chemistry
    Hi GH, I'm not a geologist or a chemist so anything I say is suspect but that frequently fails to stop me.
    As hinted at in the previous posts there are a LOT of different kinds of rock. What determines the type is the chemical composition of the materials making it up, the circumstances it formed under, the environment it has been in since formation and probably a lot more I don't know about.
    Obviously, different types of rock under different circumstances take differing amounts of time to form.
    You talked about cooling. That only applies to igneous rock. That starts in a moten state (think lava in hawaii). It can cool very quickly indeed as noted. However, it can also take a very long time to cool. I once walked on lava that had flowed 3 days before. I was walking on 3 day old rock. About 20 cms down the tree holes it was still glowing bright orange and so would not really be "rock" yet.
    If the "lava" (wrong term for this case) is underground and kilometers across it can take many, many 1,000's of years to cool. This is determined both by lab measurements of heat conductivity and the nature of the resulting rock. When lavas cool slowly they form crystals of a different size than when they cool rapidly.
    No one has yet mentioned that there are many types of sedimentary rock. Some types take time to pile up before they solidify (very fine grained). These lithify due to chemical processes and those take know (I think) amounts of time. Others are formed of the remains of living things and it takes large amounts of time to pile up enough of them.
    There are, if you go into the details, probably 1,000's of answers to your question.

    This message is a reply to:
     Message 1 by gigahound, posted 05-18-2006 7:40 PM gigahound has replied

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    jar
    Member (Idle past 395 days)
    Posts: 34026
    From: Texas!!
    Joined: 04-20-2004


    Message 9 of 62 (313897)
    05-20-2006 12:48 PM
    Reply to: Message 1 by gigahound
    05-18-2006 7:40 PM


    pointing back to the Grand Canyon thread
    We are still way down in the very bottom of the canyon, but one thing has become abundantly clear.
    The lowest layers that can be seen right now in the GC (certainly not the oldest rocks on earth since there are others underneath them) are are the waste product of yet older rocks. The Vishnu schist is the product of several steps. First other activity built a mountain somewhere else. That was then eroded and the gradually worn down into smaller and smaller pieces until you has sand and small rocks. The sand and small rocks were then transported to it's present location where other processes turned it into sandstone, then turned the sandstone into schist.
    Well it takes a while to build a mountain, then to wear it down, then to move the sand to a new location, then to change it to sandstone, then to change the sandstone to schist.
    BUT ...
    things can happen quickly as well. There has been some recent work on some of the rapid occurring events. One such event that folk have been studying for a long time is Heart Mountian. The evidence seems to show that it once moved about sixty miles eastward in perhaps as little as a half hour. Just imagine a mountain passing by at about 120 miles per hour.
    But IMHO these are the important parts.
    • we have been able to tell for a long long time that the rock at the summit was older than the rock at the bottom.
    • that means the geologists are able to recognize unusual strata.
    • they have been able to find several things that are unique to Heart Mountain that makes it different from the other peaks in the range it started out in.
    • they have been able to model the event to show one method where such a thing would be possible.
    The point of all this ramblin is that there is not just one set of evidence that points to an old universe, but rather every single dataset points to an old universe, and that there is remarkable correlations between every single method of dating. It is not that one method points to a universe that is young, another sorta young, another kind old and another very old, all seem to point to a very old universe.

    Aslan is not a Tame Lion

    This message is a reply to:
     Message 1 by gigahound, posted 05-18-2006 7:40 PM gigahound has not replied

      
    Matt P
    Member (Idle past 4775 days)
    Posts: 106
    From: Tampa FL
    Joined: 03-18-2005


    Message 10 of 62 (313952)
    05-20-2006 4:27 PM
    Reply to: Message 1 by gigahound
    05-18-2006 7:40 PM


    A bit of math
    Hi Gigahound,
    Most people have provided you with a general discussion of how it's very hard to imagine a large body of rock cooling rapidly. I'm going to provide a bit of math to further illustrate the difficulty of rapid cooling. I use Fick's laws to illustrate these phenomena. Fick's laws are phenomenological laws that describe how something must move across an area, and are essentially equations that describe the conservation of mass or energy for a given system. Fick's laws can be applied to temperature, as temperature is essentially energy and energy is conserved. You can find out a bit more about Fick's laws here: Fick's laws of diffusion - Wikipedia
    Fick's second law derives from his first law and states that the change in heat is proportional to the heat gradient across a body. In math terms this becomes:
    dT......d2 T
    -- = K ------
    dt......dx2
    where dT/dt is the change in temperature with respect to time, K is a constant, and the second term describes the change in the temperature gradient, or the temperature with distance profile. Sorry for the dots, but the board doesn't like the extra spaces. Luckily for a first order calculation this simplifies to:
    t = x2 / K
    where t is the time it takes a body of rock of size x to cool. K is constant for all rock and is ~10-2 cm2/s, so the units work as well.
    Let's try a few examples. NosyNed describes walking on a lava field in Hawaii. The size of the rocks is on the order of 10 cm to 1 m. This gives:
    t = x2 / K
    t = (10 cm)2 / 10-2 cm2/s
    which becomes ~104 seconds or about an hour. Rock that is this small cools rapidly, and can be stepped on. For a rock 1 m in size, this stretches to several days to cool (106 seconds).
    However, there are some huge bodies of rock that look very similar to rocks we see today, notably large plutons. Plutons are large bodies of magmatic rock that have cooled slowly underground. Consider the Idaho plutons (see here: Idaho Batholith ). These plutons are ~100 km in length, and we use a distance of about half of this as our distance. Using the same math as before,
    t = x2 / K
    t = (5000000 cm)2 / 10-2 cm2/s
    t = several million years.
    The time it takes to cool these rocks is several million years. These are some of the largest igneous bodies, so even small rock bodies (a few km in size) take several thousands of years. These equations are great since they're so simple- they are essentially just the conservation of energy applied to a system.
    Some large plutons are young and are still hot as they haven't had time to cool down yet. These plutons are usually associated with geothermal activity like geysers, and Yellowstone national park is on top of one.
    I hope this gives you a little bit of appreciation for the math that goes behind how long it takes rock to cool. Enjoy!
    Edited by Matt P, : Fixed superscripts

    This message is a reply to:
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    gigahound
    Inactive Member


    Message 11 of 62 (313981)
    05-20-2006 7:14 PM


    Good start?!
    I've already begun researching several items pertaining to the current respones. I'll try to post a reply to each person below.
    Also if my upcoming replies seem to be stoking a debate, I apologize in advance; it's not my intent to debate, but to clarify my own misconceptions and purhaps make a definitive decision on where I want to stand.
    I've followed, in a limited manner, many scientific studies over most of the disciplines. However, I think much of my information has been second-hand and out-of-date, or merely insufficient.
    Please be patient as I work through the information that I am being presented with here and through my research.

      
    gigahound
    Inactive Member


    Message 12 of 62 (313999)
    05-20-2006 8:36 PM
    Reply to: Message 6 by JonF
    05-20-2006 8:41 AM


    These are the posts that I saw mention geological testing in labs. Now that I've re-read them, it seems I was mistaken, the labs seem to be studying the folding of the Earth, rather than the layering, however, there are folds within the layers, correct? So how far off base am I here?
    http://EvC Forum: Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up. -->EvC Forum: Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up.
    So you are saying that under pressure rocks will fold and deform. I assume this has been tested in the lab and that under pressure you can actually bend rock that normally would break.
    And the cooling of rock seems to have explained mathematicly in this thread already, but here is the post that says it was done in a lab.
    http://EvC Forum: Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up. -->EvC Forum: Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up.
    Oh, I'm sure they'll come up with some ad hoc explanation that ignores every other line of evidence. REcently we discussed on another board, the rapid formation of granitic (coarse grained) textures in laboratory setting and very controlled conditions, and YEC took this to mean that giant batholiths, like the Sierra Nevada, could have cooled in just a few weeks. Kind'a flys in the faces of logic and intuition, but there you go...
    Also in the same thread message #s 130 and 131 http://EvC Forum: Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up. -->EvC Forum: Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up.
    So you are saying that under pressure rocks will fold and deform. I assume this has been tested in the lab and that under pressure you can actually bend rock that normally would break.
    Yes, rock deformation labs all over the world have performed these sorts of experiments.
    Edited by gigahound, : No reason given.

    This message is a reply to:
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    gigahound
    Inactive Member


    Message 13 of 62 (314002)
    05-20-2006 8:50 PM
    Reply to: Message 7 by Coragyps
    05-20-2006 10:08 AM


    The actual distances have been measured, in some cases, by methods that depend only on geometry and on the Doppler Effect - the same one the traffic cop uses to give speeding tickets.
    Are you sure? Doesn't a remote measuring device require the signal to "bounce" back? Shouldn't it take just as long for a measuring signal to return from a target as it took to reach it? If so, then how can we measure objects at millions of light years away with this method?
    I understand that many measurements are ascertained through mathematics based on brightness...but how does the above work?

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     Message 14 by AdminNosy, posted 05-20-2006 8:53 PM gigahound has replied
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    AdminNosy
    Administrator
    Posts: 4754
    From: Vancouver, BC, Canada
    Joined: 11-11-2003


    Message 14 of 62 (314003)
    05-20-2006 8:53 PM
    Reply to: Message 13 by gigahound
    05-20-2006 8:50 PM


    Supernova measurement
    see
    Falsifying a young Universe. (re: Supernova 1987A)
    for the details. You topic was regarding rocks. Let's not go too far afield.

    This message is a reply to:
     Message 13 by gigahound, posted 05-20-2006 8:50 PM gigahound has replied

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    NosyNed
    Member
    Posts: 8996
    From: Canada
    Joined: 04-04-2003


    Message 15 of 62 (314005)
    05-20-2006 8:56 PM
    Reply to: Message 12 by gigahound
    05-20-2006 8:36 PM


    bending rock
    Try to remain focussed.
    I assume this has been tested in the lab and that under pressure you can actually bend rock that normally would break.
    I'm not sure how this ties into the breadths of time topic.
    You should give a reason for each question you ask. This will help individuals answer it in an appropriate fashion and help focus you on the core topic.
    The topic is VERY big; there is a lot of material so letting it wander even a bit will make a mish mash out of it and you won't be able to wrap your head around it.

    This message is a reply to:
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