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Two Chinese Stalagmites Are a 'Holy Grail' for Accurate Radiocarbon Dating
- njarboe 8y agoOriginal paper links Science (subscription required): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1293 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1293 SciHub: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.aau0747 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.aau0747
- bostonpete 8y agoWouldn't Rosetta Stone be a better metaphor than Holy Grail?
- hetman 8y ago"Holy grail" is being used as an idiom and not a metaphor here.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoIdioms are colloquial metaphors
- macleginn 8y agoNo, they are not. The meaning of an idiom is not predictable from its constituent words, that’s it. A metaphor involves some kind of meaning transfer. In this case some properties of the ‘prototypical’ Holy Grail (desirability mostly) are transferred to the stalagmites. The source for the transfer itself could potentially be an idiom, but in this case it’s not, actually. The word ‘grail’, albeit rare, has a normal meaning (a kind of cup), and ’holy grail‘ is what it is: a holy cup. We just decided based on the strength of the literary tradition to call a particular object that way.
- macleginn 8y agoIt would. They got the accomplishment (“A precise and accurate C14 calibration is considered the Holy Grail of radiocarbon dating”, from the original paper) and the means necessary for it mixed up.
- kiriakasis 8y agoFinding the means necessary to an accomplishment is in itself an accomplishment. If their work was to search for perfect samples then the accomplishment was finding them. If their work was in calibration then the samples are just a mean. Maybe in the last decades everyone knew that good stalagmites were needed and so people were searching for the perfect ones. It is all a matter of what story are you trying to tell.
- nvahalik 8y agoSo... how do people actually know how much C14 was in something? Does dating only work if you know how much C14 was there originally? Otherwise how would you be able to measure the difference between what is there and what was there originally?
- nonbel 8y agoThey calibrated it to the amount of C-14 found in artifacts with "known" dates, eg from ancient egypt. Most of those "known" dates originally come from this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Justus_Scaliger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Justus_Scaliger
- fwip 8y agoAre you sure you linked the right page? It contains no mentions of carbon dating, nor does it seem to indicate that he was involved in determining the date of ancient artifacts.
- Godel_unicode 8y agoGP is saying that the article is about the person who established a lot of known dates. Those known dates are then used by others to establish the C14 baselines. Two distinct but related facts.
- nonbel 8y agoSee my ref here for how radiocarbon dating is calibrated to dates attributed to historical artifacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18694692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18694692 Joseph Scaliger is just like the "founder of modern chronology": >"The last great chronographer was Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) who reconstructed the lost Chronicon and synchronized all of ancient history in his two major works" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology
- crygin 8y agoThe C14 timeline is calibrated from radiocarbon years to calendar years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibration_of_radiocarbon_dates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibration_of_radiocarbon_dat...