I believe you are correct there, I misspoke earlier in my post regarding the dating of homogenous rocks. There would need to be a crystal lattice in play for the reasons you have mentioned. Please pardon my wordings or statements that appear to run contrary to this.
I have the article in question up on my computer now. I dont see anything in there that suggests that something was dated to various ages in which there was no real understanding of why. I see a paragraph that i will quote here,
"In an important study of Miocene leucogranitic rocks of the Himalayas, Schiirer (1984) documented reverse discordance where monazite analyses plotted above concordia. These monazites had strongly negative (future) 207~b/206~b ages, some being as low as -400 Ma. This type of isotopic behavior in monazite has since been documented in a number of other instances including rocks older than 150 Ma (Fig. 3) (Schiirer et al. 1986; Parrish and Armstrong 1987; Parrish et al. 1988), and it seems to be a common feature. The best explanation for this behavior is that of Schiirer (1984), who, following a line of reasoning developed earlier by Mattinson (1973), suggested that monazite, a Th-bearing mineral, incorporates significant amounts of relatively shortlived 23@Th into its structure upon crystallization. 23?h is an intermediate daughter in the 238U decay chain, with a half-life of 75 200 years, which decays to 206~b. Because of the large amounts of Th incorporated into monazite, large numbers of atoms of initially incorporated 23@Th decay to 206~b, SO a closed U-Pb system would produce a 206~b/238~ ratio that plots above concordia. Mattinson (1973) and Schiirer (1984) pointed out that in contrast with monazite, minerals that have very low TWU, such as zircon, baddeleyite, or xenotime, will show a deficit of 206~b."
This is about all i could gather that Tolkein was referring to. But right there in the same section you have multiple sourced research papers discussing the practice.
Its not like some researchers published something and came to the conclusion that they had no idea what they were doing. Rather the research paper really just demonstrates an understanding of the science behind this particular form of dating, what to look out for, and how to keep accuracy and precision in the methods. And it also describes how the discordance was visibly apparent in the results, which ultimately allowed researchers to dig deeper into the situation to understand why the discordance was present. Its not like people were just completely blind and just pumping out conflicting data without any awareness as to what was going on. Rather people were...really just being scientists and uncovering the nuances of U-Pb and U-Th dating.
The institute of creation research has this article:
http://www.icr.org/article/dubious-radiogenic-places-u-th-pb-mineral-dating-d/
Which states : "While monazite grains can yield negative "ages," such as -97 Ma in a 20 Ma Himalayan granite that also contains zircons yielding "ages" up to 1483 Ma.24"
But again, this is irrelevant because the article is describing how precision is acquired through dating.
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It would be like, someone writing a research paper on how to hit a baseball. If you swing too soon you will miss. If you swing too late, you might end up hitting a foul ball.
Then some heckler comes along and says "look! theyre describing how they swung too soon and hit a foul ball".
But, the heckler misses the purpose in the discussion, in that the discussion actually demonstrates knowledge of the practice and is describing how to swing accurately (and in that it is also describing how to swing inaccurately to inform the reader).
But ultimately as I noted before,
"Only the two isotopically coupled U-Pb chronometers, 235~-207Pb and 238~-206~b have the analytical potential to resolve detailed events with high precision throughout the Earth's history. Though zircon has been the favored mineral for precise age determination, monazite U-Pb geochronology is an established but underutilized tool which can complement the more familiar U-Pb zircon method.
The objective of this paper is to provide a detailed outline of the types of U-Pb behavior in monazite, using natural examples, and to show the power and importance of this mineral in unraveling age relations of geologic, metamorphic, and thermal events."
The authors see the value in practical application of these dating methods, and that is what the paper is ultimately centered around describing.
Yet again its just young earth creationists quote mining, taking things out of context and being dishonest. Just like with the C14 dating discussion that tolkein presented. He misquoted a paper, he lied about its conclusions, he then proceeded to act like he meant to quote a different paper when he realized he was wrong. Rather than just admitting that he didnt know what he was talking about.
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