I try to be patient

I really do. But I just came across a paper by John Woodmorappe on the AIG website while researching the YEC claim of increased decay rates that is a prominent feature in the RATE book (volume 1, on the web). The article is entitled "Billion-fold acceleration of radioactivity demonstrated in laboratory"
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/acceleration.asp
It's absolutely beyond belief how a Christian and a geologist (Woodmorappe has a geology degree) can write something so deliberately misleading, bordering on dishonesty. The article cites research from reputable sources on "Bound-state beta decay of highly ionized atoms". This is beta decay in atoms with a bare-nucleus, with all their electrons stripped. The research indicates that under certain conditions Re-187 (whose decay to Os-187 is used for dating) decays up to a billion times its normal rate. He suggests that during creation week God created all atoms in the bare-nucleus state allowing a billion fold increase in radioactive decay and a huge head start for all of our isotopic geochronometers. Of course as any geologist, or anyone remotely familiar with radiometric dating knows, isotopic clocks don't start until the mineral containing the radioactive isotope crystallizes!!!! Minerals don't crystallize too well without their electrons! In fact I'm pretty sure that geoch!
emical processes in general don't function very well without electrons.

He also cites credible research indicating that the decay of Lu-176 to Hf-176, another uniformitarian geochronometer, can be accelerated at extreme high temperatures. In language that suggests he has found an embarrassing flaw in the method he tells us that incredibly the half-life of Lu-176 can be made to decrease 14 orders of magnitude from its accepted 41 billion years to 3.68 hours. Almost as an afterthought he says, "In terms of specifics, at temperatures below about 200 million K, t½ remains unperturbed at about 41 Ga. But, over the interval of 200 to 300 MK, the effective t½ drops precipitously (by nearly 10 orders of magnitude), then begins to level off asymptotically at still higher temperatures." If people weren't being misled by this I would be on the floor laughing. Unperturbed below 200 MILLION DEGREES K !?!?!? What in the universe has a temperature of 200 MK? Once again most geologists know that an isotopic geochronometer starts ticking when it cools past its!
 closing temperature, the temperature at which parent and daughter elements are quantitatively retained. And if it is again heated above its closing temp, say during metamorphism, the clock is reset. What mineral has a closing temperature of 200 million #$%&%#ing degrees K?
 
There's even more but that's enough for now. How can anyone write garbage like this with a clear concience? The article seems to be free from outright lies; I'll accept that the references are genuine and that his cited facts are straight. But do people like Woodmorappe think they can avoid the rightful charge of dishonesty by suggesting that this research "raises fundamental questions about the temporal stability of isotopic ‘clocks’", to quote his final paragraph? I'm sorry but reading this made my blood boil.

Brent
Received on Wed May 10 23:45:32 2006