CONSTANT RADIOACTIVE DECAY RATES

Introduction

We hear only that radioactive decay rates are constant. After all they measure the decay in laboratories and publish them as decay constants. Work was done a long time ago to try and make the decay process change. Scientists were successful at making them vary by as much as 5% under extreme electromagnetic fields. Nice to know but not very world changing.

Well, hang on to your hats. A study by Fabio Cardone1 of the Institute per lo Studio dei Materiali Nanostrutturati in Rome have shown that ultrasonic cavitation can make the textbook rates rise dramatically. By this I mean the decay rate of thorium-228 was increased in experiments in water as a result of ultrasonic cavitation in excess of a factor of 10,000.

In the "Hunt for the Red Oktober", you may remember the American submarine reversed its engines for a moment and this alarmed the crew, not because the engines would be heard, but rather because the propeller blades were cavitating. Cavitation is caused by small vacuum bubbles formed in moving water, which, when collapsed, produce implosions and shockwaves.  This is just a preliminary study. Yet, if true, this re-opens the whole question of just how accurate the radiometric dates from the field are.

Billions of Years

One of the premier evidences given for the dating the Earth at 4.5 billions years is radiometric dating. Many dates have been recorded from isotopes such as potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, uranium lead and uranium-thorium.   Geologists know the rate of radioactive decay so they measure the ratio of parent to daughter elements. Plug the results into a formula and out pops the age. The problem is, many studies in the field experience large variations in results from the same minerals in the same area. Many results on rocks of known age have huge errors. They are explained by contamination but nobody knows for sure. Dates determined by radiometric dating methods which are not what the Darwinists expected are frequently unpublicized or written off as contamination errors.

There is no scientific evidence of what the radioactive constants were millions of years ago. No one was there to observe and measure the conditions. Decay rates cannot be proven to have remained constant.  This new study admits the possibility that a global catastrophic flood which caused massive cavitation might have tampered with the decay rates for a short period of time. If true then radioactive decay is no longer to be trusted to give true dates for the age of the Earth. An exception might be made for carbon-14  because most of the CO2 would have been absorbed since the flood. However, these dates are less than 100,000 years.

The lay person may not appreciate that without this technique there is little on the Earth, the Sun or the planets and their moons that appears to be old or that can be used to date them in the billions of years. Salts building up in the oceans take less than 60 million years, even starting with pure distilled water. Erosion rates are fast enough to put all rocks above sea level back into the sea in 16 million years. The helium content in the atmosphere would accumulate in less than 100,000 years. The age of Earth's magnetic field is less than 10,000 years old. Creationists successfully predicted the strength of 5 planetary magnetic fields based on the assumption that the age of these fields was only 6,000 years. The rings of Saturn will be clogged and dimmed by space dust in the next million years. It cannot remain as bright as it is now for billions of years.  You can see the youth of this solar system in the following presentation of Genesis Week. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFzJapa2REs&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PL608FF9C588CFD9BC

We live in interesting times.

Alan Montgomery

1 F Cardone, R Mignani and A Petrucci 2009 Phys. Lett. A 373 1956.