Radiometric Dating
The link between radiometric dating and lightspeed
Setterfield: Yes, there is. 'c', the speed of light, is in the numerator of every reduced radio decay rate equation.
Setterfield: Atomic decay rates do not depend on the speed of light. Both are, however, 'children' of the same parent -- the Zero Point Energy. Because of this, and because the speed of light is in the numerator of every reduced radio decay rate equation, any changes in the speed of light are indicating changes in atomic decay rates.
Setterfield: Yes there is. Importantly,
the original short half-life elements were also a contributor and they
have gone now. This also made for rapid heating of the earth interior
(cool to start with). Furthermore, there is evidence that the main
radioactive elements were concentrated in a layer low in the mantle and came to
the surface progressively after that.
Setterfield: I believe that it is possible to determine the initial ratios of the parent elements in the various chains. It is through this mechanism that the radiometric age of the universe is usually calculated as being on the order of ten billion years. Professor Fowler did exactly this and has maintained his calculated radiometric age for the universe at about 10 billion years, with which I am basically in agreement. Interestingly, using these sorts of ratios, one piece of moon rock dated as being 8.2 billion years old, to the amazement of the dating laboratory involved. As far as stars are concerned, the Th/Nd ratio has been shown to be unchanged no matter what the age of the star is, which leads one to two conclusions. Firstly, supernovae have not added a significant amount of new elements to putative star-forming clouds. If they had, the ratio would be different in various stars. This then suggests that the majority of the elements were formed at the beginning rather than through a series of supernovae explosions. Given that point, it seems that the stars must be basically the same age.
Setterfield: There is a discussion of the effects of radioactive decay and natural ore bodies in Ex Nihilo Technical Journal Vol. 1, 1984, pp. 126-129. My reply on those pages was sparked by a question about Oklo and other ore bodies by Bob Gentry. The basic fact about Uranium ore bodies is that they need slow neutrons to be captured by the uranium nucleus in order to produce the reaction. It is for that reason that water was needed at Oklo to slow the neutrons down sufficiently for the ore body to start a chain reaction. With high c values, it can be shown that atomic particles moved faster, proportional to c. This included the neutrons produced at Oklo. The high-speed neutrons were not near the uranium nucleii long enough to produce any reaction, just as high-speed neutrons are today. As essentially all the neutrons were in that category when c was higher, the chance of a reaction was significantly lower. The conclusion is that neutron induced reactions in ores, though minimal now, would have been even more minimal with higher light speed, so no chain reaction would occur. For a fuller discussion, refer to the original article.
RATE is the Institute of Creation Research's acronym for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth. It is a group put together for the purposes of studying the geologic record in terms of radioisotope dating. Dr. Andrew Snelling, one of the RATE team members, is a personal friend and was kind enough to give us the following statement for this page to help clear up the above misconceptions and any others:
We would like to stress, additionally, that the Setterfield research is presenting reasons why there are old age results in the field of radioisotope dating. The RATE group is looking, as Dr. Snelling indicated above, for the patterns and anomalies that exist in line with completely new data sets. 2012 note: The RATE group has decided there are two or three miraculous times during the earth's history when decay rates were suddenly increased enormously and then went back to today's rates. They have no reason for this, but the data demands some kind of explanation for evidence of increased decay rates in the past. Our research has shown that these increased decay rates were not a matter of sudden miracles or special times which came and went, but were a matter of the increasing strength of the Zero Point Energy throughout space. Once the Zero Point Energy reached its maximum, any changes in either atomic constants or the decay rates have been extremely minimal. We sincerely hope that this is enough to clear up misconceptions regarding the two different approaches.
Isn’t dendrochronology accurate for checking radiocarbon dating?
Setterfield: Radiocarbon dating requires the most assumptions of any of the dating methods and is therefore the least accurate. Dendrochronology also makes many assumptions, a number of which can easily be shown to be questionable. In the tropics, many trees maintain a steady rate of growth and so do not produce rings at all. In moderate climates, tree ring production depends upon both rain and sun. As a result, seeds from the same tree which are planted at the same time in different areas can show different tree ring development. If they are on different sides of a mountain one will probably get more water than the other, and in twenty or fifty years their ring thicknesses would not be correlated as coming from the same set of years. If one grows in the sun and one grows in the shade of other trees, again the tree ring development will be different. For this reason, although tree rings can be reasonably accurate to the age of one particular tree, trying to correlate one tree with another to try to extend the ages being determined is not at all an exact science. Similar patterns can be shown in trees from very different times and different patterns can be shown in trees from the same time. Thus, trying to correlate carbon14 dates with tree rings ends up taking on some circularity as an argument for accuracy. The tree rings are often initially dated using carbon 14 where old wood is concerned. Then matches are attempted with known younger or older wood and carbon14 is verified by these. This is not always the pattern, but it is enough of the time to cast some real doubt on the efficacy of using dendrochronology to verify radiocarbon dating. "Dating in Archaeology: Radiocarbon & Tree Ring Dating" by Trevor Major is a very good article dealing with the problems in this area. It brings up some good points about both radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology. The summary of the article is as follows:
Another good references regarding problems with dendrochronology is at Dendrochronology
Some quotes on radiocarbon dating: Because of the number of creation articles debunking radiocarbon dating, journals and other publications are now loathe to admit problems. But the problems with this form of dating are many, especially as compared to zircon crystals, for example. Here are some of the older quotes from when problems were being publicly admitted:
Setterfield: What I have shown there is the change in the decay rate over time. I have a number of decay rates, and they are all showing a consistent rate of change. In once case you may have a change in one part in 7000 years, and in another perhaps 2 parts in 14,000 years. So what I have done is reduce all these rates of change to a common ratio to show comparisons with other ratios of other atomic quantities.
Setterfield: Thank you for your response. There may be some uncertainty in the radiometric measurements. However, I believe that an "in principle" case has been established from the behaviour of the other atomic quantities mentioned in the Report. If these are behaving in the way that the observational evidence suggests, then it follows from the physics of the situation that the radiometric data will behave in a concordant fashion. The data do not negate that proposition.
Setterfield: With your background in electronics etc, you will be able to appreciate the groundwork that has been done in my article on plasma physics and the way that it is affected by the Zero Point Energy. When the ZPE was lower, the electric and magnetic properties of the vacuum were different and all plasma interactions were accomplished much more quickly. Plasma physics has shown how all galaxy types along with their stars have formed by the interaction of plasma filaments. We can time these interactions in the laboratory, then upscale them to inter-galactic interactions and get the time frame there. Then when the change in the ZPE is factored in, a whole universe can be formed in about 4 days. The complete groundwork for this has been laid down in my article on "Reviewing a Plasma Universe with Zero Point Energy". What may also help is our material regarding the first two days of creation in our study on Genesis 1 - 11. As far as the 14 billion years of astronomy are concerned and the related 4.5 billion years of geology, let me try to help your understanding. As the ZPE strength increases, space becomes "thicker" because increasing numbers of virtual particle pairs are being formed in any given volume of the vacuum. These particle pairs inhibit the progression of light photons and atomic processes slow down. The increased ZPE means an increase in the mass of all sub-atomic particles as outlined in the article that you have just read. But energy is conserved in atomic processes, including kinetic energy. Thus when electron masses increase, since their orbital kinetic energy is constant, their orbital velocity slows down. This is one form of atomic clock, namely the rate of revolution of electrons in their atomic orbits. Another is the various forms of radiometric clock. Thus alpha decay occurs when an alpha particle escapes from the nucleus. Within the nucleus the alpha particle may be considered to be moving in some kind of orbital. The velocity of the alpha particle is the crucial thing here as it can be considered to be hitting the walls of the nuclear potential well a number of times per second. There is a finite probability that the alpha particle will escape, and this probability depends on the number of hits against the wall that it has made. Obviously, if the speed of the alpha particle is higher, there will be more hits per second and so the escape rate will also be higher. The speed of the alpha particle is again related to the constant kinetic energy. Therefore, earlier in the history of the universe when the particle mass was lower, the velocity will be higher, with a proportionally higher escape rate. Thus the radiometric clock was ticking faster back then. If you are concerned about the mathematical function that the ZPE is following in its increase, or its inverse (which gives the behavior of the speed of light and the rate of ticking of the various atomic clocks), then the reasoning goes along the following lines. As the mass of subatomic particles increases with increasing ZPE, the radius of any given atomic orbit will change. This happens because, as shown by Bohr's first equation for the orbiting electron, each orbit has a given amount of angular momentum which is proportional to Planck's constant, h. As the strength of the ZPE increases, so, too, does h. But angular momentum must be conserved in this process. In order for this to occur, the orbit radius must change. This change causes the light emitted from each atom to be more energetic or bluer. Thus as we look back in time to progressively more distant objects (that is objects whose light was emitted progressively earlier and earlier in the history of the cosmos), their light will be progressively redder. To astronomers, this is known as the redshift. This ZPE process has two possibilities; either it happened smoothly (in which case we would get a smoothly changing redshift), or it happened in jumps (so the redshift would be quantized). Observation indicates that the second option is the one which is occurring. The evidence is all there that the redshift is quantized, but astronomers have been ignoring this for some considerable time because it knocks out one of the two legs which support the Big Bang proposition. The only viable alternative, that was mentioned by John Gribbin, was that the redshift must be due to the behavior of atomic emitters within the various galaxies. This is the option which our research has validated. On this basis then, the redshift provides data describing the behavior of atomic clocks and lightspeed. The redshift/distance equation is therefore the same equation as the speed of light and atomic clock rates are following, while it inverse describes the behavior of the ZPE. The form of equation that I use is often used in astronomy. In this form, the distance, x, is given as a fraction of the total distance which overcomes problems with determining an exact distance scale. In the form used for the behavior of light and atomic clocks, orbital time, T, has been substituted for distance, x, because distance and time are related. Again T is given as a fraction of the total time that the process has been operating. But we can go further! Not only do we have the redshift equation empirically from the data, we can also obtain it theoretically from a consideration of the processes acting to produce the ZPE and there are several ways of doing this. Thus we have both observational data and theory to guide us as to the form of equation that the atomic clock rate has been following. We can then integrate that equation to find the (inflated) atomic time for any actual orbital time. When that is done the scenario for astronomy and geology really opens up. This is summarized with charts in Time, Life and Man. This whole aspect of the research about atomic orbits and the redshift and its quantization and its relationship to the ZPE was discussed in detail in another of my papers published in December 2008 entitled "Quantized Redshifts and the Zero Point Energy." Cesium 133
Setterfield: First, let me mention that all the changes in atomic time keepers are due to the changes in the strength of the Zero Point Energy (ZPE) which controls the properties of the vacuum. Changes in these properties affect both atomic behavior and the speed of light uniformly, so they are both children of the same parent. It is not the speed of light in and of itself that produces these changes. Second, SED physicists have shown that the ZPE controls all atomic orbit phenomena, whether the atom is stable or radioactive. Thus, for example, the rate at which an electron orbits a nucleus will decrease as the ZPE strength increases. The electron orbital rate is one form of atomic clock. In the case of radioactive atoms, processes in the nucleus can likewise be shown to be linked with ZPE behavior along with electron orbital phenomena. So the answer to your question is that the orbital processes acting in the cesium 133 atom that are used as timekeepers (in a slightly more complicated way than the simple example given above) are themselves dependent upon the ZPE strength. So as the ZPE strength increases, each one of those processes will become slower. As a result, the processes used in stable isotopes like cesium 133 to measure time will be of no use in detecting changes in the speed of light since both are being affected uniformly by the ZPE. I trust that answers you question as simply as possible, yet gives you some understanding of what is happening.
Setterfield: Your question relates to what has been called the "oldest living tree", a Norway spruce living in Sweden that is claimed to be 9550 years old. Thanks for the link to the National Geographic article about it. Careful reading reveals that Norway spruces send up a trunk which develops into a tree that lives for about 600 years and then dies back to the root. The root then sends out a new trunk and the process repeats. So they do not get the age of the tree by tree-rings from the trunk or branches. Neither do they get the age of the root by any tree-ring process. The article explicitly states that they find the age of the root by carbon-dating. They state that while the bristlecone pines in the USA are dated by tree-rings, the Norway pines are dated by the radio-carbon process. Here is the exact quote:
So the tree is not 9550 orbital years old, but 9550 atomic years old. Even that may be unreliable because of the problems that are inherent in radio-carbon dating. So the oldest living tree is still the bristlecone pine. The article states that: "Trees much older than 9,550 years would be impossible in Sweden, because ice sheets covered the country until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 years ago, Kullman noted." Since the ice-age ended around 2400-2500 BC in actual orbital time, these Norway spruces are no older than that.
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