The issue with YEC

[invisible trousers]

Heh. Don't bet on it.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

what we're saying is you're assuming the decay rate that is measurable today and extrapolating it backwards into what you believe to be millions of years. and that very fact itself lends to criticism, and criticism surely even you would agree as necessary.

<sigh>
Why is it that you think that no one out of the tens of thousands of physicists who work on this kind of stuff have considered the possibility that physical constants may have changed?

Guess what? They have. Repeatedly over the last 50+ years.

Get it straight folks, scientists are not stupid, nor do they purposefully leave underpinnings of their work untested.

Most recently we have (quoting myself in post http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=13871043 )

To quote from the European Space Organization (ESO) press release I cite above what is being looked at is "the so-called "fine structure constant", alpha = 1/137.03599958, a combination of electrical charge of the electron, the Planck constant and the speed of light. The fine structure constant describes how electromagnetic forces hold atoms together and the way light interacts with atoms."

That is to say that the change in alpha over roughly 10 billion years is less than one part in 100,000.
Please note that this was viewed as a huge change.

Again quoting from the ESO press release: "The result of this extensive study is that over the last 10,000 million years, the relative variation of alpha must be less than 0.6 part per million."

And those limits were imposed by the limits in accuracy of the experiment, more precise measurements are being planned using somewhat different methods.​

There are a number of other tests as well, the reality is that there is a load of evidence that physical constants, such as those that determine decay rates, have never changed by any signficant amount and no evidence that they have.

 

[shernren]

yes. precisely my point. thanks!