radiometric

Setterfield: Yes, there is. 'c', the speed of light, is in the numerator of every reduced radio decay rate equation.

Setterfield: The simplest way is to say that the equations describing atomic decay contain a number of atomic constants, including the speed of light. If energy is conserved in a varying light speed process, these constants are changing so there is effectively a light speed term in the numerator of each equation. Thus, the higher the light speed, the faster the decay rate, in the same proportion.

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. (1/30/01)

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.

There have been a number of misconceptions about this group: that it is throwing out data which does not conform to Bible; that it is intent on proving radio decay dating wrong, etc. A number of those who support the Setterfield research seem to feel that it is therefore necessary to be against the purpose and work of the RATE group. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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.

We sincerely hope that this is enough to clear up misconceptions which are going around regarding the two different approaches.

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 could 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. Please notify us if the link no longer works. We make no implied or other support of anything else dealt with on that or associated webpages as we have not read them, but the article itself brings up some good points about both radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology. The summary of the article is as follows:

There is another point that needs to be mentioned here. In the USA there are stands of bristlecone pines that have several living specimens around 4,500 years old, or a little more. When carbon 14 dates are obtained from core samples, it is possible to compare the behavior of radiometric dates with historical tree ring dates. When this is done, a discrepancy is noted between the two dates which is due to the rate of 'ticking' of the radiometric, or atomic, clock as compared with actual orbital dates. This discrepancy can be accounted for by an oscillation in the speed of light which is also picked up by astronomical and geological observations. Please see the section of Atomic Quantum States, Light and the Redshift entitled Redshift Periodicities and Geology.

Question: I have been reading your paper Atomic Constants, Light and Time and I have a question. What do you mean by the statement below near the end of the paper, under the heading of references. Why do you reduce all units to unity? I don't understand what you are doing here and the reason for it. Do you mean you are changing the decay constants to unity?

"19, 20: l = radioactive decay constants. All units reduced to unity. In this case METH. column refers to the number of elements only."

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.

Comment: Thanks for the explanation. As for the half-lives that you used, all of them will have an uncertainty, sometimes a considerable uncertainty in the value. It is unclear how you have handled this uncertainty. In any case, it does not seem to me that you have strong evidence of a changing half-life.

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.