How is carbon dating done on inorganic objects when there is no decayed carbon to date?

Question

Feel free to also explain how we know that carbon decays at a constant rate, especially now that we know that the speed of light is not a constant.

Answer 1

C 14 dating can not be used on inorganic material. Geologists use other radioactive isotopes such as Ar-40 to Ar-39, K-Ar, U-Pb, Rb-St dating.

Decay constants can be neasured in controlled labratory setting.

Where did you read that the speed of light is not a constant. That is news to me.

Answer 2

It's done WITH ASSUMPTIONS......

"Dr. Libby and the evolutionist crowd have assumed that all plant and animal life utilize carbon-14 equally as they do carbon-12. To be grammatically crass, this ain’t necessarily so. Live mollusks off the Hawaiian coast have had their shells dated with the carbon-14 method. These test showed that the shells died 2000 years ago! This news came as quite a shock to the mollusks that had been using those shells until just recently.

We’ve listed FIVE FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS [emphasis mine] here that have caused overestimates of age using the carbon-14 method. The list of non-compliant dates from this method is endless. Most evolutionists today would conclude that carbon-14 dating is – at best – reliable for only the last 3000 to 3500 years. There is another reason that carbon-14 dating has yielded questionable results – HUMAN BIAS." [emphasis mine]

"What would happen if a dinosaur bone were carbon dated?--At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Scientists dated dinosaur bones using the Carbon dating method. The age they came back with was only a few thousand years old.

This date did not fit the preconceived notion that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. So what did they do? They threw the results out....this is common practice....they do this many times, using a different dating method each time. The results can be as much as 150 million years different from each other! - how's that for an "exact" science?"

"Radiocarbon dating is still a young science and even though there has been done a lot of research we must understand that each individual tends to accept those data which fit his expectations. What I am attempting to do now is point out some areas of cautions or possible pitfalls in relying too heavily on such dating methods."

ALL HAIL THE god(????) of SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 3

Hmm ... I wonder if that's why *scientists don't use carbon dating on inorganic objects*. D'ya think?

>"Feel free to also explain how we know that carbon decays at a constant rate"

Because we measure it. Because the constancy is a consequence of quantum theory. Because this constancy is a feature not only of carbon-14, but of *all* radioactive isotopes. Because we have never found an isotope that decays with a variable rate. Because there is no reason you or anybody can *think* of for radioactive decay to be non-constant.

So after we have measured the decay thousands of times, under all sorts of conditions and temperatures, with ever increasing degree of precision, and found no variance, even slight, in the rate of decay ... the burden fall on you to find some reason why the decay rate might vary, and some evidence that it does. And not just a little ... but such a wildly varying decay rate that carbon dating, when used properly, can be inaccurate by an order of magnitude (dating objects at 60,000 years old that you claim could be no more than 6,000).

>"... especially now that we know that the speed of light is not a constant."

Where on earth did you hear that? And what on earth does that have to do with radioactive decay?

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lady_phoenix chips in with the obligatory creationist take on radiocarbon dating that shows just how *BADLY* creationists understand this stuff.

Yes, it is based on ASSUMPTIONS ... the assumptions that the laws of physics actually hold. Creationists are more than willing to break these laws as necessary to yield the absolutely ABSURD idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old ... which is about as likely as saying that the earth is only 600 miles in diameter.

For example "Dr. Libby and the evolutionist crowd have assumed that all plant and animal life utilize carbon-14 equally as they do carbon-12. To be grammatically crass, this ain’t necessarily so."

Really? Why not? (The article does not say.) The fact is that C14 and C12 are chemically *identical* and that's all that a life form cares about. A plant cares not a whip about whether that carbon atom in a CO2 molecule has a couple extra neutrons. The fact that the author doesn't understand that says far more about his ignorance than about science.

Second example, this insistence radioactive decay may not be constant. Where on earth does this come from? To support this, they refer to obscure, but unsubstantiated "experiments" showing tiny discrepancies in Uranium-238 and Iron-57 (apparently unaware that Iron-57 isn't even radioactive) ... nothing even *CLOSE* to suggesting such a huge variability in the decay rate of isotopes that radiometry would be off by *billions* of years in the age of the earth.

Third example, they refer to the effects of the industrial revolution, and to the nuclear bomb tests of the 1940's and 50's as changing the rate of production of C14 ... and fail to see that this would explain why their cherished "counterexamples" of recent objects might be off. These things might indeed throw off the radiocarbon dating of objects less than 100 years old ... but still be highly accurate for things 1,000 ... 5,000 ... 20,000 or 40,000 years old.

So these arguments sound all puffy and 'scienc-ie' in a Yahoo answers forum ... but in the scientific community they are laughable. They are laughable because the creationists are in the awkward position of having to rewrite every scientific law, principle, and constant they find (e.g. the speed of light). And *THAT* is why creationists are laughed out of the room when they present these arguments to actual scientists.

The creationists are selling ignorance. But the scientists just aren't buying.

Answer 4

It isn't, but there are other dating methods based on radioactive decay of other materials. Beta decay depends on the weak nuclear force, That force was unified with electromagnetism as the electroweak interaction, but it is still, as far as I know, independent of the speed of light.

We don't KNOW that the speed of light has changed. Those theories which allow it to change, do so only at the earliest stage of the birth of the universe, long before there was any radioactive matter to decay.

Answer 5

What would the speed of light have to do with radioactive decay?

As the other answer mentioned, you can't do CARBON dating on inorganic material. Hence, the name.