Polonium Halos

Do 'Polonium Halos' prove a young earth, as Robert V. Gentry claims?

you tease

No.

See here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html

It goes into great detail to show why this is not evidence of a young earth at all.

Looks like a link war....

Do the halos prove a young earth? No, they would prove a rather instant creation.

The halos have a real quick half life while the formation of the granite according to the uniformatarians took quite a while and therefor should not be there.

It would be like shooting a bullet through a bucket of water, while the water is freezing.
Now if you could freeze the water rather quickly, the trace of the bullet would be captured in the ice. This is sort-of what happened with the polonium halos.

There is two views concerning the halos.

The uniformatarians claim the parent was present while the creationist say there was no parent when the halos formed.

From what I read the halos were collect from an area that strongly suggest there was no parents present which means the polonium was created parentless...as when God spoke the polonium and granite into existance

Other uniformatarians claim that the isotope is mistaken with a similar isotope.
I've communicated with people who have studied these polonium halos and they say there is no mistaken idenity.

It's also understandable that a link such as vance has provided would like to dismiss Gentry. I cold provide several links that would refute vances link but what would that prove? I'm not into link wars like vance seems to be.

The question is which scientists have the more convincing scientific arguments. Having read Gentry and the others, I think it is very clear that Gentry is WAY off base, simply finding what he is hoping to find. The link allows everyone to make up their own mind if they are interested in reading up on the subject.

You know if AIG won't jump on the bandwagon, then it is got serious problems, since AIG tends to have a very low threshold for inclusion in its "body of evidence":

Of interest is the fact that the most aggressive young-earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis, has recently published an article critical of Gentry's theories on polonium radiohaloes, one of his premier arguments for a young Earth. Tas Walker of AiG writes "Polonium halos have been found abundantly in granites, and minerals from some 22 localities have so far been reported to contain polonium radiohalos. Because polonium isotopes have very short half-lives, it has been argued that ‘granites with Po halos, regardless of their "geological age" are primordial rocks’, created supernaturally and instantaneously during the Creation week. Indeed it has been contended that such granites cannot be duplicated by natural processes. This conclusion has been disputed because of the geological relationships of the rocks in which polonium halos have been found. For example, some samples containing radiohalos were from dikes cross-cutting host rocks which thus must be older. Rather than primordial, it has been suggested that the parent material of the radiohalo was part of a conventional uranium or thorium decay series segregated by some geological process...."

Source: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/docs/tj_v15n1_radiohalofind.asp?srcFrom=aignews

The Geoscience Research Institute, the research arm of the Seventh Day Adventists, has also published an article critical of fellow young-earth creationist Gentry. In a 1988 article, Brown et. al. write "[Gentry's book] Creation's Tiny Mystery represents an interesting approach at a synthesis of science and the Bible; however, the argumentation presented has some serious problems. These include: *The inconsistent use of radioactive disintegration rates; *The fact that polonium halos appear to be derived from uranium; *The evidence for the origin of polonium halos by aqueous transport; and *The fact that polonium halos are found in secondary rocks. Because of these and other problems, readers of Creation's Tiny Mystery should be cautious in accepting its argumentation and claims of evidence for ex nihilo creation. ..."

Source: http://www.grisda.org/origins/15032.htm