Radiometric Dating and the Special Theory of Relativity.

Not an obvious point of contention but this is the favourite gambit of the biblical and koranic literalist I regularly engage and this is his standard canard.Having just exhaustively explained the premises and evidences of why radiometric dating works as is useful for dating stuff like rocks.His come back to me was this:>>I see that as purely hypothetical because over that timescale we would be making assumptions about the unchanging 'laws of the universe' and therefore NOT be reliable<<Yes this is the old 'maybe the constant laws of the universe weren't constant the whole time' argument and 'I can't prove otherwise!'But his reasoning isn't just this hyperbole it rests, so he claims, on Special Relativity.>>According to modern thinking about time from physicists*, the future and the past are of identical nature. Surely you wouldn't feel confident to extrapolate a billion years into the future ... so why would you be so confident extrapolating into the past???<<* note, I know him: He means Einstein.UPDATE: After this forum was transferred he was even more explicit:>>I can't be confident that ANY method of dating could be at all reliable for such orders of magnitude. It makes assumptions about the universe and assumes we know enough about space-time to accurately estimate such figures. It doesn't make any sense to me, and doesn't answer any questions about life and its meanings ... it just rolls out such and such happened so many millions of years ago (or so we think with our scientific beliefs/theories/assumptions.<<I'm just wondering how the EvC community will divide over this question and how you solve the problem of someone who will not countenance the accuracy of dating methods, 'because time is relative.'Explaining time dilation, I've found is futile, so I'm looking for suggestions.Thanks.LJ.Edited by Lithium-joe, : Typo and punctuation fix.Edited by Lithium-joe, : Updated content from my theist....

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Hi Lithium-joe, and welcome to the fray. as you are new here, some posting tips: type [qs]quotes are easy[/qs] and it becomes: or type [quote]quotes are easy[/quote] and it becomes:

quote:

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quotes are easy

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Try this: Are Uranium Halos the best evidence of (a) an old earth AND (b) constant physics?, and you might understand the argument better than I, but the critical thing is that the diameter of the ring is proportional to the alpha energy released with each decay stage, and that changing the rate of decay necessarily changes the alpha energy released. Thus if the rate of decay were not constant while the ring was forming, that then the ring would not form - it would be blurred, and more blurred the older the ring was.Enjoy.

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I've found that creationists start out with a religious belief in a young earth and start making excuses from there.The vast majority of them know nothing of the nuts and bolts of dating, and accept the most ridiculous nonsense from the internet and creationist literature as TRVE because they want it to be TRVE.Most of them don't know enough about science to even understand the scientific evidence--they just know its wrong. They have no expertise on their own, they just know/hope/believe that scientists and their dating methods are wrong somehow.Because of this it is very hard to discuss things with them because scientific evidence doesn't faze them in the least.They know even less about relativity.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Thanks for the tips RAZD, I borrowed the convention of using the angular brackets for quotes because they are slightly more visible than quotation marks.I'll try and use the quote tags from now on.Thanks for the referral I'll take a look.

Thanks for reply Coyote.Well Warner (my theist) is an odd kettle of fish. Something like a Unitarian pantheist (Apparently quite liberal as an institution but ha-ha not our Warner. And his Pantheism is pre 17th century, as I've discovered, Warner's never heard of Baruch Spinoza.)He is is also a biblical creationist (A curious mix of theistic pantheism - not a contradiction, apparently) and he's a Koranic literalist (the fun we've had arguing whether certain suras suggest the moon is a star, I can't tell you....) Also a classic Cartesian dualist (we are soul stuff inside bodies) but there the comparison stops. Introspection and sceptical inquiry? Forget it!So his religious beliefs (both of them) are circa the illiterate goat herds of first century Palestine and the of course the final revelation to the Prophet Mohammed, but his philosophical insights appear stillborn somewhere before The Great Fire of London but after Galileo was tried for Heresey; an appropriate metaphor then since this involves on the one hand the abrogation and wilful ignorance of evidence and the spread of the Plague through dubious hygiene.There seems to have been some crisis in his life when religion became important and he did the rounds trying a bit of this and that and in a bold stab at ecumenicalism - accepted the two main denominations wholesale. More bang for your buck I suppose...I suppose I should be grateful for a small mercies that he didn't encounter A Kingdom Hall or The Church of Scientology while Moribund and Morose of Birmingham.Anyway this is an adult conversion.He doesn't appear to have a critical bone in his body and seems to have been deeply affected by some particular ideas in science, particularly Einstein and Hawking - probably because they each mention god so much (I'm joking) which run like an undercurrent through his thinking without the necessary and concomitant acceptance of scientific methods or other scientific discoveries, or for that matter, other scientists or studies.Sometimes he takes his ball and goes home; though he just can't stay away - apparently we are damned and he feels compelled to minister.h2g2, where I hail from was Douglas Adam's early internet experiment to make a Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy before Wikipedia stole our thunder. A small oasis of like minded, basically rationalists, it seems to attract theists like wasps to the picnic. But there's a large atheist community there who put the leg work into rebutting this nonsense.Warner's career as Chief Idiot started by spamming threads with quotes from the Koran, so he endeared himself to us immediately...His latest jolly jaunt was to demarcate something he called 'calendar time' a scale which he said was something people understood in their lives in the scales of months, years onto an upper scale of perhaps 100 - 1000 years.But beyond this, a dim and distant land lurked and it was called "unreliable hypothesising about unseen events using questionable dating methods."So he reckoned the radiometric dating was accurate but not congruent with his 'calendar time.' So saying 'this fossil in 47 millions years old' is a meaningless statement, according to him.A friend of mine referred me to this site while I was researching radiometric dating to come back at him with some specifics with. I got him to consider whether for example the ice sheets in Antarctica were *at least* 900,000 years old. - and he agreed! I was floored! This wild mixture of religious ideas his simultaneously holds in his head doesn't seem to include a specifically Young Earth creationism just a fuzzy dislike of any number bigger than about 10,000. (Go ahead - scream. I know I do.)But now he's snapping back into routine, what was it "any dating method is unreliable"
Ah religious nonsense, as regular as a high fibre diet and approximately the same consistency upon exit.The sensation of talking to Warner, in case you are interested, is something like clubbing the only seal pup which ever deserved it. Edited by Lithium-joe, : No reason given.Edited by Lithium-joe, : Punctuation fixes and after thoughts...Edited by Lithium-joe, : No reason given.Edited by Lithium-joe, : I apparently can't spell for toffee!Edited by Lithium-joe, : or parse Grammar. I need more tea. Is that a valid reason?

Further to the above about radiometric dating and special relativity;I had a message in my inbox this morning from someone worried I was doing science a disservice by getting one of my details wrong, so I wanted to run it by you guys, since there's probably someone here who can tell me one way or the otherThe message was this: Okay, says I. Better check that.Google is being a bit useless today, so here I am.Now my understanding was that the decay rate is constant but that the fissile elements decline on an exponential curve.So take Carbon-14 the half life is approximately 5730 years but the mean lifetime of Carbon-14 is exponential so that the quantity decreases at a rate proportional to its value, which means the amount of radioactive elements disappears on a declining gradient, but in regular periods of 5730 years - that's the constant part.If it weren't constant then after the first 10 years since the clock started Carbon-14 lost half it's fissile material. then after a period 1.4 million years it was reduced down to a quarter, then a 12th after a half life of 3 centuries...etc.In other words you need logs to calculate the exponential curve of the decay to the daughter element but the interval of the half life is constant and fixed.Now am I right or hopelessly wrong, because I need to know.Or what is the correct determination of 'constant' in this context?Thanks.Edited by Lithium-joe, : No reason given.

He obviously doesn't know what he is talking about, Decay rates are constant in that the half-life (the time it takes for half of any given amount of the element to decay) is constant.And he agrees with that. So he's not saying anything of significance - and if he understood even the basics of the subject he'd know that.

Thanks Paul,I want to ensure, however, that I'm not making a false positive where he's wrong and I'm wrong.So is my description accurate?Also *do* logarithms come into this at all?Glancing at the wikipedia article of radioactive decay, i can see logs come into the equations that are used to calculate the values, but that appears to be the extent of it.

If you look you'll see that you description agrees with his.The decay rate considered as half-life, or the proportion of a given mass of the substance to decay in a given time is constant. The decay rate considered as the mass that decays in a given time is not. The problem is that he wrongly assumes that "constancy of decay rates" refers to the latter.The decay rate as he defines it is proportional to the mass - so as the mass declines exponentially, so does his decay rate. It's not logarithmic.(To explain in more detail, he's got his axes mixed up - if you measured time, t, in half-lives and set the initial decay rate d to 1 then t = -log2(d). But that's the wrong way around - we want d in terms of t - which is d = 2^-t - an exponential.)(Hope I haven't made any embarrassing mistakes - this is not the math I'm best at !)

Back onto Warner's contributions.What do you all make of this: Now it seems to me like an Argument from Personal Incredulity - and it ignores the vast tracts of evidence that support the the *reasonable* assumptions and deductions and inferences that are made. Which will form I think the frame of my answer to 'this is guesswork' and I think is a fallacy of induction too!I had to laugh though - a human life-span of 1000 years!But what would the ideal riposte to this sort of thing be.(He's now receiving support from other parties saying he's expressing 'reasonable doubt' and isn't being dogmatic. Is that a fair and correct assessment?)

Here's a list of the usual rebuttals to the position that radiometric decay rates were greater in the past:

• Radioactive decay generates heat, and concentrating billions of years of radioactive decay into just a few thousand years would have melted the Earth. Keep in mind that the Earth is already very hot, only the outer 20 miles or so being cool enough for life.
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• The dates yielded by various dating methods based upon different isotopes agree, which would be impossible if decay rates were not constant.
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• Astrophysical studies of distant stars and galaxies millions and billions of light years away, meaning that we're observing them as they were millions and billions of years ago, indicate that radiometric processes then were the same as today.
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• Radiometric dating is consistent with what we know about the rates of other physical processes, such as magnetic field reversals recorded in rocks, the speed of tectonic processes, and geological processes of sedimentation and erosion.

If I've left any out people can add to this.Your description of Warner says that it would be wise to keep in mind that some out there deny a spherical Earth, or heliocentrism, or that we ever walked on the moon. You don't want to waste your time on someone with ideas so whacked out that he could never have any influence in the creation/evolution debate. In fact, such whackos only hurt the causes they serve by making them seem far more weird than they really are. The Republicans sound reasonable when you listen to Colin Powell, but then Pat Buchanan pipes up and scares the bejesus out of everyone.AbE: Of course, this means it would be in the Democrats best interest to secretly sponsor Buchanan's speaking engagements, and so maybe what you're doing is a great strategy because it encourages Warner to state his weird opinions more often.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Add last para.

Hi Lithium-joe,Paulk has pretty well answered the question, but another way to present it is that the rate is a constant in an exponential formula. This is the simplest version of the decay formula that I know of:
P_(t)=P₍₀₎*(1/2)^kt
were k = 1/half-life and is constant (the decay rates given use e in the formula instead of 1/2, so there is some conversion involved, but still it is a constant).You can take logs of both sides (hence the use of e), and it becomes
ln{P_(t)}=ln{P₍₀₎*(1/2)^kt}
or
ln{P_(t)}=kt*ln{P₍₀₎*(1/2)}
Hope that helps.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
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to share.

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But what would the ideal riposte to this sort of thing be.

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Percy's covered a lot of responses - and you could add others like SN1987A.But essentially he's proposing that the laws of nature might have changed - but they changed in a way that leaves no evidence whatsoever. All the measurements are affected in the same way. Fundamental constants changed - but coordinated with other changes such that no consequences are observed. If he finds that more plausible than the idea that there have been no relevant changes then I'd like to know why.

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(He's now receiving support from other parties saying he's expressing 'reasonable doubt' and isn't being dogmatic. Is that a fair and correct assessment?)

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Not really. Reasonable doubt needs reasonable grounds - and ignorance of the evidence is hardly sufficient to support the opinion that the experts ARE wrong.

• Radioactive decay produces radioactivity, and concentrating billions of years of radioactive decay into just a few thousand years would have killed pretty much all life with radiation poisoning.
• "Radioactive decay" is actually an "umbrella term" for three very different phenomena, each of which is governed by different mechanisms and comes in many varieties. Any changes would have to be tightly coordinated between the many variations in order to maintain the observed extemely high level of agreement between dates obtained from different isotopes/mechanisms. It's apparently impossible to come up with a scenario in which one mechanism changes; it's impossible cubed to come up with a scenario in which three mechanisms change in lock-step.
• The Oklo natural nuclear reactor. Dated by mainstream methods to about 1.8 billion years ago, the observed distribution of byproducts woiuld be very different if decay rtates had changed.

The physics that goversn radioactive decay is fundamental to the Uinverse, and changes would hafve repercussions in all sorts of areas that you wouldn't expect without knowing the physics. Professor Steve Carlip compiled a list of things that we would see if decay rates have changed, from The fundamental constants and their variation: observational status and theoretical motivations:

• Changes in the radius of Mercury, the Moon, and Mars (these would change because of changes in the strength of interactions within the materials that they are formed from);
• Long term ("secular") changes in the orbits of the Moon and the Earth --- measured by looking at such diverse phenomena as ancient solar eclipses and coral growth patterns;
• Ranging data for the distance from Earth to Mars, using the Viking spacecraft;
• Data on the orbital motion of a binary pulsar PSR 1913+16;
• Observations of long-lived isotopes that decay by beta decay (Re 187, K 40, Rb 87) and comparisons to isotopes that decay by different mechanisms;
• The Oklo natural nuclear reactor (see above);
• Differences in gravitational attraction between different elements (Eotvos-type experiments);
• Absorption lines of quasars (fine structure and hyperfine splittings);
• Changes in the mass difference between the K0 meson and its antiparticle;
• Geological evidence of "exotic" decays, such as double beta decay of Uranium 238 or the decay of Osmium to Rhenium by electron emission, which are impossible with the present values of basic physical constants but would become possible if these changed;
• Comparisons of atomic clocks that rely on different atomic processes (e.g., fine structure vs. hyperfine transitions);
• Analysis of the effect of varying "constants" on primordial nucleosynthesis in the very early Universe.