(03-27-2014 12:41 PM)LSU04_08 Wrote: How is any of this accurate proof of age? How does someone know the age of the sun to know their equipment is accurate? Like others, you're just going by what they tell you. You don't know how the sun is, so you can't use the sun's age to determine the age of the Earth...
I've done more than just go on what others have told me. I've studied the physics behind it and followed the reasoning in pretty good detail. That was all roughly 30 years ago, and I'm not well prepared to explain or defend that reasoning at this stage.
(03-27-2014 12:41 PM)LSU04_08 Wrote: Here, let me show you something fancy, make it sound good, and you'll believe it without proof. If I've said it once, I've said it 13.8 billion times. You, nor anybody else, knows the true age of the Earth, of the sun, of the universe, or even of a dinosaur bone. All you have is heat readers, carbon dating devices, and isotope dating devices... None of which are proven a fact.
I put out the graphics to provide some visual aid to what I said in text ... perhaps incorrectly believing that you were genuinely interested in it, not to blow smoke up your arse.
As for your assertion of what i or others know of the age of the earth, you are simply wrong.
(03-27-2014 12:41 PM)LSU04_08 Wrote: So it's documented that my grandfather's goat died 75 years ago. I make a device that matches up to that. Good, now how the heck do I know if it's accurate when it tells me that dino bone is 10 million years old, or that this pottery I found in Peru last month is 576 years old, and was made when the Inca Empire first began? I don't. I think I do, so I document it, then it suddenly becomes a fact.
My point is that it's useless in dating the age of a dinosaur bone ... it works in a fairly narrow timeframe, disregarding* various arguments (bacterial contamination, assumptions about baseline levels of isotope). The reason for that timeframe is that you're relying on radioactive decay of Carbon isotopes with a half-life of about 5000 years. After 10 half-lives (50,000 years), you have 1/1000th of the original level of the isotope, which means you have very little material to measure after 10 half-lives and negligible material after 100 (1/1000000th).
* I say disregarding just to set aside any such arguments to avoid digression ... whether those arguments have merit or not is immaterial to whether it would be possible to use carbon dating on a time scale on the order of millions of years.
(03-27-2014 12:41 PM)LSU04_08 Wrote: I love science, I love space, I love archeology, and I love ancient history. I just can't get onboard the ages that all these devices claim objects to be. I know they're old, REALLY old, but I don't know HOW old. Nor do you, or any scientist.
Up until that last sentence, you're ok. You are free to make statements about what you know or believe, but have no basis to make projections on what others - me or anyone else - knows, unless you can argue that it is not possible to know a thing. And, there you would be in trouble.
You don't appreciate the volume of work and predictions validated by observation that back up these claims. And, as much as you won't trust any of them without written documentation, the fact is that the science is far more reliable than such documentation in most instances. By way of example, every year on my grandmothers' birthday, she and one of my uncles would argue about how old she was... 98 or 99, 99 or 100. The documentation wasn't that valuable in her case. She lived to be 103 years old, +/- 0.97%. There are no first had observations of the age of the sun nor the age of the universe, but I am just as confident in their age as I was in hers. Maybe not the same degree of accuracy, but there is far more science, far more evidence to support the age of the sun and earth than there is in more pedestrian things that are perhaps backed up by a court record or someone's diary.
