More proof their dating methods are based on false assumptions
gabriel
assumptions you never hear about if you don't dig into it, nor
about the inconsistency these assumptions produces.
www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/07/04/news-to-note-07042009#adm
- Radioactivity has not been dropping steadily over time, as is
often claimed
- It is susceptible to unseen interference from an unexpected
quarter - e.g., the sun.
- We have since learned that certain decays can be influenced by
electromagnetic fields
- Catching such variations requires decay rates to be counted
over several years, impossible for the great majority of
radioactive isotopes which have half-lives shorter than a few
dozen years.
- Counting experiments are not performed on stabler isotopes that
decay over hundreds or thousands or millions of years at all: the
change in count rates over the course of an experiment lasting
even years would be too small to be measurable.
- It would not be surprising for odd variations to occur in a
long-term experiment. Buildings and the equipment they contain
heat up and cool down over the course of a year. Environmental
parameters such as atmospheric pressure and humidity also change
over time.
It's 1986, and there's a puzzle on Dave Alburger's desk. Not Ern�
Rubik's latest toy, but the data from a four-year experiment to
measure the half-life of the rare radioactive isotope silicon-32.
On one level, the numbers fit together just fine, adding up to a
half-life of 172 years, in keeping with previous estimates.
There's a devil in the detail, however. The sample's
radioactivity has not been dropping steadily over time, as the
textbooks demand. It has fallen, to be sure, but superimposed on
that decline is an odd, periodic wobble that seems to follow the
seasons. Each year, the decay rate is at its greatest around
February and reaches a minimum in August.
If we know anything about radioactivity, it's that this kind of
thing just doesn't happen. Radioactivity decreases predictably
over time. That's why we can tell the age of rocks, fossils and
prehistoric artefacts by the activity of radioactive atoms within
them, and why nuclear waste becomes less toxic over time.
The fault was surely in some detail of the experimental set-up.
Yet try as they might, Alburger and his colleagues at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York - all
nuclear physicists highly versed in this kind of painstaking
measurement - couldn't find it. Eventually they published the
result anyway, noting that although the variations were a puzzle,
they had no bearing on their value for silicon-32's half-life
(Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol 78, p 168).
And there the result languished, a scientific skeleton in the
closet. Until last year, that is, when it was rediscovered and
dusted down by Ephraim Fischbach and Jere Jenkins of Purdue
University in West Lafayette, Indiana. They think the data fits
into an emerging pattern indicating that radioactivity is not
quite the immutable process we assume it to be. Instead, it is
susceptible to unseen interference from an unexpected quarter -
the sun.
This controversial view goes against the grain established by
Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand-born physicist who discovered
the structure of the atom. In 1930, he and colleagues measured
the decay rates of various isotopes, concluding that "the rate of
transformation of an element has been found to be a constant
under all conditions".
We have since learned that certain decays can be influenced by
electromagnetic fields, but Rutherford's core conclusion stands
firm. Atoms in a chunk of radioactive material decay with an
equal probability within a given time. It's a random process at
the atomic level: you can't tell when any one atom will pop, but
the fewer there are left, the less frequently it occurs. The
result is a characteristic curve of activity that falls
exponentially over time.
When Fischbach and a student, Shu-Ju Tu, stumbled upon Alburger's
old results, they were not looking to overturn that picture.
Rather the reverse: they had developed a new test of randomness
and were using nuclear decay data to see if it worked. The
Brookhaven results stopped them in their tracks. "We could see
just by looking at it that the data was not random," says
Fischbach. Intrigued, he and Jenkins began combing the results
from other groups to see if anyone else had reported a similar
seasonal effect.
Sure enough, someone had. It was not as clear-cut as the
Brookhaven case, but in 1998 a team at Germany's national
metrology lab, the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in
Braunschweig, had seen an annual variation in the decay rate of
radium-226, an isotope with a half-life of about 1600 years. The
experiment had run for 15 years in the 1980s and 90s (Applied
Radiation and Isotopes, vol 49, p 1397).
Do two swallows a summer make? Countless measurements of the
radioactivity of many different elements have been made over the
years. If just two had thrown up an anomaly - even the same
anomaly - surely the error must lie in the experiments?
Yes and no. Tests of relatively few isotopes would throw up a
subtle annual oscillation, even if it were a general feature. For
a start, catching such variations requires decay rates to be
counted over several years, impossible for the great majority of
radioactive isotopes which have half-lives shorter than a few
dozen years. Equally, counting experiments are not performed on
stabler isotopes that decay over hundreds or thousands or
millions of years at all: the change in count rates over the
course of an experiment lasting even years would be too small to
be measurable. That leaves relatively few elements, like
silicon-32 or radium-226, with half lives of a few dozen to 1000
or so years, that would show the effect.
For Fischbach, the significant thing was that the results were
both from world-class laboratories. It would not be surprising
for odd variations to occur in a long-term experiment. Buildings
and the equipment they contain heat up and cool down over the
course of a year. Environmental parameters such as atmospheric
pressure and humidity also change over time.
Alburger and his colleagues, though, had meticulously designed
their experiment to avoid such problems. They measured the decay
rate not only of silicon-32, but also of chlorine-36, a much
longer-lived isotope, under the same conditions. By measuring the
ratio of the decay rates, any systematic errors resulting from
the way the experiment was set up or changes in its environment
should have cancelled out. But they didn't.
Fischbach and Jenkins considered various possible explanations.
Eventually, they hit on something promising. The seasonal
variation seemed to track precisely the 3 per cent change in the
distance between the Earth and the sun as the planet completes
its slightly elliptical orbit. The closer Earth was to the sun,
the higher the decay rate was. It was a convincing fit, but only
half an answer. What on Earth - or off it - could be behind such
a correlation?
Nuclei such as silicon-32 undergo beta decay, during which a
neutron in the atomic nucleus decays into the slightly less
massive proton. As it does so, it emits an electron and a
near-massless particle, an antineutrino. As antineutrinos are
notoriously difficult to detect, beta decay is signalled simply
by a nucleus spontaneously emitting an electron.
Fischbach and Jenkins suggest that another reaction would, in
theory, have the same signature. If a neutrino - a sister
particle to the antineutrino - knocked into a neutron in an
atomic nucleus, it would produce a proton and an electron. The
nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun's core are spewing
neutrinos equally in all directions. The further away from that
source you go, the more spread out those neutrinos are. The
higher flux of neutrinos through the Earth when it is close to
the sun would therefore bump up nuclear decay rates (see
diagram).
*New interaction*
It's a neat idea, with just one catch. For it to work, neutrinos
must interact with neutrons much more readily than has ever been
measured. "There would have to be some kind of additional
interaction that for some reason had never been observed before,"
says Eric Norman, a nuclear physicist at the University of
California, Berkeley. "That seems unlikely."
Peter Cooper agrees. A physicist at the Fermilab particle
accelerator facility in Batavia, Illinois, his work had already
questioned a claim that the energy of particles varied with the
seasons when hitting an underground detector at the DAMA
experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in central Italy.
This variation, with a maximum in June and a minimum in December,
had been proposed as the signature of the solar system's passage
through a sea of dark matter thought to perfuse our galaxy (New
Scientist, 26 April 2008, p 14). But Cooper's analysis suggested
that subtle seasonal effects affecting DAMA's detectors could not
be discounted as the cause.
Following a suggestion made by Fischbach and Jenkins, Cooper
tested the new claim by looking at the trajectories of space
missions powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators. These
RTGs harness the heat created by plutonium as it undergoes beta
decay to produce electricity. If the new idea were correct, the
further out in the solar system the spacecraft travels, the
smaller the flux of solar neutrinos would be and therefore the
slower the rate of plutonium decay.
One spacecraft seemed an ideal candidate for investigation.
NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, launched in 1997, followed a
trajectory first towards the sun, gaining energy in a
gravitational slingshot around Venus, and then outwards past
Earth and Jupiter. What Cooper found was: nothing. The power from
Cassini's generators fell exponentially as it flew both towards
and away from the sun in exactly the way it would have done on
Earth.
A quiet end to a heretical theory? Fischbach and Jenkins don't
think so. They counter that the power developed by Cassini's
generators is proportional to the difference in temperature
between the plutonium it contains and the outside of the
spacecraft. This temperature difference changes in accordance
with the square of the probe's distance from the sun in exactly
the opposite way to the neutrino flux. It would therefore almost
perfectly cancel out any variations in the decay rate as measured
by the RTG's power output.
The duo is now busy combing the scientific literature for other
evidence which might bear out their solar neutrino theory. They
have had some success. There is the case, for example, of Ken
Ellis, a medical physicist at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston, Texas, who over nine years found seasonal variations of
about 0.5 per cent in the decay rate of plutonium-238 used for
radiation studies of the chemical composition of the human body
(Physics in Medicine and Biology, vol 35, p 1079).
The evidence is bitty, however, and the consensus is that much
more is needed before the theory can be properly assessed. Alvin
Sanders, a physicist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville,
thinks there could be something in it. He reckons it might also
hold the key to another curiosity - the fact that when the age of
trees judged using carbon-14 dating is compared with their age
gauged by counting their rings, the discrepancy between the two
gets larger and smaller over a cycle of about 200 years.
"Wiggles in carbon-14 dates are well known as a nuisance," says
Sanders. Fluctuations in incoming cosmic rays and in Earth's
magnetic field have been proposed as explanations, but Sanders
thinks that the solar neutrino theory is a plausible alternative.
The well-documented 200-year period of sunspot activity, known as
the de Vries/Suess cycle, would cause variations in the number of
neutrinos being emitted by the sun, which would in turn influence
carbon-14 decay rates.
"What we are seeing may be the heartbeat of the sun," says
Sanders. It means that carbon-14 data from Earth, as a proxy for
the sun's neutrino activity, could allow us to determine the
history of the sun's internal reactor stretching back thousands
of years. Quite generally, if Fischbach and Jenkins should
ultimately be proved right, nuclear decay would represent a
powerful way to detect neutrinos - something that currently
requires experiments on a huge scale - and a new type of
telescope with which to peer inside the sun.
At the moment that is speculation. Twenty years on, the mystery
of Alburger's result remains, and until it is explained nothing
should be dismissed out of hand. Researchers are still searching
for a mundane explanation. Last month, Tom Semkow, a physicist
with the New York State Department of Health in Albany, and his
colleagues proposed that despite all the precautions taken, some
of the variation in the Brookhaven data might be explained by
seasonal temperature changes. Their idea is that hot air is less
dense and absorbs fewer beta particles, increasing the count rate
registered at a detector (Physics Letters B, vol 675, p 415).
Even if that is right, though, it doesn't look to be enough to
explain the whole effect.
Alburger himself, long since retired, is almost apologetic that
the issue remains unresolved. "I am sorry that I am unable to
throw any further light on these curious and as-yet-unexplained
results," he told New Scientist. Fischbach and Jenkins might have
made a worthy stab at explaining them, but it looks likely that
this skeleton will be hanging in the closet for a while yet.
Wibbly-wobbly neutrinos
If neutrinos cause wobbles in nuclear decay, it seems nuclear
decay may return the favour by producing wobbles in neutrinos.
The background is research from the GSI nuclear physics
laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, which found a strange
periodicity in the decay of two heavy radioactive ions,
praesodymium-140 and promethium-142.
These ions undergo a process similar to beta decay known as
electron capture, in which a proton in the nucleus absorbs an
electron and changes into a neutron, emitting a neutrino. This
decay changes the mass of the ions, and can be identified as a
change in the speed at which they race around a magnetic storage
ring.
Yuri Litvinov and colleagues, who carried out the experiments,
found a standard exponential decay with half-lives of 3 minutes,
23 seconds for praesodymium-140 and 40.5 seconds for
promethium-142. But superimposed on each was an oscillation, with
the measured decay rate increasing and decreasing every 7 seconds
- just like in the Brookhaven case, but on a much shorter
timescale (Physics Letters B, vol 664, p 162).
Unlike in the Brookhaven case, there is a growing consensus as to
the cause. Neutrinos come in three different "flavours" with
different tiny masses, and they can oscillate between these
forms. The suggestion is that this quantum-mechanical oscillation
changes the momentum associated with an ion's decay, and so
affects the time it takes the isotope to move around the ring.
The regular oscillation between two states of the neutrinos
emitted by the isotopes produces the observed 7-second cycle.
If so, that is an exciting development, because it raises the
possibility of studying the behaviour of neutrinos in an entirely
new way - and in a much smaller-scale experiment than has ever
been possible before.
Ken
Budikka
> More proof that dating is based onnumerous assumptions,
> assumptions you never hear about if you don't dig into it, nor
> about the inconsistency these assumptions produces.
>
>
> www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/07/04/news-to-note-07042009#adm
The New Scientist article doesn't even remotely say what you claim it
says. It says there's a fluctuation, but the decay is still there.
In short, your position is so pathetic and weak that once again we see
that you're forced to outright LIE about it.
In addition to this, you furnish us with yet more proof of your
appalling hypocrisy. Here, where you mistakenly think scientists
support your embarrassingly threadbare position, you subscribe to what
they say whole-heartedly and uncritically, but when those same
scientists support evolution, then they're unreliable and not to be
trusted?
If you can't see something seriously delusional in your behavior, then
you need help.
What this shows is yet another crack in the sham façade of creation.
if the scientist if establishment was desperately shoring up the
Theory of Evolution and telling lies, then why would they openly
report something like this?
Every which way you turn, you're tripped up by the vacuity and
dishonesty of your creation snit position.
And everyone knows it.
Budikka
Smiler
> On Jul 9, 5:31 am, gabriel <gabriel_bapt...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> More proof that dating is based onnumerous assumptions,
>> assumptions you never hear about if you don't dig into it, nor
>> about the inconsistency these assumptions produces.
>>
>> www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227141.400-solar-ghosts-may-haunt-ea...
>>
>> www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/07/04/news-to-note-07042009#adm
>
> The New Scientist article doesn't even remotely say what you claim it
> says. It says there's a fluctuation, but the decay is still there.
> In short, your position is so pathetic and weak that once again we see
> that you're forced to outright LIE about it.
>
> In addition to this, you furnish us with yet more proof of your
> appalling hypocrisy. Here, where you mistakenly think scientists
> support your embarrassingly threadbare position, you subscribe to what
> they say whole-heartedly and uncritically, but when those same
> scientists support evolution, then they're unreliable and not to be
> trusted?
>
> If you can't see something seriously delusional in your behavior, then
> you need help.
>
> if the scientist if establishment was desperately shoring up the
> Theory of Evolution and telling lies, then why would they openly
> report something like this?
>
> Every which way you turn, you're tripped up by the vacuity and
> dishonesty of your creation snit position.
>
> And everyone knows it.
>
> Budikka
Gabriel's 'dating method' is commonly called 'kidnap'!
--
Smiler,
The godless one
a.a.# 2279
All gods are bespoke. They're all individually tailor
made to perfectly fit the prejudices of their believer.