(October 14, 2010 at 8:10 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: can you conclude that radio-metric decay has always been constant by observing to be constant for 100 years?
The earth circumferance analogy was certainly perfect for the point I was attempting to make.
In any case, sure, we can certainly move back to radiometric dating.
Yes, it can, in fact, be proven to be consistent and for a number of reasons:
First of all, we would have seen it given all of the radiometric dating among all of the samples taken among all of the radioactive elements used for this purpose, to which we have derieved samples from all over the world and a number from outside of Earth's atmosphere, including the Moon, Mars, and various extraterrestrial rocks that have crashed into the planet over the years.
The thing is - they all date accurately in contrast to one another and not one of them has shown a margin of error that would make dating techniques unviable and not one of them has a different decay rate between materials of the same radioactive element anywhere.
As such, despite variables that allow us to view samples from wildly different places all around the solar system, radiometric dating has never proven to be inconsistent and because of this, it is highly unlikely that it has been inconsistent at another point in time.
This is analagous to how we can tell that boys and girls grow up at different rates at different times to a different average height without necessarily following a sample over the course of their entire lifetimes. The same is true for radiometric dating samples.
Second of all, different radiometric isotopes decay at different rates. There are no known methods of changing all of them simultaneously under the same process.
Third of all, a variable decay rate would violate numerous proven fundemental aspects of quantum mechanics (I believe the strong force was mentioned by another person you dismissed earlier in this or the other thread).
As such, for these reasons and more, radiometric dating is highly precise and consistent, despite attempts by the Curies and others to prove otherwise.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
