Honestly this David Winsberg guy did a fantastic job showing how YECs have no solution to the heat problem.
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To all my science peeps, is Winsberg even right about his calculations regarding heat transfer through rock? It doesn’t look right to me.
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This closed thread has reopened. So I suppose that means the YECs have finally solved the heat problem.
It sure took them long enough.
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Sorry to disappoint. Like fusion power, twenty more years should do it.
Gentle and very modern ape Erika @GutsickGibbon responded to the open mike round referenced in this thread, and one of the YEC participants, Winsberg, stated some things you will not often hear from that perspective on the heat problem and radiometric dating in general - as @Mr_Wilford summarized in his post.
Here is the Standing For Truth open mike episode
Winsberg’s comments concerning radiometric heat begin at 1:30:50
YEC attempts to obfuscate the accelerated radiometric decay heat problem by throwing out technical sounding mumbo jumbo, but none of uniformitarianism nor the details of the decay path at all matter. The product has less mass than the source material. E = mc2 is all that is needed. Less that a gram of mass was turned to energy at Hiroshima, and the mass conversion for the entire inventory of the planet to be compressed from over billions of years to a single year would involve millions of metric tons mass equivalent in released energy.
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Good analogy. [And if there are any newcomers reading this thread, my comment about YECs finally solving the heat problem was sarcastic. I suppose I should use emoticons more often for clarity but something in my being resists the little buggers. I’m old school, I guess.]
@GutsickGibbon can always be counted on to provide wit as well as clarity to these kinds of topics. The posted images weren’t clickable/linked in my browser but I should be able to find those videos.
I found the videos at:
As usual, Erica (Gutsick Gibbon) is so entertaining on this topic.
Moral of the story: It is much easier to maintain a Young Earth Creationist viewpoint if one struggles to grasp basic laws of physics. Perhaps I can be forgiven for my bluntness because that I myself grew up in a Young Earth Creationist environment and thereby for some years assumed “creation science” was insightful—until I had the time to carefully examine the science. The Laws of Thermodynamics can be a good place to start. Very enlightening.
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The Heat Problem is far bigger than the Flood year issue, the problem appears to be universal.
We can use radiometric methods to determine the ages of Moon rocks, Mars rocks (shergotites), and meteorites as well as radioisotope decay curves in supernovae.
If the whole Universe is only 6,000 years old, then was there a universal burst of superdecay?
Accelerated Radioactive Decay is flawed both in terms of cause and effect. In effect because of the Heat Problem, in cause because decay rates depend on the relative values of fundamental constants which if altered would essentially change our universe into something we would not recognize.
I get the impression that rank and file YEC adherents regard decay rates as independent variables, measured in labs, and from there dating techniques extrapolated using uniformitarian assumptions; and that these rates could somehow be different without any wider consequence. YEC apologists just stay quiet and allow them to think that. The reality of physics is that isotopic decay rates, although immensely difficult to model and compute, are wholly determined by the fundamental forces, quantum processes, and atomic/subatomic geometry. Nowhere have I found any YEC attempt to substantially address the mechanism for accelerated decay.
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Not to mention that the U-238 decay chain has 13 intermediate steps between U-238 and Pb-206. The half-lives of these elements ranges from from billions of years to fractions of seconds. It would take not one but 13 miracles to achieve the secular equilibrium we see in some natural uranium ores.
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Another interesting story about radioactive heating is about Aluminum-26. Al-26 is a radioactive isotope with a half life of about 700,000 years, and was relatively common in the early days of our solar system. Planetesimals (r = 10 to 100 km) with significant levels of Al-26 begin melting in their cores by about 1.2 million years, and are fully molten by about 2 my.
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That’s the great thing about miracles-upon-demand (to defend one’s casually concocted “science”): constants can be anything you wish. Very convenient.