Application of carbon dating katherine scott dating

C-14 is another radioactive isotope that decays to C-12. Because of its short half-life, the number of C-14 isotopes in a sample is negligible after about 50,000 years, making it impossible to use for dating older samples.

The half-life of C-14, however, is only 5,730 years.

Think of it like a teaspoon of cocoa mixed into a cake dough—after a while, the ‘ratio’ of cocoa to flour particles would be roughly the same no matter which part of the cake you sampled.

In other words, we have a ‘clock’ which starts ticking at the moment something dies.

Libby knew that if these figures were correct, it would mean that the atmosphere was young, so he dismissed the results as being due to experimental error!

(We are not implying dishonesty here, merely showing how powerfully the evolutionary/uniformitarian concepts of Earth history influence great scientists to mould or discard evidence which appears to contradict that viewpoint.) What about modern measurements, using advanced technology such as satellites?

Obviously this only works for things which once contained carbon—it can’t be used to date rocks and minerals, for example. We obviously need to know this to be able to work out at what point the ‘clock’ began to tick.

We’ve seen that it would have been the same as in the atmosphere at the time the specimen died. Do scientists assume that it was the same as it is now? It is well known that the industrial revolution, with its burning of huge masses of coal, etc.