Explain Carbon Dating?

Question

Where did it originate? How effective do you consider it to be? Where did you learn about it? Have you used it? Were you there???

Answer 1

Carbon dating is a technique for discovering the age of any object that was once alive...for more than 40 yrs. many scientist believed that the missing link between modernhimans and apes had been found..parts of the skull and jawbone thought to be more than 250,000 yrs old were found at Piltdown in Sussex, England between 1908 and 1912.
Carbon dating of the skull in 1955 showed that the Piltdown man was a hoax.

Answer 2

I did a rather lengthy explaination in this article:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsU5zuEx1IJC7Ej9v_59qwPty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20071130231208AAMSA5Z&show=7#profile-info-26e6c17c5a832b9734c53d53ec389b26aa

The up-thrust of the question is "how old is the earth", and of course biblical scholars and scientists widely disagree. Esentially I explain why bibilical scholars are probably underestimating the age, and why scientists are probably over estimating the age due to flaws with carbon dating.

The gist of the argument that carbon dating is flawed is that the notion that the ratio of C14 to C12 in the environment "is constant" is an assumption that is both unproven and unprovable. We have dated objects with known dates and come up with the right answer, but in the grand scheme of things, those objects are very recent. We apply carbon dating to dates that go rediculously beyond that. The ratio of C14 to C12 may have been relatively constant recently, but to extrapolate that as far back as we have, is not sound.

It is at best a guess, but it is the best guess we've got.

Answer 3

Willard Libby is credited with the development of the idea. He was one of Harold Urey's ex-students (Urey is the grandfather of most of stable and radiogenic isotope geochemstry). I know from encountering other questions by you that you aren't much of a fan of carbon dating so I won't expend too much effort explaining things as I believe you have already spent some effort on your own learning about it and developing your own opinion.

As with any analytical technique, there are certain constraints that apply, the absence of which would invalidate any conclusions based on that information, but for the most part the technique is sound. I personally have never done any carbon dating, although my sister has. I have done other dating of rocks (and innumerable stable isotope studies), straight from sampling through mineral separation, chemical extraction, and mass spectrometry. The whole concept is based on the physical laws of the universe as understood and determined through centuries of investigation, so I think it is pretty well founded. Obviously if you do not accept that the universe is constrained by physical laws that remain essentially unchanged through time (if you believe in magic and miracles as ordinary events) then you would not be expected to accept the whole idea, although I would think that to be a very short-sighted and constrained way of thinking.

Answer 4

http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResources/HighSchool/Radiography/halflife2.htm

There is the Reader Digest version.

It is consider the gold standard for dating material.

The problem I have with the Carbon Dating it is a logarithmic function to plot something linear like time. That is itself introduces an error.

It also has a problem with like 50K and less and yet some try to date things millions of years old.

Like all science people do make mistakes.

It is still a good tool to use and shouldn't be tossed out.

Answer 5

The earth is constantly being bombarded by so-called cosmic radiation; this radiation originates primarily from the sun, but also all other background sources in space.

Here on earth, we feel but a small fraction of this radiation, due to the fact that our atmosphere forms a good shield against it. In the upper atmosphere, the most common isotope of nitrogen, nitrogen-14, absorbs radioactive particles, and decays to radioactive carbon-14.

About 7 kilos of carbon-14 are produced in this fashion every year. This might not seem like much, but 7 kilos amounts to about a trillion trillion atoms, which is more than enough to ensure that every plant and animal on the planet has some carbon-14. When you breathe, for example, you take in some carbon dioxide, and each breath probably contains several atoms of carbon-14. When you put sugar in your coffee, sugar is an organic, carbon containing molecule, and because it was produced by a plant that turned carbon dioxide from the air into glucose, some of that glucose contains carbon-14. Because of the way that it's produced and moves through the food chain, carbon-14 is evenly distributed amongst the majority of living things.

That being said, when something dies, it is no longer constantly replenishing its supply of carbon-14. Carbon-14 has a fixed half-life of 5730 years. Thus, by knowing what the specific radioactivity of carbon-14 is, you can measure the radioactivity of anything that either was alive, or was produced by something that was alive that contains carbon.

The actual measurement follows the following equation:

Ai = Ao (.5) ^ (t/h)

Which means the number of measured or remaining atoms is equal to the original number of atoms times one-half to the time divided by half-life. You can replace Ai and Ao by any reasonable measurement, for example instead of numbers of atoms they may be radioactivity from carbon-14, etc.

Carbon dating originated with Willard F. Libby, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in 1960.

I find the method to be extremely reliable and effective, limitations only theoretically exist based on the accuracy of your equiptment and your sample size. Usually carbon dating is accepted out through several half-lives, up to about 50,000 years.

I learned about carbon dating when I was an ungraduate for chemical engineering. I have worked as a chemist for an archeological team that used carbon dating, but more as an observer, as it was a family affair.

Answer 6

Carbon dating uses the radioactive isotope of carbon, C14, that is found in small amounts in nature and its decay product, Nitrogen 14.

All living being constantly replace their C14 content. All living organisms have 100% C14, but when they die, the radioactive decay begins.

All radioactive isotopes have a half life. This is the time it takes for 50% of the parent isotope to decay to the daughter. C14 has a half life of 5730 years give or take about 40 years.

You can measure the amount of C14 versus N14 in a dead organism and figure out about how old it is. The formula is to multiply the half life by the number of half lives elapsed. For example, if you have 25% C14 and 75% N14 then 2 half lives have elapsed, so the specimen is about 11,460 years old.

Obviously, C14 dating is only effective on thinf 50,000 years and younger due to its short half life. But for things that fall within this range, its is fairly reliable.

Willard Libby and his colleagues discovered carbon dating in 1949, so I was not there, but I learned about it during my paleontology courses as part of my geology degree course work. I have not directly used it (measuring C14 levels) but I have worked with C14 data to calculate ages of some things.

Answer 7

Sensible answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating

Silly answer: Two Carbon atoms went to a singles bar and hooked up. They went out to dinner the following night and got on like a house on fire and were starting to bond when the house actually did catch fire and they were wrenched apart by four oxygen atoms and they drifted apart as carbon dioxide never to see each other again.

Answer 8

I found a couple of sites that may be useful to you.

a scientific page
http://www.ridgenet.net/~do_while/sage/v4i10f.htm

and a video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DARD0NmlL4I