How reliable is science? (Assumption 3/7) (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, April 20, 2012, 00:33 (4380 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Your article on dating iron based artifacts admits its flaws, though it breezes through them as if they don't exist.
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> >Thus, over the years, the sample-size requirement has been greatly reduced and the carbon-extraction procedure has been simplified. However, as has been mentioned, for a radiocarbon date on iron to be meaningful, the carbon extracted from the iron-based material must be from biomass contemporaneous with original manufacture. In addition to fossil fuels such as coal and coke, other carbon sources such as geological carbonates (e.g., limestone and siderite), shell, or old wood (which are all depleted in 14C) will cause artifacts to appear to be older than they are. Complications arising from the recycling of artifacts must also be considered. These limitations of the dating technique have been well summarized by van der Merwe3 and Cresswell.5
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> When you forge iron, you let it bake in a bed of hot coals in order to not only heat the iron, but also to get the iron to absorb the carbon. This poses a problem because you have at least two different sets of carbon to date. There is the carbon that was naturally present during the formation of the iron ore, and the carbon present in the coal. Additionally, there is no guarantee that all of the coal came from the same source. The old method of creating coke, rarified coal, normally was a two or three step process, depending on what you started with. If you started with wood, the wood was burned to create coal, and then burned again while being wetted to produce coke, and then burned again during the forging of the tool. There is also the chance that coal came from different batches. (Different sources would have different ages, all of which would have been absorbed by the iron. So, when dating an iron objects, you have the potential to have numerous sources of carbon, all of which are older than the object being dated.
> -Looking at that paper talking about iron-->that's all built into the math. And when the people who wrote papers were challenged, they had to write whether or not there was a valid explanation for the discrepancy. -I spent a year and a half in chemistry: You can correct for carbon issues like what you discuss here, if you're aware of all sorts of minutiae: Again, built into the error tables. -> 
> Additionally, when you are talking about errors in the range of thousands of years, you are talking about an error that could eclipse all of recorded human history!! That is no trivial thing to be shrugged off by simply saying "We no there is a possible error."-In terms of carbon dating, I'm understanding that my inherited "40k year" rule applies to *reaaaaaaaly* old things. Carbon dating is MUCH better for "younger" things. (Where "young" is limited to the geological perspective.)-I understand that you're aiming for "it's not perfect" but if a scientist has to publish the degree of error in his/her results--as in the case of the Iron paper I submitted, don't you agree that the lack of perfection is acknowledged?

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