You are arguing against the Laws of Physics, and such arguments do not end well. Until you come up with alternative Laws of Physics that explain all the data better than our current understanding, you are just making noise.
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Ar/Ar is correct. It is a variant of the K/Ar method that controls for atmospheric argon contamination.
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In the specific case of what I quoted, it would be better to say K/Ar. Point taken.
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Quite the contrary. Your mishandling of the physics invalidates your argument. Anyway, I see you Evolutionists continue your campaign to censor all intelligent voices who oppose your views by moving this conversation from the main page. Just more coverup. In that case, I no longer am interesting in pursuing this subject matter here.
This exchange makes you look quite bad, but if you insist I’m happy to keep in on the main page. I’ll even pin it for a week.
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LULS. Just do a simple search of the forum. Type in age of the earth and look how many times this has been talked about. One thread had over a 1000 posts. And you want to cry censorship? For crying out loud.
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No need to pile on. @r_speir has a challenging task ahead. It is really difficult on a personal level to hold together very strong personal beliefs with uncooperative evidence. Unquestioned presuppositions are powerful, but evidence can challenge presuppositions. This challenge is never comfortable.
Give him some space to figure it out, and some empathy. I’m sure he will come around.
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Saw this post and came to respond, but saw that everyone else’s responses had pretty much handled it. I should note that I take exception to your claim that none of us are experts in this field. @davidson is entirely qualified to speak on this. Additionally, @Joel_Duff, @T_aquaticus, @evograd, and I are more than competent to discuss it.
There is simply nothing in your “paraphrase” that bears any resemblance to what Dalrymple said. You made it up out of the whole cloth. It is absurd, invented nonsense.
Of course I understand why you want it to be that way. I wanted it to be that way too. I wanted there to be a way that all radiometric dating was somehow fundamentally flawed. I wanted there to be a magic bullet, a hidden assumption that could be flipped to fit everything into 6,000 years. If this K-Ar date is wrong for young rocks, why can’t EVERY rock be young and therefore EVERY date be wrong?
This is not the magic bullet you think it is. Logically, isn’t not the magic bullet, because if it was, then there would be no need for RATE. Baumgardner and Humphreys and Snelling and Boyd and all the others in RATE know full well that “this date is wrong so maybe every date is wrong” does not work. They had to invent an ad hoc accelerated radioactive decay model (and, correspondingly, an ad hoc hyper-dimensional heat rejection scheme) to explain radiometric dating. They would not have gone to all that trouble if what you are claiming was true. Unless you think you understand the physics of radioisotope decay better than Baumgardner, Humphreys, Boyd, and Snelling, that alone should be enough to stop you.
And on that point – let’s talk about expertise.
Sigh. Randall Munroe said it best…
I know from personal experience how good it feels to try and overturn “the system” with “simple logic” because you have an outside perspective. I did it for YEARS. But dude, no. As I said above, there are probably at least a half dozen of us here who are more than competent to discuss your misunderstandings of physics and geology. A good way to know if someone is competent is whether they can show their work. If all you have is “simple logic” but you don’t actually have any maths, that’s not a good sign.
So here’s my challenge to you, @r_speir.
Suppose you discover an old campfire during an archaeological dig. Charcoal from this campfire is sent to a lab and is tested, and is found to contain 0.2% pMC. Assuming no contamination, what is an uncalibrated minimum radiocarbon age for this campfire?
This is an extremely basic, undergraduate-level physics question. I am confident that there are at least three people on this thread other than myself who could answer this question without consulting Google, and I am equally confident that almost everyone on this thread could answer this question in less than five minutes with a couple of simple Google searches. Please try to answer it. If you can figure out the answer, you might be on your way to gaining a better understanding of radiometric dating and some of the problems you think you’re seeing.
I’m not trying to be elitist or arrogant here, by the way. I have a purpose in asking you to solve this question. Take all the time you need.
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Well not only was the thread moved, it is now closed. You know I am not interested in carbon dating here. Why did you ask me to carbon date a campfire? Diversion? I am interested only in what Dalrymple conceded. By the way, since you are an expert, how many rock samples have you run radiometric testing on? None, I presume. So you are not an expert. Only the real experts know how numbers get fudged and how pre-assumptions and pre-knowledge affect their results. You would not know that. You would only know Wikipedia postings. That is why I am looking for an expert opinion on Dalrymple’s statement. I’m sorry, but I do not think you qualify.
I’ll reopen it for you.
Insist that we don’t pile on @r_speir here. One at a time please.
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Dalrymple is an expert. He has published multiple peer reviewed papers on radiometric dating. He states quite clearly that tiny amounts of excess argon are only a problem for the youngest samples and aren’t a problem for older samples. The title of his essay is “Radiometric Dating Does Work”. What we would like to hear from you is why you reject this expert opinion.
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A Google Scholar search for Brent Dalrymple:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C13&q=brent+dalrymple&btnG=
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I have a purpose in asking you to solve the problem. If you expect us to put our time and energy into discussing this with you, I’m interested to know whether you will take the 3 minutes it should take you to answer the question.
Take all the time you need.
I have a purpose in asking you this question. Take all the time you need, though the answer is already obvious.
He does not state “tiny samples” anywhere. And we already know that excess argon is not a problem for pre-assumed older samples. Don’t you see that is the point of my whole argument? If all lava flows on the planet are 6000 years and younger, the entire radiometric exercise is obsolete. The entire planet flies under the radar of radiogenic detection.
They aren’t pre-assumed to be older samples. They MEASURE the ratio of isotopes in the rocks. They don’t assume them.
If all lava flows on the planet were 6,000 years and younger then they wouldn’t date any older than 250,000 years old according to the essay written by the expert. You claim you want information from experts, but here you are rejecting that very information. Even more, it makes no sense to claim that radiometric dating is wrong simply because it conflicts with your belief in a young Earth. You need something more, and an error range of 0.25 million years for the K/Ar method isn’t going to cut it when the method is measuring ages of 20+ million years. Add to that the correlation with other dating methodologies that use different isotope pairs. Again, this is from the expert:
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Even if they “pre-assume” them, the actual measurement would then be able to reveal whether that’s true. I can “pre-assume” that my living room is fourty meters wide and sixty meters long, and then measure it and falsify it to my own satisfaction. What I might believe inside my own head isn’t going to magically shorten my ruler.
It’s just another one of @r_speir’s super bad excuses to try to avoid dealing with the data.
SInce we are talking about essays written by experts, this one is a classic:
“Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective” by Roger Wiens
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Yikes. We are not getting anywhere. Let me try again. According to radiometric testing, the Mt St Helens eruption ain’t there. It does not exist. No one can accurately measure it because it is too young. Can you now make the connection with a young planet? Via radiometric dating, the planet does not exist. It is too young.