>>Anyway, Barnes nowhere gives any calculations in the _Impact_ articles,
>>and I bet he doesn't in the _Acts and Facts_ article either.
>
>I looked up the _Acts and Facts_ article in the book _The Battle for
>Creation_, ed. H. Morris and D. Gish. (Creation Life Publishers 1976), p.
>230-238. This book is a reprint of all the Acts and Facts up to that time.
Ok, I have that book and looked it up. Turns out that Wysong's reference
to _Acts and Facts_ is the same as _Impact_ No. 16. As I conjectured,
Barnes gave no quantitative information.
> ... Kelvin argued that if the earth
>solidified at this time, the shape of the earth should still show that
>shape.(The "centrifugal" force would cause an 86 kilometer bulge which would
>be frozen in place. ...
>The problem with the argument is that the earth has never solidified!
Another problem is that Kelvin had no idea how flexible rock is over
a long time. It flows like taffy. The earth's mantle does the same,
but he had no way of knowing that. Barnes had access to such information
but for some reason didn't deal with it.
>Kelvin did not know about radioactivity when he performed this calculation.
That's right, but Barnes claims he did. In _The Battle for Creation_,
page 235 (and _Impact_ No. 16, p. 3) Barnes wrote:
Kelvin was well aware of radioactivity, as is demonstrated by
the fact that he wrote several papers on it. That did not appear
to him to alter the problem at all.
As usual Barnes gave no references and no indication that Kelvin
published his first paper on estimating the earth's age via cooling
in 1862, and his last word in 1897, a year or so after radioactivity
was discovered and six years before the amount of heat it releases
was quantitatively measured in 1903 by Ernest Rutherford (see Brent
Dalrymple, _The Age of the Earth_, p. 45). Given this gross error
and many others like it, I can only conclude that Barnes is
deliberately dishonest or completely incompetent to write on science.
Alan