Re: A challenge or a question - you decide.

"On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:40:22 +0000 (UTC), in article
<Xns99D2620DB73mujinomega@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mujin stated..."

TomS <TomS_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:203148716.000003c0.089.0001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

"On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 06:36:08 -0700, in article
<1193146568.783852.218250@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Inez stated..."

On Oct 22, 5:58 pm, FreedThinker <onefreedthin...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Vend,

I am not blaming contamination entirely. But when contamination
happens, it does not infer that it is a pure chunk of "old rock"; in
isocron dating D_i, P, and D don't exactly stick together unless it is
a closed system.

We can trust the equipment for the range of accuracy for that
equipment. However, since isocron dating doesn't measure under a
particular age, we can't date something as being within that range
unless we already know it is in the range ... which is circular
reasoning.

Thank you.

I am not an expert in this or any branch of science, but I always find
it interesting when people believe that they know better than all the
professionals who do this for a living. Do you really think that such
a glaring problem has gone unnoticed by scientists? Do you think that
they are all dishonest, or just stupid?


In particular, this complaint about the dating methods being "circular".

If the dating methods really were circular, then how did the scientists
come to agree on particular numbers?

Why did they agree on the figure of 65 million years for the famous
KT boundary layer and the extinction of the dinosaurs? Why did they
pick that number, rather than any other?

If you take a look at the actual history of how the radioactive dating
methods came to be accepted, they had to prove themselves. The
geologists were not just overwhelmed by the physicists, when the
physicists told them how to give absolute dates. Just as the
archeologists were not about to accept the dates given by
radiocarbon dating without being shown that it worked. There is
a resistance from a particular discipline when an outsider comes
with some new methods. And you can bet that the geologists and
archeologists would have rejected a *circular* argument from a
physicist.

Not only that. Considering that you can always find at least one physics
graduate student or professor on campus who is willing to go on at length
about how physics is the ultimate science that every other science rests on
- and that things like anthropology, psychology, archaeology and possibly
even biology aren't really sciences at all since you can't wrap everything
up into a neat little equation - I imagine that any serious flaw in C-14
dating would have been *gleefully* pointed out to the physicist outsiders
who proposed it and then smugly rejected.


Quite so.

And there is a bit of history to this rivalry. Remember that
Lord Kelvin told the geologists in the 19th century that they
had got the dates wrong. The physicists had to retreat from
such pronouncements when radioactivity began to be appreciated,
and undoubtedly the geologists were gloating about that. And
the geologists learned from that experience not to blindly
trust the physicists.


--
---Tom S.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
attributed to Josh Billings

.

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