Pangea and Creation

HELEN

Just a couple of side points relating to the radiometric data. Barry considers it good in terms of atomic years for the most part. In a previous thread I mentioned where we had talked to a friend who leads one section of a dating lab and deals with zircons, he had mentioned that about 15% of the dates they got were discarded as being in error for one reason or another. This still leaves 85% coming up to scratch with what was expected. Granted that dealing with zircons is considered the most reliable form of radiometric dating and that the error margins for other forms may be significantly higher, but even if only 50% of dates worked out in the other forms (and with the exception of C14, which has a number of problems associated with it), it is necessary for creation to deal with that instead of simply focusing on anomalous dates. This is one of the areas where Barry's work differs significantly from that of many other creationists.

The second point is the 'age bins' or clumping of radiometric dates. I called Barry a moment ago and got permission to pass on the data from the table and references from his paper. I don't know how to get a table formatted, so what I am doing is giving first the peaks in the geological data in terms of millions of years (as taken from HH Read and J Watson, "Introduction to Geology Vol 2; Earth History Part 1 -- Early stages of Hearth History," pp 11-13, Macmillan Education Ltd. 1985)and the second number is showing the redshift peaks, as shown in FA Jenkins and HE White, "Fundamentals of Optics," 3rd Ed., pp 412-414, McGraw-Hill, 1957). The radiometric dates have a +/- uncertainty of about 50 million years:

100 ---- 125
300 --- 270
450 --- 450
600 --- 670
950 --- 925
? --- 1200
1400 --- 1500
1800 --- 1820
2100 --- 2150
2500 --- 2500
3000 --- 2850

The paragraph immediately following the table says,
The uncertaintly of +/- 50 million atomic years is the error in determining the precise position of the peaks, not the error in radiometric measurements. As can be seen, the agreement between the two data sets in Table II is reasonably close, and an even closer match may be possible by refining the value of K. This reasonable agreement tends to confirm the general thesis that the behaviour of light speed is uniformly affecting both the redshift and radiometric data.

 

MARK KLUGE

Helen wrote:

Helen, please check your references. Jenkins & White, Fundamentals of Optics, 3rd Edition, p. 412-414 is in a chapter called “Physical Optics”, and deals with the solution to the wave-equation, the energy density of an electromagnetic wave, and radiation from an accelerated charge. That section has nothing to do with red shift data. Where did those data really come from?

(I was unable to obtain a copy of Watson, so I cannot comment upon that part of the data.)

 

HELEN

I want to thank Mark for correcting this. The fault is entirely mine and I have NO idea why I could not get his references correctly. Here is the paragraph before and after the graph and I have cut and pasted the numbered references from my own Word copy of his paper! My apologies for this error, and thank you again, Mark.

The reference I gave was #38 in Barry’s paper which has nothing to do with the material on the table, as Mark said. The sentence in which this reference occurs is “ If the electric field strength is E, and the corresponding magnetic field strength is H, then the simplest electromagnetic waves have the following form [38]:” and I don’t know how to reproduce the Greek letters in the equation here.

At any rate, here is Barry’s material minus my extraordinarily careless error!

 

MARK KLUGE

I thank Helen for providing the references for Setterfield’s table of ages of radiometric-dating peaks and astronomical population peaks as functions of age (or distance from Earth). I have not yet been able to examine those references, so I cannot comment as fully as I’d like; however, I think this post is worthwhile because the mere presence Helen’s corrected references does satisfy one objection I had made previously. When one can put away such an objection, I think it is worth a little bit of expanded explanation..

Previously Helen had cited a 1957 book by Jenkins & White as the source of the astronomical peaks. This immediately raised my suspicion, not so much because the reference in question was a book on physical optics rather than astronomy, but because of its 1957 date. To convert observed redshift data to distance (and hence the age of the events being viewed) one needs a value for the Hubble Constant. In 1957, however, the generally-accepted value of that parameter differed considerably from its currently-accepted value. Therefore, had Jenkins & White contained data of observed astronomical objects as functions of distance, the locations of peaks in those data would be incorrect (unless Setterfield had reworked them) and their near coincidence with similar radiometric-measurement peaks would have been just coincidence. Setterfield had indicated that a closer agreement could be obtained by refining the value of his K, which is undefined in Helen’s excerpt, but clearly closely related to the Hubble Constant. Such refinement are reasonable, but only for small refinements: One could not reasonably adjust the parameter to what was thought to be its value in 1957. With the 1957 citation I suspected that Setterfield might have done so; however, with the corrected citation it is clear that he did not use an outdated value of the Hubble Parameter.

Since I have (and will continue) heavily criticized Setterfield for errors in his varying-parameters model, it is important that I note when, as here, an objection of mine is removed.