How accurate is Radiometric Dating?

[Anomalocaris]

The answer to the original post is “much, much, much, more accurate, no, infinitely more accurate than god created everything”

[Fake Messiah]

Religious people put their holy book before evidence and science overall, but then the question arises what criteria do you use to choose which holy book to extol?

[Anomalocaris]

does it matter which holy book?

If you are looking for the right childish doodle that will make quantum mechanics all clear to you, you are probably destined to never master even arithmetics.

[brewer]

No, I should have phrased that differently.

Undrestood, I could have misunderstood your intent also.

[polymath257]

So how come they were wrong about the pyramids?

I don't know. Which dating method did they use? Did they follow the appropriate protocol? Did they interpret the results correctly?

For example, you can't carbon date the pyramids.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Until elements begin decaying at non-constant rates, I think we can treat radiometric dating with a high degree of confidence.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

It’s not the inconstancy of the rate of decay that puts unavoidable error bars on radiometrid dating.    It is the uncertainty surrounding just how much of the parent element there were at the moment of the event you are trying to date, whether certain quantity of daughter element had already been there at that moment,  and if there was some way we have not yet been able to think of or control for that allows some of the parent and daughter element to escape or be removed, thus screwing up the ratio of parent to daughter elements and thus the implied radiometrid age.

However, the possibility of such disturbances to parent-daughter element ration screwing up radiomatric dating can be reduced by cross check several different radioactive decay clocks, if these are available.     The chance that several radiometrid clocks are disturbed by the exact same amount so they all agree on the wrong age is virtually nil.

If several different radiometric clocks disagree in statisistically significant way, then you have some thinking, anssessment and experimentation to do to figure out which one(s) could have been disturbed.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It’s not the inconstancy of the rate of decay that puts unavoidable error bars on radiometrid dating.    It is the uncertainty surrounding just how much of the parent element there were at the moment of the event you are trying to date, whether certain quantity of daughter element had already been there at that moment,  and if there was some way we have not yet been able to think of or control for that allows some of the parent and daughter element to escape or be removed, thus screwing up the ratio of parent to daughter elements and thus the implied radiometrid age.

However, the possibility of such disturbances to parent-daughter element ration screwing up radiomatric dating can be reduced by cross check several different radioactive decay clocks, if these are available.     The chance that several radiometrid clocks are disturbed by the exact same amount so they all agree on the wrong age is virtually nil.

If several different radiometric clocks disagree in statisistically significant way, then you have some thinking, anssessment and experimentation to do to figure out which one(s) could have been disturbed.

Thank you. These little lectures of your are very helpful.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

You are welcome.

[polymath257]

It’s not the inconstancy of the rate of decay that puts unavoidable error bars on radiometrid dating.    It is the uncertainty surrounding just how much of the parent element there were at the moment of the event you are trying to date, whether certain quantity of daughter element had already been there at that moment,  and if there was some way we have not yet been able to think of or control for that allows some of the parent and daughter element to escape or be removed, thus screwing up the ratio of parent to daughter elements and thus the implied radiometrid age.

However, the possibility of such disturbances to parent-daughter element ration screwing up radiomatric dating can be reduced by cross check several different radioactive decay clocks, if these are available.     The chance that several radiometrid clocks are disturbed by the exact same amount so they all agree on the wrong age is virtually nil.

If several different radiometric clocks disagree in statisistically significant way, then you have some thinking, anssessment and experimentation to do to figure out which one(s) could have been disturbed.

It should also be pointed out that Rb-Sr dating is self-correcting in this way. You need to have several different crystals from the same rock, but you can derive the amount of the parent isotope from the measurements.