quote:
There is no need to reconfigure half-life, this very well may be consistant. Though if you take a sample and cut it in many pieces, and leave it as such for a time, and put it back together, it is going to appear many magnitudes older than is assumed if it were not mingled with in this way. (this was for the sake of example). A possible cause for the relative consistancy in given dates for radioisotopes is the same decintegration or effect contributed to increasing decay rate of radioisotopes.
JM: Rubbish! It does not matter how you slice, dice and pureee a sample, the radiometric age will not be affected. Let's do a thought experiment. Let's just use 2 pieces and you can sum the solution to an infinite number. Let's say that piece originally contained 5000 atoms of isotope X that decays to isotope Y. Let us further say that the half-life is 1000 years. Let us further say that this rock is then split into two pieces. The first piece gets 1000 atoms of X and the second piece gets 4000 atoms of X. Here is the decay scheme in both rocks:
Piece 1:
1/2 life Parents Daughters Age
0 1000 0 0
1 500 500 1000
2 250 750 2000
3 125 875 3000
Piece 2:
1/2 life Parents Daughters Age
0 4000 0 0
1 2000 2000 1000
2 1000 3000 2000
3 500 3500 3000
Now, further suppose that after 2000 years, these two pieces came back together. You would get the following result:
Parents= Parents in Piece 1 + parents in piece 2=1250
Daughters= daughters in piece 1 and daughters in piece 2= 3750
The age of the composite sample with these ratios= 2000 years. No change is seen. As I said, you can divide the sample up as much as you like and when you bring them all back together, the age of the composite would be the exact same as the parts.
Cheers
Joe Meert