|
Source: (consider it)
|
Thread: Does Creation Science Give Comfort to the Enemy?
|
Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
|
Posted
On another topic entirely
There is some spin-off discussion on the Noah's Flood thread re rock-dating - see BHB's latest post there. I'm not a geologist but I found this link which struck me as a decent rebuttal of the BHB assertions in the other thread. The Mt St Helens "controversy" appears to be a bit of a put-up job.
DH Hosts may rule this an OK tangent for the Noah thread, meanwhile I thought I'd ask the assembled brains what they know of this issue and what they think of the link I found.
--------------------
Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged
|
|
Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
|
Posted
Sorry, I've not had time to read your link Barney.
But, perhaps I can comment anyway. There's a big question to ask, that is "why would anyone attempt to K-Ar date a recent eruption?". I'm pretty sure the data was collected by reputable scientists and not Creation Scientists (generally, Creation Science doesn't have the resources to fund that sort of measurement). I actually had a similar run-in re: 14C dating with the author of a different article in the TJ, in that case it was about 14C measurements of coal.
There is, actually, a very good reason to run K-Ar analysis of modern lava. And, there are very good reasons for making 14C measurements of coal.
It's a question of analytical accuracy and data quality. One of the big questions for K-Ar dating is how good the assumption of zero Ar at formation is. An easy way to do that is measure the K-Ar ratio of modern lavas, and assume that ancient lavas behaved the same. What you find is that for modern lavas there are very small residual Ar concentrations, which if you wanted to use those to determine an "age" would be equivalent to a few 100k years to a million or so; of course that isn't the age of the rock and no-one in their right mind would claim that it is. What you do now have, however, is a better estimate of the initial Ar content of the lava which allows for more accurate and precise measurements of the ages of ancient lavas.
With the 14C and coal, what you do is run the coal as a blank standard to determine the instrument background. If you took those numbers as "dates" then for a good AMS machine you'd get an "age" for the coal of 50k years or so. The author of the TJ article I mentioned (and it's such a load of dross I'm not even going to attempt to find it again for a link) then claimed on that basis that therefore coal beds were actually only a few thousand years old. He didn't seem to understand the concept of measurement of instrumental background, nor why an article in a scientific journal would give that data as part of a report on commissioning a new facility. The editor of TJ was also distinctly uninterested in issuing a retraction for the article in question nor allowing any sort of rebuttal to be published.
--------------------
Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
|
Posted
Actually, now I've deciphered the miscode in it, pjkirk's link on the Noah thread is much simpler and, to these eyes at least, is a quite conclusive refutation as well.
--------------------
Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged
|
|
Louise
Shipmate
# 30
|
Posted
I've given the dating method controversies their own thread and copied over Alan's post, so that can be continued there
cheers,
Louise
--------------------
Now you need never click a Daily Mail link again! Kittenblock replaces Mail links with calming pics of tea and kittens! http://www.teaandkittens.co.uk/ Click under 'other stuff' to find it.
Posts: 6918 | From: Scotland | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
Printer-friendly view
