The reason is you’re only reading a simplified layman’s summary in a popular press magazine. If you want that level of technical details you need to read the actual published research in the primary scientific literature. I believe I’m the 4th person to point out your misunderstanding but you just don’t listen.
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(facepalm) The 4.53 to 4.58 billion years IS the 50 MY error range. You were offered a nice tutorial on how scientific error ranges are determined but you blew it off, remember?
We know quite a bit about how our solar system formed
The universe didn’t form 4.5 billion years ago. To the best of our data it began 13.799 +/-0.021 billion years
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For uranium 235/238 dating from zircon crystals, the conditions of their formation guantee there can be no contamination. We would need a geochemist to explain why that is so, but I thing it has to do with high temperatures and the conditions in which zircon crystals from.
This sort of dating is very reliable because separate measures can be made for U235 and U238, allowing a cross-check of the results. There will be some error, but it should be within about 10% of the actual age (educated guess).
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It’s simply a matter of basic chemical properties. Uranium and thorium have the same radius (0.8-1.0Å) and valency (+4) as zirconium, and can easily substitute for zirconium in the ZrSiO4 crystal lattice. Lead has a valency of +2 and can not.
Newly formed zircon crystals have a lead content of typically a few parts per trillion, corresponding to only one or two years’ worth of radiometric decay. Zircons are also very hard and have a high closure temperature (in excess of 1,000°C), so they are strongly resistant to weathering, contamination and leakage. When they are disturbed, they will preferentially lose lead rather than uranium, which means that measured ages in that case will be an underestimate rather than an overestimate. This does not help the young-earth cause.
The idea that nuclear decay rates or chemical properties could have been different in the past is nothing but fantasy. If they had been, life on Earth would not have been possible, and zircons would not have been able to form with the crystal structure they have today. Even if they had, the heat released by the accelerated decay would have reset the “clocks.”
In other words, there’s no way round it: we should not find any significant amount of lead in zircons in a young earth, end of story. But we do.
For a more detailed explanation:
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The general problem with fossils is that there has to be carbon in them for them to be dated. None of it can be dated past 80,000 years. In most cases, it points to a young earth. So most chronological sequences are inherently flawed, because they depend on an index that is flawed. If they are over a certain period of time, they can’t be dated. This does not stop people from trying. Also, items have underdone a calcification process to make them look like fossils when they are really not fossils at all. The accumulation of lava debris, etc., after a volcanic eruption such as Mount St. Helens is one such phenomena, where layers volcanic ask have been laid down in such a way as to make it look exactly like ancient layers of stone. The fact is that is all happened in the late 20th century.
I think the point he was making in regard to the position of the earth in regard to the sun is that we do move closer and further away from the sun. But it’s hard to think that the fact that we are the distance we are from the sun is something that is random or the result of a giant explosion of the some kind. If anything, it points to the possibility that were was an intricate design to the universe, so that we could all live in a climate that would allow us to discover things in outer space.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with radiometric dating per se. The problem comes when people make wrong assumptions about the results, or about what should be tested, or even about the meteor itself.It’s a fantastic claim for someone to think that the earth is 4.5 billion years old using a method in a lab because it gets us no closer to knowing how the earth, the universe was formed. If we don’t know how the earth was formed using this guide, why believe with absolute certainty that it started 4.5 billion years ago? The fact is that we don’t know how old the earth is outside of knowing or understanding how the entire universe was formed. Being 100 percent confident of the age of the earth is like saying you know when the universe and our solar system was formed - 4.5 billion years ago. That’s why this is nothing more than speculation.
You wouldn’t think that if you read his words in the interview.
Knowing the one is not the same thing as knowing the other. Your conditional sentence does not follow logic. (I can know how old someone is without knowing anything about their parents and how they came to be born at the time they did.)
Why? That makes no sense. Please explain your logic that brought you to this conclusion (and why scientists disagree you on this.)
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Please back up this claim…so it doesn’t look as foolish as it does at the moment.
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It makes a lot of sense. Why postulate how old the earth is for certain without giving some kind of thought to how it was formed. That’s like being introduced to someone who knows how old her or she is but knows nothing about where they were born, how they were born, how the process works, or thinks that they were dropped from the sky by storks.
Larry, you appear to be uninformed about radiometric dating methods. C-14 dating is limited to about 60k years, other methods are not. The assumption about rates of radioactive decay are tied to physical constants (fine structure constant), and we have strong evidence this value has not changed going back to the early universe. Additionally, changing the fine structure constant also changes the chemical properties of matter, and any substantial change would make the chemistry that allows life impossible.
I realize these are your beliefs, but beliefs are not science. Please consider framing you beliefs as exactly what they are, rather than claim science as a basis for you belief. I think this will help you in discussions here. 
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No, that’s wrong too. Asking for sciencific evidence to back up a faith based claim is wrong, because its pretending it was a scientific claim in the first place. Larry is making a statement based on faith, and we should recognize that first.
IOW, don’t get baited into a scientific argument about claims based on faith.
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Yours is a straw man argument. There is no lack of “some kind of thought to how it was formed” among scientists. The reason that scientists can be more confident on the when of certain aspects of origins than on the exact how and why of origins is because of the available evidence.
I don’t doubt that it makes sense to you—but it doesn’t to me and it doesn’t make sense to the science academy. Peer-reviewed scholarship has carefully examined the evidence for when the universe was formed and the confidence intervals are impressive. Radiometrics is a very mature field. So is red-shift analysis. (And those are just a few of the reasons why we can know a lot about the age of the universe.)
There is a vast consilience of evidence which contributes to our understanding of the age of the universe. You are free to reject it but the evidence weighs against you.
So what you are saying is that when a meteor is formed really does not matter as far as how it is tested by radiometric means? Also, what is your strong evidence that this value has not changed going back to the early universe? That would have to be 4.5 billion years or so? And how was the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, scientifically speaking? That would really help me understand how you are framing your scientific beliefs about the universe.
As far as I know, the radiometric methods used for meteors are measuring the date at which the rock solidified (cooled down enough so that the molten materials would harden into rock).
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While it is certainly true that Larry is motivated by faith claims, I interpreted @deuteroKJ’s statement as simply pointing out the obvious: That Larry was confusing the necessity of carbon in the Carbon-14 testing of materials which are less than about 50,000 to 95,000 years old (depending on the equipment) with the radiometric methodologies utilized in dealing with much older fossils where the ages are in the many millions of years.
I can see your point here—and I too often refuse to take the bait. Yet, if we avoided every bad argument that was motivated primarily by faith claims, this forum wouldn’t be nearly as valuable for many of the sincere inquirers who come to venues like Peaceful Science.
Over the years (especially on Internet forums) I have often pondered just where I should draw a line of even “dignifying” a really bad argument which tries to masquerade as being “scientific”. It brings to mind the flat-earther arguments found on some forums. Because flat-earthers are such an obscure fringe group, I don’t waste much time on them (except for occasional entertainment purposes when I see one of their Youtube videos.) On the other hand, if flat-earthers were constantly appearing at my local school board’s meetings and running for positions on state science textbook commissions, I would probably be aggressively engaging their arguments. And if I had friends who were driving to a $100 million “Flat-Earth Encounter” tourist attraction on their vacations, I’d be downright depressed and feel like I must do something, even though that would require “dignifying” their pseudoscience as worthy of my laborious point-by-point refutations.
So I definitely get what you are saying. I guess it all depends on whether we think that our refutations will produce any fruit—and that often comes down to trying to educate the silent observers on a forum while realizing that the person we are refuting might be immune to the science. Passive spectators often get more from our efforts than anybody else.
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Have you ever taken the time to study the basics of how the age of the earth is determined? You would notice that more than one measurement methodology is used—and the results show a striking consilience. One can campare uranium-lead minerals, and crystals of zircon, and the calcium-aluminum inclusions in meterorites. As I understand it, all of these have helped scientists down through the years establish better and better lower-bounds on the age of the universe.
I consider Wikipedia quite useful for knowledge summaries of such topics:
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Amen! (Is it out of place to shout “Amen!” in a science thread?)
Now for one of my gripes are about “science journalists” who confuse the public on such topics. Take a look at this science writer for a business periodical who delights in declaring within the article (after the bombastic title) that physics textbooks will have to be rewritten:
That was in 2011. Of course, it didn’t long for the preliminary study which the Forbes article cited to get corrected: “Decay rates of radioactive substances are constant”.
Of course, people like Ken Ham got nuts over that news item for 2011 and he thinks it just another confirmation of his denialist taunt “Were you there?”
Yes, to Larry and many other non-scientists, it seems reasonable to say “Hey, the physics might have been different in the past?” Of course, Last Thursday-ism could also be true and everything we think we observe in the universe is just a false memory implanted in our brains by some supernatural force.
Nevertheless, for the non-scientist, “The physics MIGHT have been different in the past” may seem reasonable—even though it is basically saying that science is worthless because we just can’t know anything.
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By studying things like meteors and planets it does tell us about the past. Even the distribution of elements tells us that the solar system formed from the leftovers of a supernova. Radiometric dating tells us when molten rock circling the new Sun began to solidify (the radiometric clock starts when rock solidifies from molten rock). This tells us when rocks started to form and crash into each other which is the how the planets formed. The study of meteors tells us a LOT about how the Earth formed.
Baloney. That’s like saying I can’t say how old I am until I can measure the age of the universe. That’s just nonsense. We don’t need to know how the universe came about or when the universe came about in order to figure out when a rock solidified in the past.
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