(October 15, 2010 at 3:31 am)Chuck Wrote: No, radioactive elements can not be altered chemically. Elemental identity is determined by the configuration of the nucleus, and can only be changed by overcoming strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together. Chemistry is an effect of electromagnetic forces involving the electron cloud, and does not significantly effect the nucleus. Nuclear fusion will effectively end and the earth die long before strong nuclear force varies by a magnitude of 8.
He is full of shit and doesn't know how to stop. He would be a disgrace even to Christianity. Don't let him bullshit you.
Sorry, but this isn't technically true that radioactive elements can't be altered chemically.
Carbon 14, for example, can become radioactive carbon dioxide, which makes it less useful for radiocarbon dating for a number of reasons.
Things like this can happen to other elements if the conditions are right, but it's irrelevant to this discussion anyway because scientists avoid these kinds of things when dating things properly by looking for carbon-14 and its daughter elements in a sample not contaminated as such. They even test for these using chemical means and comparing the ratio of daughter and partent elements.
It works the same way with samples near volcanoes because the heat can boil away the daughter elements and reset the clock on the rocks inside if the rock is molten, so if they want to date a fossil, they get the rocks that are nearest to the fossil and not the ones clearly altered by geologic activity or whatever. They also take several samples to eliminate the possibility of a false positive and make the result as accurate as possible.
You are absolutely spot on about the nuclear force, however, but their creationist ideas are completely and utterly ridiculous on their own. That video he hates even proved it beyond any shadow of a doubt because the universe cannot exist in any creationist view because the universe must have a constant speed of light, be large, and very old. It cannot be anything else without completely ignoring gravity or some other fundemental and well-established law of the universe.
In his case, the speed of light and the strong nuclear force.
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
