Suppose you found a piece of charred wood that was buried
100 feet deep. Now you want to date it
at a radiocarbon lab. Could your sample
be a thousand years old? Maybe ten times
that!
The most advanced method to obtain radiocarbon dates is
AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry). If
this really gives an absolute age why
do I need to answer the question "what is the age of your sample?" on
the submission form?
The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (UK) have this in
the instructions for their sample submission form: "Period (required) -
indication of likely age of the sample: e.g. Bronze Age, Paleolithic, Holocene
etc." If 14C dating
gives the exact time when the specimen died, why ask?
Check out this form from the University of Waikato (New
Zealand)*:
Likewise, note a similar pattern from the Keck AMS Lab
(UC Irvine):
Stuart Pocock (Clinical
Trials) said that, "randomized controlled trials are an essential tool for testing the efficacy of
therapeutic innovations." [1] Why
don't we apply the same standard to radiometric dating?
Philosophy professor Alex Bird (Univ. of Bristol)
explains the "double blind" procedure**:
... neither the patient not the clinician knows
whether the patient is receiving the treatment. This is often done in conjunction with the
use of a placebo, which is a harmless substitute equivalent in appearance to
the treatment. [2]
What if we dated samples (even dino fossils) using the
double-blind method? Mark Armitage has
made a riotous LOL video on this topic (worthy of SNL). Armitage sent shockwaves through
establishment academia when he found soft tissue in dino remains and later lost
his job‼ In February 2013, he published
his astonishing research in Acta
Histochemica, a mainstream journal on cells and tissue. Two weeks later, he was fired from California
State University - Northridge where he managed the biology department’s
electron microscopy. He was apparently
let go because of his young earth views.
*forms modified slightly, see link for the exact format, no
wording was changed (e.g. "what is the age of your sample?")
** special thx to Tom Shipley for the "double
blind" aspect
Notes:
1) quoted in Philosophy
of Science by Alexander Bird (McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, London, 1998), p.
256.
2) Bird, p. 257, emphasis added.
FYI: I heard Ray Charles live at the 1989 Olympic
Festival which was held in Oklahoma City & surrounding areas. Ray Charles (d. 2004) was an avid chess
player.
