I would post this in science and technology, but there are less people that go there, and apparently atheists and agnostics, buy sterotype know whats up when it comes to science. lol. anyway, i was reading this book and it claims that carbon 14 is unreliable, when it comes to dating things, because the amount of carbon 14in a sample that someone trys to date, is influenced by outside factors. like they sited the industrial revolution as putting more carbon in the atmosphere, so it would influence the levels of the carbon in a sample. think they mad ea good point myself. also a question of my own, how do they know the original amount of carbon 14 in the sample, to see how much has been lost in the first place?
As I understand it, carbon-14 dating is less reliable over shorter time periods, which I guess could be related to the Industrial Revolution. That said, it could just be that accuracy is less important if you're talking in terms of thousands or millions of years. Pretty sure you could still distinguish between a million year old rock and a five year old rock though, for example.
true true, i've read that carbon dating in itself can only go back so many thousands of years, it isn't used to date like millions and billions, as it cant, something about the half life? they use other methods to date back that far.(millions and billions) so basically what ur sayin is, bein in the range of, is more important than bein exact. that makes sense, but im sayin is, if there are things that make it less accurate, than it shouldn't be taken so serious by scientists, cause it could be wrong.
i think it's been agreed upon for many years that most carbon (~98%) is carbon 12. so that's how you can tell how much is carbon 14 (~2%) it's a little more complicated, yes, but that's the gist of it. and they know the half life of C14 (it's radioactive so it decays into C12) so it's able to predict ages of things relatively accurately.
It is good to about 60,000 years. It can be fairly accurate when done by a good lab with proper calibration curves and protocol. It is only good for organic based systems testing only such as an animal or a tree (no rocks, metals, etc.). For samples up to 10,000 years old, we are talking about +- 100 RCY. All of this is based on the known ratio of Radioactive C-14 to C-12 and its decay to N-14 over time. C-14 has a half life of 5,730 years. The C-14 to C-12 ratio of atoms is about one to one trillion. Some of the religionists with a bone to pick, usually because they want to claim a young earth for some crazy reason, will argue that decay rates have changed. Now that is true, but with calibration curves this can be easily accomodated by the testing lab. And the same is true for the issue of changing atmospheric conditions. Keep on Jammin with the science. As we used to say in the old days, better living through chemistry!....
not that im to knowlegable on the math part, haha, but i get what your saying. okay well, in labs they can replicate situations of changes in the atmosphere throughout time to make a more accurate date? and to porkstock?a so they can see the amount in the original sample cause of the ratio of c12 to c14? alrite, they cleared things up a bit. thanks you all!
i believe so and all organic things (life) has a lot of carbon in it. organic basically means carbon based.
so were all carbon based life forms... cool. haha. plants and annimals(any living thing) are carbon based, but i dont think rocks are, well maybe, but i know they dont use carbon dating to date rocks though.
