How reliable is science? (Assumption 1/7) (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, April 15, 2012, 14:17 (4603 days ago) @ dhw

Assumption 1:-Each system has to be a closed system; that is, nothing can contaminate any of the parents or the daughter products while they are going through their decay process—or the dating will be thrown off. Ideally, in order to do this, each specimen tested needs to have been sealed in a jar with thick lead walls for all its previous existence, supposedly millions of years!-But in actual field conditions, there is no such thing as a closed system. One piece of rock cannot for millions of years be sealed off from other rocks, as well as from water, chemicals, and changing radiations from outer space.-Agreed, a reading can be "thrown off" from a "perfect" date, but how "far off" are we really talking? I've read that Carbon 14 dating is typically accurate (in the real world) to about +/- 40K years. -This is no secret! It does mean however that there needs to be normalization techniques that we can use to help refine information. -The last piece here belies the author's ignorance: Radiation from outer-space will not have a measurable effect on a rock. Most interstellar radiation passes completely through the earth. -The author's overall argument though, is that a rock, say in a sedimentary layer, isn't a closed system because it has a rock layer above it and a rock layer below it. As if, we can't correct for that. You can determine a substances purity, and then mathematically normalize the dating by dating the above layer, middle layer, and lower layer, and removing the influence of the other two layers. This correction is part of the normal process for dating, and while the author is correct in that it won't give us an exact date... in most cases an 80k year range is pretty good precision when you're dealing with time scales across 4.5Bn years.-[EDIT]-Which is a computed error of 80K/4.5Bn = 0.00001778 years

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