In Australia, wood found in Tertiary basalt was clearly buried in the lava flow that formed the basalt, as can be seen from the charring. The wood was dated by radiocarbon (14C) analysis at about 45,000yrs old. But the basalt was dated by the potassium-argon method at 45 millions yrs old.
Glad that you brought this silly example up because it is very important to understanding dating.
First, if they had gotten a date older than radiocarbon date any older than they did, it would have been thrown out as being unreliable anyway. Each of the 40 or so different radiometric methods have cover different ranges and with different accuracies. So if you tried to date a really old piece of wood, say a piece that is 200,000 years old, using radiocarbon dating, guess what, you'd get an age of about 40-50,000 years. Sorry, that is the limit of the method. It does not mean the wood is not 200,000 years old, only that the tester used the wrong tests.
Garbage in---Garbage out.
This particular test is also a good example because no details are ever given. It is repeated on all the Creationists sites, but on none of them do they give any of the necessary information. If such a thing ever happened, and there is no evidence that it did, it would be classified as a hoax at best, outright fraud being far more likely.
Fraud is a strong word and I want you to understand fully why it was the word chosen.
Since the {edited to fix spelling (delete an extraneous y)} specifics are never given, we can only assume what happened. Most likely, a sample was given to a lab with no information about its origin and the lab was told to perform radiocarbon testing. The results showed that it was at the limits for testing by that method so it is
at least 45,000 years old.
That is all that is shown.
Sorry, your example shows nothing beyond an poorly attempted fruad.
Try again.
This message has been edited by jar, 06-14-2004 09:00 PM
Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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