Maybe a dumb question but, in layman's terms, how did we determine the half lives of atoms that take such long timespans to decay? Surely we couldn't reliably detect any amount of atoms that decay within a reasonably observable timespan.
The halflife is the time it takes half a sample to decay. We have it set to "half" because it's the easiest way to quantize it, but the numbers you are working with get much more manageable when you realize we can detect decay at far smaller percentages, and that amount can be inflated, simply by looking at a larger sample. Soo the answer is, conversion and maths. Now, an obvious next question for an inquisitive mind might think "Well, how do we know for sure that once those numbers are converted, and a scale is established, that it actually works that way, reliably ?" and the answer is, they had to take a bunch of other estimates of age for known objects, and to compare compare the estimates and see if it manages to corroborate the numbers we expected. They could also probably figure it out with knowledge about subatomic force calculations but that is way beyond my wheelhouse.
1 gram of any radioactive isotope has a number of atoms in the order of 10^20. Even if you have a very small amount of a slow decaying isotope, it's more than enough for a Geiger counter, for example, to detect a bunch of decays. I'm not sure, but I believe that in such situation the hard part becomes to quantify the isotopes, not the decays.
I used to go to UCL's Institute of Archaeology and yea Gordon Square is right outside our faculty building where we'd often conduct experimental archaeology. It's so funny to hear about it in a scischow video
That's your personality at play. Odds are pretty good Hank doesn't find magic less fascinating when he understands it. For many of us, magic tricks only become interesting when we either know how it's done or have at least something to start from in working it out. Take, for example, a math problem where ? is an operator you don't know: 1 ? 1 = 27 Unless I miss my guess, you don't really care what the question mark is doing because I presented it as if it were math. The question mark could stand for " + 25 + " or it could be something more convoluted, but you really don't care. It's just a dumb example problem. And that's how magic tricks look to many of us. If you're math minded, though, you can already think of things that might be interesting if you were presented with them. For example, ? could be "round( (10^a) * (e^b))" where a is the antecedent and b is the postcedent of the operator. A math-minded individual could then have fun imagining the applications of that now that they know how it works. And that's how magic tricks entertain me. I figure them out, or I go find out how they were done. Sleight of hand is also more a demonstration of athletics. You can usually tell when that's what's being done even if you can't see how it was done.
@@Merennulli Interest and fascination are two wildly different things though. I like finding out about how magic tricks are performed, I like being impressed by the technical skill and creativity that goes into each trick, but that doesn't change the fact that the FASCINATION aspect is all but gone once the mystery is revealed. Sure, you can have a moment of "Oooooohhh" where you maybe feel a sense of excitement, but finding out that someone has a tube running along their arm and down their finger will never compare to the childlike wonder of watching someone fill up an empty glass with beer out of thin air right in front of your eyes.
@@reaper4812 First off, straight from the dictionary, "to command the interest of". I do get that they have contextual differences despite literally referencing one another in their definitions, but "fascination" still describes how people view a magic trick after they know how it works. Nothing in the usage or definition of the word requires ignorance. Only that the predicate has the attention, interest, and excited engagement of the subject. You may have that childlike wonder when you see a glass fill up by "magic", but most of us don't. (This is intentionally the only time I've used "most" so far.) We know that it's done by a tube, a trick glass, or some other mechanism, and sight-unseen we have no appreciation for how it might work. People DO experience that same childlike wonder watching physics demonstrations where they are explained how it works before seeing it. The coin vortex many science centers have in the lobby is a perfect example of that. How many times have you been to one and seen grown adults putting coin after coin into it, knowing full well how it works, but wanting to experience the wonder of it over and over? Or the VAST number of physics toys that are sold to adults? Newtwon's cradles, tensegrity sculptures, Tesla coils, gyroscopes, Stirling engines, multi-arm path tracing pendulums, etc. There are many different ways people experience fascination with magic acts. If yours happens to require ignorance of the mechanism, so be it. Embrace the wonder of what fascinates you. But don't project that onto everyone else and deny the wonder of what fascinates us.
they use the organic material that was above / below / surrounding the stones, to figure out a date range. like gobleki tepe in turkey - it was a massive stone megalith that was buried in a hill. the organic material that was used to bury the stones was dated, and it was known that the stones had to be placed there BEFORE that, since they stones were UNDERNEATH the dirt.
Just sounds like not a perfect noisegate. Noisegates just cut the mic audio completely if its not past a certain threshold (speaking) Or they don't have noise suppression on that time when they usually do
No that wasn't it. If there had been no humans generating co2 then we would have been moving into an ice age. Nobody thought co2 would cool the planet. However enough nuclear bombs would do it.
@@lenabreijer1311 I disagree, I seen the movie in a theater. All those that believe in the so called global warming , sure blow their cult belief on the internet and none have gone to zero carbon footprint. FYI when you exhale your breathe is mostly CO2. If there was zero CO2 starting tomorrow how would the plant life last or human kind . No plants no O2, THE END.
@@robertgoldman8064 like Hollywood always gets their science right? It must have been some obscure scifi B movie because I don't remember it at all. Nobody said there was zero co2 before humans started raising the levels. If that is your kind of knowledge then I suggest you crawl back under your rock and stop embarrassing yourself.
I understand that not all living things contain Carbon 14 as it isn't easily absorbed in water so thus skewing the 'clock' and being unhelpful in dating deep sea organisms. I am saying this because a very well meaning young lady 'disproved' evolution because a living deep sea snail was carbon dated to be millions of years old. I wish I knew more about carbon dating then as I could have told her that carbon dating isn't calculated in millions of years, but in thousands and is very useful for biblical archaeology!
how do we know that the issue with carbon dating hasn't always affected the earth. we've been burning coal for hundreds of years. Can we assume that the carbon levels were the same 500 years ago much less 10,000 years ago. If we base the age of a creature or plant on a ratio that has been changing for a long time, how can we know that it's accurate without more controls?
If you've seen the range of uncertainty in the most recent IPCC report, I would say accurate is not strictly a scientific way to assess that range of uncertainty.
To get an exact date is expensive and time consuming (see the bit about using an AMS to calculate actual atom numbers) so ball park figures and an average is more often used. When a scientist (or otherwise intelligent person) reads these figures, they know what's going on. And it's future modelling, which always has the element of surprise in it = Ah!
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. 2 Peter 3:10 KJV
Merlin might have existed... to some degree at least. There are some really old songs about an former soldier, outlaw and hunter with that name. It seems like someone took those songs and mixed in a lot from the Welch bard Taleisin and some pure fantasy to create the Merlin we know from the Arthur tales but there was likely a real person who at least inspired the myths. No Gandalf or anything, just a guy living alone in the wilderness and sometimes interacting with travelers and since this was around 8th century and up further North he had nothing to do with Stone henge.
This is the kind of world 🌎 we've made for ourselves and our children, better have no enemies when the light goes out , due to the economic crisis, wars and rate of unemployment I think now is the best time to invest and make more money for the future
Some of the first research was done by fossil fuel companies. Wouldn't it be in their best interest to skew the data towards no climate change? That's not what they found though
@@kellydalstok8900 Ahh don't worry, it's not just us Americans. We're both amazing and horrible as a species everywhere we live. Both qualities just manifest differently in different cultures.
maybe to you but i'm an older person and getting darn tired of unlearning all i once thought i "knew".' joking. i wish i had more time to see the wonders on the way. my mamaw remembered horses and buggies and lived to see the moon landing.
Ok, so for this video, I learned that dating is not a guarantee and not the only way. You have to combine it with other techniques or use a different technique completely. Got it. Subscribed! Didn't know that this is a dating advise channel.
Why can’t they just re-carbon date something that was previously carbon dated and using the current levels of CO2 compared to previous levels determine a new calculation for the ratio where both determinations are consistent?
Because the added C12 can make 2 ages look identical in amount of C14. Let's say you put a box with 100 pennies in it on a shelf each year, and each year I take a penny out of each box. After 10 years the first box will have 90 cents, the second 91 cents and so on up to the last box you put up with 100 cents. Next year you decide to put up a box with 95 cents in it. How do you tell it apart from the box that is 5 years old?
Thank you so much, for not referring to Jeffrey of Monmouth as a historian. I hate when educators do that. At best he's a historical novelist. But I like your description better. "A fanciful writer of English History."
I`ve always wondered, why is it so hard to believe that people were able to built Stonehenge, when people were already building step pyramids in Egypt around 2660 bc?
1500 years of construction by POSSIBLY different groups of people i wonder what is the possibility that there were a team of builders every one of which lived more than 1500 years?
Hypothetically speaking: if I ate nothing but Egyptian mummies 🤮would that change my "age" by carbon dating because the C14 in the mummies has decayed?
Moa wikipedia "Polynesians arrived sometime before 1300, and all moa genera were soon driven to extinction by hunting and, to a lesser extent, by habitat reduction due to forest clearance. By 1445, all moa had become extinct, along with Haast's eagle, which had relied on them for food. Recent research _using carbon-14 dating_ of middens strongly suggests that the events leading to extinction took less than a hundred years ..."
3:32 - something interesting I discovered about this, that you sort of hint at but don't quite mention, is that some folks have taken to thinking of January 1st 1950 as a sort of arbitrary threshold for about when all this was going on, and referring to times before that date as "Before Present" or "Before Physics". Of course, I see no reason not to extend this out the other direction ("after physics"/"after present"), too, and so I'm writing this comment in the year I think of as AP73 (that most folks know as 2023). Because I figure there should be a year zero (1950), because number lines, and that, yeah, we should base our numbering on something that actually matters scientifically somehow. Happy new year!
What I don’t get about this is if there are clearly variables, why do some people scoff when people challenge some of the dating that has been done? I get that it’s at least mostly right. But lots of science has the possibility of being wrong, or at least off base.
Now how and if do you take into account the amount of microbial life that exists everywhere will they not throw off your colon 14 calculations being that they are alive and will stay that way regardless of the death around them and the amount of microbial life will change on temperature oxygen and light so how are we taking all of the variables into account if someone can answer that for me that will help my thirst for knowledge thanks
Whats really gonna bake your noodle later is there will be potentially alien civilizations, or human colonies on other worlds... That we will have no way to accurately date.
Don't rule out Merlin! Whilst a fictional character clearly didn't build Stone Henge, it's possible that the source of the myth is a druidic leader who had a part in acquiring the stones from a rival tribe. If so, Merlin did build it.
