To Rick and others…
Science that contradicts the evidence is useless…
Like it or not science is not what it was 40 years ago.
An example would be the unchanging decay rates in radio isotopes. This idea was the bedrock of earth dating.
Let me be the first to rush to common ground and say that the issue you're raising is entirely relevant, very interesting, and worthy of discussion. Science encourages continual doubt, self-examination, and it would be impertinent to ignore new evidence and phenomenon. Truth fears no inquiry.
Since radioactive decay rates have been found to vary with solar activity (not trivial) it is truly a new ball game.
But now variable decay rates of radio isotopes...
Creationists are knocking at the door and it turns out science is not the exclusive playground of the materialist.
But, there's a reason this observation of potentially varying decay rates isn't as paradigm shifting as you think it is. The varying effect found was very small (possibly why it remained undiscovered for so long). Where physics gets refined more and more (note the word refined, used in the same sense that Einstein refined Newton's gravitation; he didn't, and couldn't, simply throw away 200 years of successful Newtonian calculations), it's to be expected that certain discrepancies should show up. For them not to show up means that we already have perfect theories and all variables accounted for in science, a very precarious assumption.
Now to the papers themselves. One can in fact read the published papers and get it, as it were, from the horse's mouth rather than the sometimes sensationalist media.
arxiv.org/abs/1106.1678
You can also find a whole host of other papers on this topic by clicking on the authors' names. The variation found for the measured decay rates was on the order of 10^-3. To take the example cited in the paper, the researchers found a half-life decay rate for Mn-54 of 310.881 days. This differs from the published value by ~.4% (again parts per thousand). Let's extrapolate from this and take a common isotope used in radiometric dating: the U-Pb decay with a published half life of 4.47 billion years. Say I'm extra extra generous and assume that the published value is off by a huge 10% (a bit more than an order of magnitude above the observed effect) and in the lower direction. That still only gets you to a half-life of around 4 billion years. To get the U-Pb half-life measurement to anywhere close to the thousands of years mark (a difference of many millions of percent, something so absurdly large as to be nonsensical) is just not justified by this experiment or in fact any experiment conducted (though if I err here please direct me to the article and/or experiments saying otherwise). To do so would require throwing out not some but all the evidence ever gathered for U-Pb decay for no rational reason.
Even more so, the paper seems to suggest that this decay rate variation is due to solar output, seemingly the sun's neutrino flux. But the sun is actually
more luminous today than it was in the past. So if this variation in half life decay depends on solar luminosity, the variation should actually be
smaller in the past if anything (meaning even less freedom to play with decay rate variations).
So the effect is too small to get us to the same ballpark (not even that, the same sport) as creationism.
