Carbon Dating Bogus Says Friend

[ApeAttack]

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My fundamentalist Christian friend said carbon-14 dating is "bogus" and that dating anything after 50,000 years becomes really sketchy.


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If carbon-14 dating and other methods of measuring the age of objects is incorrect, a lot of fundamental chemistry and physics is incorrect. These techniques were all built up from basic principles in chem and phys.

One thing to keep in mind is that there will always be some error in any measurement of anything. But for the technique to be useful the error is significantly less than the value itself.

Just making up something off the top of my head... There may be some technique that allows you to know the age of a piece of wood is 50,000 +/- 2000 years. The 2000 years is much less than 50,000. Some people may say, WOAHHH!!! There is a +/-2000 year error range on this technique!?!?! How unreliable! But the main point is that the sample of wood is ~50,000 years old within 4%.

(Well, technically if the +/-2000 years is 1 std deviation, there is a 67% percent chance of the wood being between 48000-52000 years old... statistics is fun)





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