Wow! What an onslaught of new postings. I turn my back around for a while doing research and the thread totally explodes. 8)
I wanted to give Geo a good answer so I have actually followed up on many of the references on that genesis website. If they ask a valid question they deserve a valid answer and not just "it must be wrong, contamination" without anything to base the statement on other than personal bias. What I mean with personal bias is that you have been told that it is like this. I wanted to know why it is like this.
Some of the references were only posters presented on creationist conferences, other looked as scientific articles but were publicized via various christian magazines and didn't look to have gone through a proper peer review. Some even included statements like "... and it agrees with the description of events in the bible."
This is what I would call doing "science" with an agenda.
The best reference I found (thank you Wikipedia) was of a discussion of building a neutrino detector with hydrocarbons low in C14. It turns out that even rocks deep in the ground actually have quite a lot C14. Some are produced in the same way as the atmospheric C14, by cosmic radiation (down to 300m depth). Some are produced by radioactive decay of uranium close to nitrate bearing rocks. Since many fossil deposits are made up of biological material, the nitrates in the original material turns into a source of C14. In the end, whatever source you check it turns out that in average it contains about 1% of the levels of C14 compared to atmospheric carbon and the levels vary quite a lot.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0308025v2.pdf
Just as solar_plasma wrote, there are a lot of different radioactive clocks and other methods to use to verify the age of fossils.
And yes, I have indirectly seen the atoms of gold in one of my microscopes. By doing electron crystallography I could see the crystal structure by reflecting the electron beam on atoms in a 100 nm thick gold film. The viewing screen lit up like a star map, each dot representing a crystal position of gold atoms. ... and I just went :mrgreen:
And no, I don't think we are likely to find out that we are only an atom in a larger universe. That idea is romantic but based on early atom models when we described it as a small planet system with the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun. There are so much more we know now both about solar systems and atoms, models like that belongs in the cartoons like "Horton hears a Who!". 8)
Göran
(edited : spelling)
I wanted to give Geo a good answer so I have actually followed up on many of the references on that genesis website. If they ask a valid question they deserve a valid answer and not just "it must be wrong, contamination" without anything to base the statement on other than personal bias. What I mean with personal bias is that you have been told that it is like this. I wanted to know why it is like this.
Some of the references were only posters presented on creationist conferences, other looked as scientific articles but were publicized via various christian magazines and didn't look to have gone through a proper peer review. Some even included statements like "... and it agrees with the description of events in the bible."
This is what I would call doing "science" with an agenda.
The best reference I found (thank you Wikipedia) was of a discussion of building a neutrino detector with hydrocarbons low in C14. It turns out that even rocks deep in the ground actually have quite a lot C14. Some are produced in the same way as the atmospheric C14, by cosmic radiation (down to 300m depth). Some are produced by radioactive decay of uranium close to nitrate bearing rocks. Since many fossil deposits are made up of biological material, the nitrates in the original material turns into a source of C14. In the end, whatever source you check it turns out that in average it contains about 1% of the levels of C14 compared to atmospheric carbon and the levels vary quite a lot.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0308025v2.pdf
Just as solar_plasma wrote, there are a lot of different radioactive clocks and other methods to use to verify the age of fossils.
And yes, I have indirectly seen the atoms of gold in one of my microscopes. By doing electron crystallography I could see the crystal structure by reflecting the electron beam on atoms in a 100 nm thick gold film. The viewing screen lit up like a star map, each dot representing a crystal position of gold atoms. ... and I just went :mrgreen:
And no, I don't think we are likely to find out that we are only an atom in a larger universe. That idea is romantic but based on early atom models when we described it as a small planet system with the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun. There are so much more we know now both about solar systems and atoms, models like that belongs in the cartoons like "Horton hears a Who!". 8)
Göran
(edited : spelling)
