"Relative Dating" or "Absolute Dating" or "Chronometric Dating"

[The Barbarian]

7 hours ago, JohnR7 said:

Watson is a prime example. I read his book "The Double Helix" back in the 1968 when it was first published. His whole life has been filled with controversy. Even in 2019 the controvery still continued. 

Yes.    He seems to be an unrepentant racist, among other things.   But he was, with Crick, precisely right about the structure and function of DNA.    And in science, it's making accurate determinations that count.  

Watson has suffered for his racism, primarily in that many people and organizations don't want to be associated with him.

But they aren't going to throw out his research.

 

 

[JohnR7]

13 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

I do notice that researchers whose results can't be reproduced, tend to lose funding and employment.

I had a friend that was doing research for premature lung development. He came up with a more affordable treatment program. He had $300,000 from march of dimes. He said there is a lot of funding, you just have to know how to qualify for it. He had like 42 publications. But I showed him were you have to present yourself different when you apply for your funding. Some of the research involved animal abuse and no one wants to fund that. So you have to hide that from the organizations that sponsor you. He hired a doctor from China and brought him over to do the actual work. I think he paid him $50,000 which most likely did little more than cover his expenses. He was actually a low paid teacher that was expected to do research to supliment their income. 

[kwikphilly]

On 12/8/2022 at 1:14 PM, JohnR7 said:

I had a friend that was doing research for premature lung development. He came up with a more affordable treatment program. He had $300,000 from march of dimes. He said there is a lot of funding, you just have to know how to qualify for it. He had like 42 publications. But I showed him were you have to present yourself different when you apply for your funding. Some of the research involved animal abuse and no one wants to fund that. So you have to hide that from the organizations that sponsor you. He hired a doctor from China and brought him over to do the actual work. I think he paid him $50,000 which most likely did little more than cover his expenses. He was actually a low paid teacher that was expected to do research to supliment their income. 

Animal abuse? Are you referring to clinical trials using animals?

Why suggest he hide anything,2 wrongs never make anything right,right?

[JohnR7]

4 hours ago, kwikphilly said:

Animal abuse? Are you referring to clinical trials using animals?

Yes, my friend was from Sweden. He came here to do his research because it was banned in his country. He taught at the Medical School here in our area. My brother was a teacher there also. 

[JohnR7]

On 12/8/2022 at 12:22 PM, The Barbarian said:

But they aren't going to throw out his research.

That is the whole point. He stole the research from a women and that makes him a sexist. That was back when women were trying to break though the glass ceiling to be on equal grounds with the male scientiests. 

It would not make much difference except DNA has come a long distance in the last 50 years and we know so much more about it now. So that makes it's discovery and beginning a lot more interesting. 

 

[Guest]

On 12/9/2022 at 4:25 PM, kwikphilly said:

Animal abuse? Are you referring to clinical trials using animals?

Why suggest he hide anything,2 wrongs never make anything right,right?

I hate any "research" that requires animal testing bordering on or crossing over to animal abuse. Dr. Fauci's experiments are inexcusable as are any other "experiments" like this. I'm sure Dr. Mengele had "good" reasons for his experiments too!

Staying on topic, there are maps showing Antarctica connected to South America in the not too distant past. It's undeniable that the Earth's oceans have changed. The shoreline on Oak Island in Newfoundland has changed in the last 300-400 years or so.

[The Barbarian]

On 12/9/2022 at 7:51 PM, JohnR7 said:

That is the whole point. He stole the research from a women and that makes him a sexist. That was back when women were trying to break though the glass ceiling to be on equal grounds with the male scientiests. 

He took a lot of Franklin's data with no attribution.   That alone should have incurred the wrath of the establishment.   But she was a woman and the times were what the were.   That doesn't detract from the brilliance of Watson's and Crick's determination of the function of DNA.   

Newton was kind of a jerk, too.   He tried to hide the fact that he wasn't the only one who invented calculus, out of sheer pettiness.  

Scientists can be mean people, just like anyone else.

 

[The Barbarian]

On 12/11/2022 at 8:04 AM, Saved.One.by.Grace said:

Dr. Fauci's experiments are inexcusable as are any other "experiments" like this.

Well, as usual, the guys behind those stories embelleshed them to put Dr. Fauci into them...

The White Coat Waste Project told PolitiFact that it does not know if Fauci personally ordered the studies, but that “it is 100% confirmed that Fauci’s NIH division funded” them. The NIAID, however, said one project — out of which came the widely circulated, graphic photo of beagles with their heads in mesh cages — was wrongly listed as receiving funding from the agency.

“All animals used in NIH-funded research are protected by laws, regulations, and policies to ensure the smallest possible number of subjects and the greatest commitment to their welfare,” the agency said, adding that institutions that receive funds in the U.S. and abroad for animal research must abide by various rules and regulations.

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/here-are-the-facts-about-dr-anthony-fauci-and-the-experiments-involving-beagles/

If they have truth on their side, why would they try to deceive us about it?

 

 

[believeinHim]

Well, Sure it's inexcusable if it's a Beagle, If it's a lab rat, Go ahead. 

[IgnatioDeLoyola]

Dear Tristen,

On 10/12/2022 at 12:01 AM, Tristen said:

Zircon crystals can be grown artificially from around 600°C, but lead is only restricted when the temperature gets over 800°C. That allows plenty of scope for lead to remain in zircons, or move into zircons during cooling (all assuming that what holds true in the lab is always reflective of nature).

Zircons tested for U-Pb dating formed in igneous rocks. That is, rocks formed from Magma. These rocks are typically formed at between 900 - 1200 degrees celsius.

While it is technically possible that God grew all zircons in a lab at 600 degrees celsius in a bath of radiogenic lead, and I wasn't around back then to see it, I submit that that's quite unlikely.

Moreover, there are four isotopes of lead found in nature - 204, 206, 207 and 208. 204 is primordial lead - the other three are formed from specific radioactive decay processes (from U238, U235 and Th232). Therefore scientists are not simply measuring the amount of lead in a sample, but specifically the amount of radiogenic lead. 

Again, it is possible that God just so happened to artificially inject 600 degree Zircons with just the right amount of Pb206 to correspond to U238 and give a very old age, and this apparent age should just so happen to coincide with apparent isochron and Ar/Ar ages for said rock. But there is no known natural process to explain this other than the rock being really old.

On 10/12/2022 at 12:01 AM, Tristen said:

Zircons can also undergo recrystallization – allowing for the removal and/or acquisition of lead.

They can indeed. And, given the paucity of Pb-206, 207 and 208 in nature and surrounding zircons in rocks, such a metamorphic event would leach more radiogenic lead than it would add, giving a lower age.

Moreover, using Ar-Ar plateaus and isochron methods we could likely detect metamorphic events in a rock, or part of a rock. An Ar-Ar partial plateau would indicate such a metamorphic event for example, and a partial isochron / disturbed isochron also.

Again, there are not other natural explanations for these results other than an old rock undergoing a partial metamorphosis, or God directly interfering in nature and making it look this way.

On 10/12/2022 at 12:01 AM, Tristen said:

I only have a problem with failing to recognize the logical distinction between assumption and “observations”. This distinction has logical implications for how much legitimate confidence we can attribute to a claim.

You are right, epistemologically. Direct observations are better than assumptions. The question therefore is: how well can we test these assumptions? Are there ways, from observation, of detecting whether our assumptions are wrong?

In radiometric dating, there most certainly are ways of testing our assumptions. For example:

- Directly observing the formation of igneous rocks in nature, and what "new" zircons and other grains look like / their chemical composition. Do many of them contain significant amounts of lead? Do they date as old when they are in fact young?

- Using self-checking methods like Ar-Ar or Rb-Sr -where the results obviously don't work / show signs if the assumptions are wrong.

- Dating using multiple methods on the same rock, and ensuring that the results are within a margin of error of each other (because it would be damned odd if all the different assumptions where wrong in exactly the same proportion in the same rock with totally different chemicals).

None of this raises our conclusions to the same epistemic level as literally travelling back billions of years and seeing all rocks actually form. But, when done over and over again (and such checking of assumptions has been done tens of thousands of times) it leads to a very high level of certainty.

On 10/12/2022 at 12:01 AM, Tristen said:

There is no independent way to verify that “they work”.

But there is. Using several independent methods of radiometric dating does indeed check that they work.

The probability that all could be wrong, in exactly the same direction and magnitude, completely independently, is extremely low. Again, the epistemic point holds - using 3 or 4 methods doesn't raise radiometric dating to the level of "observation" of age. But it does hugely increase our level of confidence in it as fact. 

On 10/12/2022 at 12:01 AM, Tristen said:

That putative ability to plot the isotopes is itself entirely dependent on other underlying assumptions about the initial state of the rocks being tested.

Again, no. The very existence of the isochron shows that the assumptions were correct. If they were not, the chances of an isochron existing at random (with 4 or more points) would be essentially zero.

BTW, before you say it, yes, false isochrons can exist (in very specific circumstances). But they are of entirely random slope - 50% give negative ages for example. Therefore (a) we know the number of false isochrons is exceedingly low from observation, and (b) they will essentially never line up in age with other methods of dating since they are effectively fully random.

Also, K-Ar / Ar-Ar dating also deals with "assumptions" convincingly but in different ways to isochron dating. Ar doesn't exist in any quantity on earth, excluding the possibility of daughter element being present in the original sample. Metamorphic events are easily detectable through partial plateaus, therefore we are sure the system has been closed, or if it hasn't been we know. And if leaching has occured, it will disproportionately affect the daughter Argon (which is a noble gas) giving younger, not older, dates.

I am fully aware that your epistemic point still holds. It would be still be better, in any particular case, to go back a few billion years to actually see it happen.

But that doesn't mean we can't be very, very certain that the earth is very, very old. We can be, and are. We have literally thousands of corroborating measurements saying so, often from different methods where there is no explanation for overlap of the results.

BTW - there are two final assumption:

1. That the rate of radiometric decay hasn't, at one point, sped up exponentially to make new samples appear old. But even this is testable, to an extent. Or at least, enough to thoroughly disprove the young-earth narrative.

2. That God hasn't deliberately made the earth "look" old, to test our faith. I have biblical and personal reasons for not believing this (and I could also philosophically invoke Occam's Razor) - but there is no scientific way to check whether we are all being tricked.