Carbon 14 in fossils?

quote:

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It is not possible that all radiometric age determinations are tremendously wrong, as the YECs would have us believe.

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Actually, what YECs would have us believe is that geologists get many different dates for the same units and choose the one date that conforms to their pre-existing biases.

No.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

In a radioactive sample, the signal (the amount of radioactivity) that is measured is going to be given byA = A₀e^-kt/5730,where A₀ is a constant related to the amount of C14 that was initially present, and k is the natural log of 2. If we assume that the same amount of C14 is always initially present in every sample (in real life this isn't true, but shouldn't affect the results here by more than an order of magnitude or so), then we havediamond: A_d = A₀e^-k58000/5730something else: A_se = A₀e^-k5800/5730Thus, dividing:A_se/A_d = e^{k(58000-5800)/5730}
=e^k52200/5730
=e^9k
=512Thus, the something else in your example has 512 times the signal of the diamond.Hope this helps.Edited by Chiroptera, : Forgot the correct factor in the exponent.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies