(June 9, 2025 at 6:13 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:06 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: BTDT, all I'm seeing is a few scraps of cellular material and biomolecules.

that's plenty of carbon for a c14 test

No, it isn't. You need a few hundred micrograms at best. You've got a few nanograms. You're short by a factor of roughly a million.

(June 9, 2025 at 6:14 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:08 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: No. Light is bosonic matter, and you and I are hadronic matter. Opposite branches of reality. The subtle hint is the way that you experience space-time and are not currently and always moving at c.

hadronic matter is made of bosonic matter

No, it isn't. Bosonic matter doesn't experience space-time and always moves at the speed of light. You're hadronic matter, do you move at the speed of light? How do you interact with your keyboard?

(June 9, 2025 at 6:26 pm)Astreja Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 5:48 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: Buddah believed in God... God told him (according to his text) to teach the dharma.

should we force people to 'intend well-being for all'?

that would be difficult to do without synthetic telepathy

but if you could do it so conviently... what is the sin?

I don't care about Buddhist mythology. I don't believe in any gods.

There is no value in a forced emotion, and no value in merely intending well-being.  If you aren't going to back up your intention with real-world actions that give people the help they desire, you're just a feel-good poseur.

intention to me is the established patterns of activity and thoughts that make up your action potentials

your intention produces all of your actions

(June 9, 2025 at 6:26 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 5:53 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: How do you know the decay rate for anything besides carbon 14...

Stick a lump of it in a very well-shielded lab with a radiation detector and watch it tick. Amusingly, the shielding isn't to keep the radiation in, it's to keep it out. You want to measure relatively small amounts of radiation without getting confounding readings from every stray cosmic ray, weapons test, and RBMK, so you frequently see these facilities built deep underground. You'll see some creationist sites claiming that all geological isotopes are calibrated against one another, and that truly would be circular, but that simply isn't how it's done. If you want to know the decay rates for Uranium you ask the boys at Oak Ridge.

Quote:we know that the carbon 14 is from the radiation hiting the atmosphere but where does the radio isotopes come from from the other processes?

There are a few others like tritium, 10-Be, and 36-Cl that are also cosmogenic, similar to 14-C. Most of the rest are primordial, they were formed by the dying stars that fertilized the nebula that became our solar system. "We are all made of recycled nuclear waste" is so much less poetic than being made of stardust. The funny thing is you only find very long-lived isotopic systems, which tells you a lot about the age of the Earth right there.

if most of the tests are based on 'stardust' isotopes... how does that date the rocks in an eruption?

(June 9, 2025 at 6:28 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:13 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: that's plenty of carbon for a c14 test

Plenty of carbon, not plenty of carbon-14.

Boru

can you prove that?

(June 9, 2025 at 6:30 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:13 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: that's plenty of carbon for a c14 test

No, it isn't. You need a few hundred micrograms at best. You've got a few nanograms. You're short by a factor of roughly a million.

is nanograms even visible? lol

(June 9, 2025 at 6:32 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:14 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: hadronic matter is made of bosonic matter

No, it isn't. Bosonic matter doesn't experience space-time and always moves at the speed of light. You're hadronic matter, do you move at the speed of light? How do you interact with your keyboard?

what does "experience space-time" mean?

(June 9, 2025 at 6:15 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:11 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: Find the rocks that were erupted. Date the minerals in the rocks. You can get whole-rock ages too, but that's much less reliable and so very 1970s.

how do you date those minerals in the rocks that were erupted?

That depends a little on the exact minerals. For a silica-rich rock I'd look for zircons, titanite, monazite, or other uranium-rich minerals to date by U-Pb and/or potassium-rich minerals (K-feldspar, biotite, hornblende) to date by Ar-Ar and/or Rb-Sr. For a silica-poor rock you have a more limited selection. There are still a few minerals (apatite, baddeleyite, titanite, rutile, and possibly even zircon) that you might be able to get an age from but the selection is more limited and you have to be a little more selective. If you have strong metamorphic overprint that may have reset the ages on your minerals you may need to pass on the trickier silica-poor volcanics in favour of the more robust minerals in the silica-rich rocks.

(June 9, 2025 at 6:43 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:15 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote: how do you date those minerals in the rocks that were erupted?

That depends a little on the exact minerals. For a silica-rich rock I'd look for zircons, titanite, monazite, or other uranium-rich minerals to date by U-Pb and/or potassium-rich minerals (K-feldspar, biotite, hornblende) to date by Ar-Ar and/or Rb-Sr. For a silica-poor rock you have a more limited selection. There are still a few minerals (apatite, baddeleyite, titanite, rutile, and possibly even zircon) that you might be able to get an age from but the selection is more limited and you have to be a little more selective. If you have strong metamorphic overprint that may have reset the ages on your minerals you may need to pass on the trickier silica-poor volcanics in favour of the more robust minerals in the silica-rich rocks.

U-Pb for example; how do you know how much U is in the zircons by dating?
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(June 9, 2025 at 6:35 pm)SubtleVirtue Wrote:

(June 9, 2025 at 6:26 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: Stick a lump of it in a very well-shielded lab with a radiation detector and watch it tick. Amusingly, the shielding isn't to keep the radiation in, it's to keep it out. You want to measure relatively small amounts of radiation without getting confounding readings from every stray cosmic ray, weapons test, and RBMK, so you frequently see these facilities built deep underground. You'll see some creationist sites claiming that all geological isotopes are calibrated against one another, and that truly would be circular, but that simply isn't how it's done. If you want to know the decay rates for Uranium you ask the boys at Oak Ridge.


There are a few others like tritium, 10-Be, and 36-Cl that are also cosmogenic, similar to 14-C. Most of the rest are primordial, they were formed by the dying stars that fertilized the nebula that became our solar system. "We are all made of recycled nuclear waste" is so much less poetic than being made of stardust. The funny thing is you only find very long-lived isotopic systems, which tells you a lot about the age of the Earth right there.

if most of the tests are based on 'stardust' isotopes... how does that date the rocks in an eruption?

The radiometric "clocks" in a mineral don't start "ticking" until the mineral forms. And they don't actually start "ticking" until they cool below something called the "closure temperature", which can be a problem if the rock gets heated up again and ceases being "closed". Put simply, we're measuring two important quantities when we date any mineral: abundance of parent isotope and abundance of the daughter isotope. So how much 235-U and how much 207-Pb? Above the closure temperature the system behaves as if it were "open" and the daughter product diffuses out of the mineral, resetting the age to zero. So yes, the primordial isotopes do decay before the mineral ever forms, but until the mineral starts accumulating the daughter product the radiometric clock doesn't start ticking.

OK, that isn't quite true, you can use the decay of radiometric systems in an open system along with some interesting assumptions to produce something called a "model age", but that's a whole other can of worms. No point in going down the rabbit hole of Sm-Nd systematics and TDM just yet.