Isometric dating: Recipe for fudge

[TheBear]

Originally posted by LiveFreeOrDie
I thought Isometrics was some kind of exercise program.

Is Isometric Dating some kind of singles forum for people who practice isometrics?

 

LOL!

No. You got it wrong. Isometric, is the name of girl you take to the excersise club, for a date.

 

[TheBear]

I'll check back on this thread a little later.

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Originally posted by TheBear
Question: How many positive results and advancements, based on the use of Isometric Dating, are in existance?

Because of accurate dating of rock strata, we are better able to identify promising places to look for fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas.

 

 

[TheBear]

Originally posted by LiveFreeOrDie


Because of accurate dating of rock strata, we are better able to identify promising places to look for fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas.

 

Give that man a cigar!!!

Any other positive results or advancements? Anyone?

 

[seebs]

I seem to recall that radiometric dating contributes indirectly to evaluation of continental drift... and thereby, to longer-term information about fault zones, volcanoes, and other trivial hazards.

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by LiveFreeOrDie


Because of accurate dating of rock strata, we are better able to identify promising places to look for fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. 

No, because of relatively consistent dating of rock strata, we are better able to identify...etc.

That's not the same thing as ACCURATE dating of rock strata.

 

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by npetreley


No, because of relatively consistent dating of rock strata, we are better able to identify...etc.

That's not the same thing as ACCURATE dating of rock strata.

 

How can you have ten different radiometric isotopes used to date hundreds or thousands of samples from a given layer of the geological colum "relatively consistently" and yet each of those dates be inaccurate? I understand how one K/Ar date can be inaccurate because of Ar leakage or excess Ar. I understand how one Rb/Sr isochron can be inaccurate because of mixing. I do not understand how both can be inaccurate yet consistently agree on the date.

If it is inaccurate, I don't see why the rocks lower in the column consistently date older than those that are higher up.

I don't know why the "young" end of the radiometric scale consistently agrees with tree-ring dates, ice core dates & varve dates. I don't know why the high end of the scale are consistent with coral clocks that assume a uniformitarian decrease in the speed of Earth's rotation, if any of these dating methods are inaccurate.

How is it that all of the inaccurate measures agree with each other?   Why don't they diverge from one another according to the individual shortcomings of each method?

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Ditto Jerry.

Why, Nick, against all reason and common sense, do you continue to dismiss the results of radiometric dating?

 

[kern]

If someone believes that (a) The Bible is completely literal and (b) the Bible advocates young-earth creationism, there is absolutely no way they will agree with any sort of dating of the earth no matter how much proof is put in front of them. For some people, Biblical literalism is very important to their faith (I have heard people say things like "if one word of the Bible is errant, then Christianity fails completely"). You see that npeterely and the others have set you up to impossible standards of proof that you will never be able to meet; ergo old-earth and evolution cannot be proven to them.

-Chris

 

[kern]

Also, the idea of constant decay rates for nuclear isotopes also led to the development of the super-accurate clocks (like the cesium clock in Boulder, CO). I assume these super-accurate clocks are useful in further scientific research, although I can't be sure because I'm not really a scientists ("computer science" doesn't count )

-Chris

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Originally posted by kern
If someone believes that (a) The Bible is completely literal and (b) the Bible advocates young-earth creationism, there is absolutely no way they will agree with any sort of dating of the earth no matter how much proof is put in front of them. For some people, Biblical literalism is very important to their faith (I have heard people say things like "if one word of the Bible is errant, then Christianity fails completely"). You see that npeterely and the others have set you up to impossible standards of proof that you will never be able to meet; ergo old-earth and evolution cannot be proven to them.

I completely agree.

What I don't understand, though, is why they won't admit that their objections to evolution are based on faith alone and not science.

 

[npetreley]

Why, Nick, against all reason and common sense, do you continue to dismiss the results of radiometric dating?

Because it's based on assumptions about original state that cannot be observed.

Regardless, you cannot deny that my statement about consistency is true, whether you agree with me about the reliability of isometric dating or not.

Even if ALL of your radiometric dating was off by X million years, you could still use the data to identify things from the strata as long as your erroneous dates were consistent with the strata.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Nick, your point here isn't clear. Either the radiometric dates diverge, in which case we are stuck with relative dating of the strata (since only radiometric methods exist for absolute dating strata older than a few thousand years). I the radiometric dates converge and agree with stratigraphic data consistently, then we have every reason to believe the radiometric dates are correct.

I'm not sure which scenario you are trying to present here, so I cannot say what kind of error you are making, but if you care to clear it up, then we can at least see if your assertion holds.

 

[Morat]

  I'm not sure what Nick is claiming here.

  Is he claiming that radioactive decay is not constant?

  Is he claiming that because we don't know the initial amount of the element, daughter elements, etc, in the rock we cannot date it?

 

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Originally posted by npetreley
Because it's based on assumptions about original state that cannot be observed.

Which assumptions in particular bother you?

Regardless, you cannot deny that my statement about consistency is true, whether you agree with me about the reliability of isometric dating or not.

I do agree.  Likewise you cannot deny that there is also a great deal of consistency between the various dating methods.

Even if ALL of your radiometric dating was off by X million years, you could still use the data to identify things from the strata as long as your erroneous dates were consistent with the strata.

If radiometric dating didn't work, then why would the 40-odd radiometric dating methods, all based on different elements with different chemical properties and half-lives, even produce concordant results at all?

 

 

[Morat]

  I would like to apologize for my confused additions to this thread. For some reason I had Austin's St. Helens testing confused with the paper in question here.

   Which meant I was arguing a completely different topic than anyone else.

   So, to wit: I was arguing that Austin was unethical in using a known-to-fail-under-those-conditions method of dating (K/Ar) instead of a more appropriate (Ar/Ar) method, and viewing the Geochron statement as a "Why didn't Geochron tell Austin it's results were bad".

   Instead, this discussion is about a claim made that dates are random, and that non-matching dates are thrown away. As such, the source of the Geochron statement is a clear point that Geochron could not have known the dates Austin wanted, so could not have culled it's results to match.

 

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by LiveFreeOrDie

I do agree.  Likewise you cannot deny that there is also a great deal of consistency between the various dating methods.

How could they NOT agree? They've been calibrated against each other!

Originally posted by LiveFreeOrDie

If radiometric dating didn't work, then why would the 40-odd radiometric dating methods, all based on different elements with different chemical properties and half-lives, even produce concordant results at all?

Because you've calibrated what you assume to be the starting conditions based on the same CURRENT observations.

Even then you run into huge problems because the same CURRENT starting conditions vary unexpectedly. So you simply write it off as "well, this particular sample had too much argon for some reason, but under NORMAL conditions..." The problem is you don't even know for sure what conditions are NORMAL for today, and you're making assumptions about what was NORMAL for 500 million years ago.

But because you stick to an accepted set of assumptions, you calibrate everything against your assumptsions and they all agree. Again, how could they NOT agree!?!?

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by Morat
  I would like to apologize for my confused additions to this thread. For some reason I had Austin's St. Helens testing confused with the paper in question here.

Thanks for doing that. I also went back and re-read it a few times and realized he wasn't complaining in the section to which I was referring, he was trying to emphasize that the lab would have returned random results if they were truly random. (By the way, the demonstration that they were NOT random is why I said in my original post that there were some good points in this article.)

Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion about how tests are done. The text would not make sense in any other context. If one never told the lab what target to expect, he wouldn't have suggested that this was NOT done, since it wouldn't be something you'd need to rule out. In addition, samples still ARE compared to things like index fossils, which are dated using isometric dating, which is circular confirmation.

 

[Morat]

If one never told the lab what target to expect, he wouldn't have suggested that this was NOT done, since it wouldn't be something you'd need to rule out.

  This is where you're wrong. Primarily, he would have made this statement given his intended audience. That is, people predisposed to believe Woody's claims.

   As such, he would have to point out that at no stage would the culling have been done. Had he merely pointed out that Austin and Woody wouldn't have "thrown out" bad dates, it would have been countered by pointing out that the lab could have.

   By pointing out that the lab could not have thrown out bad dates, even had they wanted to (for lack of knowing what a "bad date" was), he points out that there was, in fact, no way anyone could have culled the dates.

  Secondarily, in some cases the lab knows the expected date by the method of dating chosen. If a dating method is only workable within a certain age range, the lab knows the geologist believes the sample lies within that range.

   Nor is it circular. Often it's a case of a wider-range method establishing a rough age (say a 20 million year error bar) and then being resubmitted for a finer-grained look to get smaller error bars.

 

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by LiveFreeOrDie

If radiometric dating didn't work, then why would the 40-odd radiometric dating methods, all based on different elements with different chemical properties and half-lives, even produce concordant results at all

But they DON'T produce concordant results. You simply assert that they do. There is measurable C14 in coal that you believe is millions of years old. So do you conclude that your assumptions could be wrong? Of course not! You make up some other explanation for it! As long as you get to make it up as you go, you can make ANY measurements seem concordant. But they aren't.