I missed the comments about lab equipment that Linear picked up. Talk about coming from left field. There's always a small residue left on the equipment when it has been used for radiometric dating. It's simply very expensive and time-consuming to give it a thorough clean before each new test. You can pay for this if you have, using the example I gave, a relatively young sample for K-Ar dating. Or, much more typically, if your sample for this method is likely to be older, the error introduced by the residue on the equipment is going to be small. This is because there's going to be a lot more argon in an old sample so the argon contamination on the equipment won't make much difference to the result. This has got nothing to do with equipment being fragile or whatever else you claimed.

Another question is why you're so insistent that a blind study be done in radiometric dating. This isn't like medical studies where the double-blind procedure is suitable. Like I explained to you, if you take a rock sample and the method you've used gives you a result that is less than or greater than the age range that the method can date, you try other methods. Date your sample several times; use other suitable methods and different labs. If you get a consilience of dates then you can be reasonably certain that you know how old your rock is. How do you think that this process, which is time-consuming and expensive, would be any more revealing than dating a rock you have more information about? Scientists still date samples several times, use other suitable methods and different labs.



And if there is consilience between those dates, you can be reasonably certain that you know the age of your rock. Just how many tests would you personally want to see done before you were convinced? Ten? A hundred? I'll hazard a guess: even an infinite number would still be dismissed by you because you don't want to consider the possibility that the earth is old.



Okaaaay . . . so the dates that you see from the application of methods such as K-Ar or U-Pb mean that those elements were in the samples. Problem with this?



Well I can't help the fact that you're not a practising scientist and that you won't look at the relevant literature. Yes, scientists actually are interested in getting accurate results and will put controls in place to make sure they do, which often means doing multiple tests. There are many studies on the internet that a simple Google will find for you. I've provided you with some summaries of their results in this thread.



Let's see . . . maybe it's the rest of this comment that says "looking up hype." You're taking the same tack as Russ: dismissing a summary of dozens of radiometric studies published in peer-reviewed journals. I linked you to two of these. This one is for moon rocks. Each sample was dated by at least two methods. Most samples have been repeatedly dated in separate studies years apart by different scientists, using the same or different methods. Note also that though the samples were taken from different areas (depending on which mission collected the samples), the whole list of ages is in close agreement. This suggests that the lava which formed the mare areas on the moon was a large, more or less concordant event that happened quite a long time ago.

We'll perhaps leave your "you don't understand creation science" oxymoron for another thread. I understand it enough to realise that it's wrong about the age of the earth. It seems to be struggling at the moment to provide evidence for a global flood as well. You've had quite a lot of time now to post your masses of evidence here but you seem to instead spend most of your time saying that evolutionists lie. You are not to blame though because this is what creationists generally have to do to cover the fact that in reality their only source of "evidence" is the Bible. They have no dating methods of their own do they?



You're funny. I told you not long ago that scientists had begun studying radioactive decay more than a century ago (heard of the Curies?). By your own reasoning, because the estimates then or at other times in the past are not the same as the estimates today using modern equipment, the decay rates have changed by the difference between the estimates. This is about as logical as saying "When I measured this grain of sand with a ruler, I estimated that it was so big; now that I'm looking at it in a microscope, I get a different estimate. OMG, the sand grain changed its size!!!"

Now there are a number of reasons why we can be reasonably sure that radioactive decay rates have not changed. You have said you don't like to have to deal with lots of evidence all at once, so I will start with one piece of information from astronomy, which happens to be one of my favourite branches of science.

SN1987a was a supernova that exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way -- right next door by cosmic standards. Its distance from the Earth can be measured by trigonometry. Theory predicts that such a supernova would create about 0.1 solar masses of nickel-56, which is radioactive. Nickel-56 decays with a half-life of 6.1 days into cobalt-56, which in turn decays with a half-life of 77.1 days. Both kinds of decay give off very distinctive gamma rays. Analysis of the gamma rays from SN1987a showed mostly cobalt-56, exactly as predicted. And, the amount of those gamma rays died away with exactly the half-life of cobalt-56. For more details, read Radioactive Decay Lines from Asymmetric Supernova Explosions; or a more general read for the layperson, Variable Stars.

Since SN1987a was 170,000 light years away we were seeing light generated 170,000 years ago. This means that radioactive decay ran at the same speed 170,000 years ago as it does now. Simple and elegant, no?