Paul of Eugene
New Member
First of all, if anybody is doing any picking and choosing, it would be you, because everybody knows the vast majority of scientific research establishes and validates the ancient age of the earth by many independent means. So you find one out of thousands of writings that you consider to be peer reviewed scientific writing and post it - obviously selected by you for precisely the reason it agrees with your previously established point of view - and you think you've settled the issue.
Well, whatever you think of the merits of finding helium left in the zircons, you've got a variable in there that has not been accounted for.
The zircons are alleged to have a permeability to helium going out of them and there's still helium there.
But if the helium can go out, the helium can also go in. If there is a general flow of percolating helium in the whole geological stratum, then the helium content of the zircon would be utterly useless for determining the amount of time the radioactive decay had been there.
So if we grant everything in the article about the percolation of helium through zircons and the way helium exits zircons so easily in a vacuum chamber . . . the helium left within the zircons could be construed equally well as EVIDENCE FOR A SOURCE OF HELIUM WITHIN THE STRATA just as much as evidence for a mere 6000 year time in the strata.
But there is ample evidence, from cosmological observations, that radioactive decay does NOT vary from one epoch to another to any significant degree. Zircons when they form freeze out the lead as part of the crystal formation, in the same way that water when it freezes excludes salt so that frozen seawater becomes fresh water. The uranium atoms, however, don't freeze out of the zircons, being a physically smaller atom (heavier, just smaller in size) and when they decay, making lead atoms as a result, the lead is stuck there in the crystal.
Zircons, therefore, are an excellent source for the retention of the lead by product of uranium decay being pure and unsullied by native lead. This makes the analysis of the radioactive decay simpler.
But analysis of an atom that can both leave and enter the crystal due to permeability seems to me to be an unsatisfactory method of attempting to prove anything.
Well, whatever you think of the merits of finding helium left in the zircons, you've got a variable in there that has not been accounted for.
The zircons are alleged to have a permeability to helium going out of them and there's still helium there.
But if the helium can go out, the helium can also go in. If there is a general flow of percolating helium in the whole geological stratum, then the helium content of the zircon would be utterly useless for determining the amount of time the radioactive decay had been there.
So if we grant everything in the article about the percolation of helium through zircons and the way helium exits zircons so easily in a vacuum chamber . . . the helium left within the zircons could be construed equally well as EVIDENCE FOR A SOURCE OF HELIUM WITHIN THE STRATA just as much as evidence for a mere 6000 year time in the strata.
But there is ample evidence, from cosmological observations, that radioactive decay does NOT vary from one epoch to another to any significant degree. Zircons when they form freeze out the lead as part of the crystal formation, in the same way that water when it freezes excludes salt so that frozen seawater becomes fresh water. The uranium atoms, however, don't freeze out of the zircons, being a physically smaller atom (heavier, just smaller in size) and when they decay, making lead atoms as a result, the lead is stuck there in the crystal.
Zircons, therefore, are an excellent source for the retention of the lead by product of uranium decay being pure and unsullied by native lead. This makes the analysis of the radioactive decay simpler.
But analysis of an atom that can both leave and enter the crystal due to permeability seems to me to be an unsatisfactory method of attempting to prove anything.
