Posted by cougar on Nov 11, 2002 at 13:25
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Re: Earth age (John Wright)
Well, here is a fairly comprehensive report entitled Changing Views of the History of the Earth by Richard Harter which chronicles the history of human ideas about the age of the Earth. The references used for this report are:
- Russell, H.N., 1921. A superior limit to the age of the Earth's crust in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, vol. 99, pp. 84-86.
- Dalrymple, G. Brent, 1991. The Age of the Earth. California: Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-1569-6.
- Richard Huggett, Catastrophism, 1997, Verso, ISBN 1-85984-129-5.
- Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks, 1857, Gould and Lincoln: Boston
- Patterson, C.C., 1953. "The isotopic composition of meteoritic, basaltic and oceanic leads, and the age of the Earth" in Proceedings of the Conference on Nuclear Processes in Geologic Settings, Williams Bay, Wisconsin, September 21-23, 1953. pp. 36-40.
- Patterson, Clair C., 1997. Duck Soup and Lead in Engineering & Science (Caltech Alumni Magazine) volume LX, number 1, pp. 21-31.
Another extensive resource is Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale by Andrew MacRae.
MacRae closes by adding, "For a technical introduction to the methods, I highly recommend these two books:"
- Dalrymple, G. Brent, 1991. The Age of the Earth. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 474 pp. ISBN 0-8047-1569-6
- Faure, G., 1986. Principles of Isotope Geology, 2nd. edition. John Wiley and Sons: New York, p.1-589. ISBN 0-471-86412-9
If you want more information and explanation, there's always A Radiometric Dating Resource List which starts out with the intro....
The real heart of the age-of-the-earth debate (if "debate" is the right word) is always radiometric dating. There are lots of ways to guesstimate ages, and geologists knew the earth was old a long time ago (and I might add that they were mostly Christian creationist geologists). But they didn't know how old. Radiometric dating actually allows the measurement of absolute ages, and so it is deadly to the argument that the earth cannot be more than 10,000 years old."
Also... "As of January, 1999, The oldest rocks found on earth are 4.031 ± 0.003 billion years old (meaning it has been that long since the molten rocks solidified and thus reset their internal clocks). This is reported in the paper Priscoan (4.00-4.03 Ga) orthogneisses from northwestern Canada by Samuel A. Bowring & Ian S. Williams; Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 134(1): 3-16, January 1999. The previous record was 3.96 billion years, set in 1989.
Well, the list seems to be endless, but these pages will hopefully get one started in the understanding of radiometric dating.
Of course after all that, creationists will typically throw out some claim that the constants of nature have changed through time (not sure how much time they're talking about.) Since this claim is baseless, I think it's only fair to make them provide evidence for such a claim. After all, the burden of proof is on them. Mainstream science IS mainstream science because it has already been well supported by evidence.
Radiometric Dating Resource List link fix cougar 11/11 15:34
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Re: Radiometric Dating Resource List link fix in anticipation.... 15/11 18:16
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