***
UPDATE ***
Be sure to catch our latest video. We tackle a potpourri of topics:
Thunder & C-14, Tree Rings & Ammonites, Norman Macbeth (Darwin Retried), OMNI magazine & censorship ... #Rubio #NormanMacbeth #Darwin
#AltMed #TreeRings
Hotep = B @ ☮
Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Rick Perry (now supporting Ted Cruz) have all faced the age-of-earth controversy. Politicians have engaged the old earth/new earth issue, but what about the power struggles and sociology of science that has led to a 4.5B year old planet?
Around
1900 there was a wide range of estimates for the earth’s age that were
seriously considered. Hermann von
Helmholtz gave a date of 22M years based on the sun’s loss of energy. By 1931 Arthur Holmes used the results of
radiometric dating to assert that this planet is at least 1.5B years in age.
[1]
In
1883, Alexander Winchell, former State Geologist of Michigan, estimated that
the age of the earth at 3M years. Former
president of the Geological Society of London, Andrew Ramsay (d. 1891), held
that the earth may be 10B years old! [2]
Arthur
Holmes, the most important person to make radiometric methods the dominant
dating method, said in 1913, “It is now well known that if the proportion of
radium in the interior of the earth is the same as that in the surface rocks,
the earth ought to be growing hotter…” [3]
Did Holmes abandon his old earth PreSuppositions because of this
contrary evidence? No, he held tenaciously
to his Deep Time WorldView.
In
1921, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
there was no consensus on radiometric dating and an Earth that’s billions of
years old. In 1926, a committee of the
National Research Council concluded that radiometric dating was the only
reliable method to date rocks. Arthur
Holmes, who led the campaign for radiometric dating, wrote 70% of the report. What in the politics of science changed
between 1921 and 1926? Scott Frickel and
Kelly Moore have edited The New Political
Sociology of Science (Univ. of Wisconsin Press) which tackles the power
struggles in the research establishment.
To
learn more about this drama in science, be sure to get your copy of YES - Young Earth Science today! Chapter Two deals with the history of
radiometric dating. This fully
documented work has over 450 footnotes and more than 130 charts, graphs and
illustrations.
Notes:
1) YES -
Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 17.
2)
Ibid., p. 50.
3)
quoted in Hall, p. 40
M=million, B=billion (10^9)
