9 ms·
The Sun is changing the rate of radioactive decay
- ugh 16y agoIs it sad that the only thing I could think of when reading this article was ‘Oh great, another thing for Creationists to misquote’?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- abalashov 16y agoI thought the same: "Oh, an unknown/hitherto unexplored variable - wait until the Creationists get a hold of this!"
- kd0amg 16y agoFor a few years now, I've seen creationists suggesting that radioactive decay used to be orders of magnitude faster.
- bugsy 16y agoYep. Kind of like the electric universe people have been bucking the status quo as well and on the last comet rendez vous mission they were the only ones to correctly predict what would happen.
- randallsquared 16y agoCan you link to someone who is not an electric universe partisan who says this?
- djmdjm 16y agoYep. Kind of like Gene Ray, who has been bucking the status quo ...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- troystribling 16y agoThere is always uncertainty in science. That is its strength not weakness. creationists and many others do understand this.
- StavrosK 16y agoOkay, I know that the media is powerful and all, but isn't this a bit too much power for a newspaper to have?
- teamonkey 16y agoChanging the rate of mind decay
- ajju 16y agoCue creationists jumping on this to challenge evolution (by challenging carbon dating) in 4...3..2..
- sp332 16y agoBeen there, done that. The Institute for Creation Research started the RATE project in 1997. http://www.icr.org/rate/ http://www.icr.org/rate/
- ajju 16y agoSure, but it appears this is new evidence to support those claims? Or is this an old discovery that just 'went mainstream'?
- sprout 16y agoThe creationist pseudoscience tries to demonstrate that radioactive decay is variable here on Earth. This seems to be another case where our standard laws of physics break down at massively high temperatures and pressures. And of course, radioactive dating is one tool among many. The distribution of soil and rock on the Earth is almost certainly the result of billions of years of erosion, earth shifts, and climate changes.
- ugh 16y agoAlso: say that radioactive dating turns out to be worthless (which is not the case, even if the results in the linked article are true), that still wouldn’t tell you anything about the age of the earth. You can’t then just privilege the hypothesis that the earth is 6,000 years old. It’s quite funny actually, if we didn’t have radioactive dating it would make a lot of sense to say that evolution itself is one of the best pieces of evidence for an old earth. It is supported by so much evidence independent of any dating methods that any discovery which changes how much we believe we can trust radioactive dating is practically meaningless. (The obvious exception are results which would indicate that earth is orders of magnitude younger than radioactive dating makes it seem to be. But, no surprise, this is not that.)
- jcdreads 16y agoFischbach's page, with citations of (but not links to) the original research: http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/ephraim.shtml http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/ephraim.shtml A preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283 http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283 Why do publications refuse to post links to (or at least citations of) the original scientific articles? I mean, these links are the result of five minutes of googling; which means the reporter communicated with the authors themselves but didn't bother to ask for a hyperlink or an emailed citation. The mind boggles.
- jcdreads 16y agoAnd here's a paper claiming evidence against: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/files/EarthSun.pdf http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/files/EarthSun.pdf (Another 30 seconds of googling.)
- ynniv 16y agoExcept that the current article suggests a cycle of 33 days which is not due to the Earth - Sun distance but hypothetically correlated to the face of the core of the Sun (which the article suggests has a period of 33 days compared to the 28 days of the surface of the sun). I don't mind that journalists don't publish your "30 seconds of Googling". Doing so would suggest that top Google hits are fact.
- mattheww 16y agoActually the paper discussed in OP is a preprint at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4848 http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4848 It uses an extremely suspicious technique to test the significance of their finding. I doubt this paper will pass review without substantial changes. edit: The one you posted is 2 years old, but tries to explain the same effect with a different cause.
- machrider 16y agoCan you elaborate on the suspiciousness for a lay audience?
- 1053r 16y agoThe most powerful words in science are, "Huh. That's weird..."
- DaniFong 16y agoPresumably, someone has already checked this, but... it seems like temperature might be the primary influence. As the temperature increases, the heavier radioactive gases, like radon, as distributed more evenly, and higher up in the atmosphere. Was this tracked? The signal appears seriously weak relative to the noise...
- grogers 16y agoThe paper does mention this: As an example, radon concentrations are known to fluctuate seasonally, as has been noted in Ref. [10], and it was suggested that the decay of 222 Rn could lead to a seasonally dependent charge distribution on the experimental apparatus. However, this effect is extremely small given the low counting rates that typically arise from radon background [11], and in any case, the PTB data shown in Fig. 3 were corrected for background.
- bugsy 16y agoInteresting. The creationists have been saying for decades that assuming a fixed rate of decay is a mistake. So they were right again.
- jackfoxy 16y agoSeems likes using radioactive isn't the perfect random number generator it was thought to have been.
- marze 16y agoJust put the experiment on a spacecraft headed for Mars.
- joshu 16y agoOh god, if only Oracle hadn't acquired... oh, wait.
- dmoney 16y agoCould this new particle be the Higgs boson?
- seldo 16y agoSo, I don't want to be a whacko or anything, but... this is the plot of 2012, the movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_(film)#Plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_(film)#Plot In the film, solar flares and sunspot activity are blamed for altering radioactivity levels in the earth's core, causing it to rise and the earth's crust to melt, leading to worldwide, CGI-friendly apocalypse. The thing is, in 2009, when 2012 was filmed, nobody knew there was any linkage at all between sunspots and radioactivity. We thought the rate of decay was constant, and the science behind the film was bullshit. These guys hadn't published yet -- correct me if I'm wrong. Now it's still obviously bullshit -- the change caused by sunspot activity is not nearly big enough to affect the planet's temperature materially -- but there is a linkage. Which is, y'know, weird.
- gnaritas 16y ago> nobody knew there was any linkage at all between sunspots and radioactivity. There isn't, follow up has already been done to disprove this using the Cassini space probe I believe.
- sbierwagen 16y ago"Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance" was submitted in 2008.
- georgecmu 16y agoIt's one of the most basic concepts in all of chemistry It has nothing to do with chemistry and everything with physics. If the author gets wrong this simple distinction, what else did he get wrong?
- spoondan 16y agoIn 1911, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in radioactivity. Chemistry is the study of matter, as much as (but distinct from) physics.
- georgecmu 16y agoAs a matter of fact, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her research of radioactivity ("radiation phenomena" was the exact wording). Her Nobel Prize in Chemistry was for her discovery of new elements Radium and Polonium.
- CWIZO 16y agoI don't know anything about this. But doesn't this mean that all age calculations for fossils and such are completely wrong?