Monday, March 22, 2010

R.A.T.E. and Radiohalos

Well, it's been another long stretch in posting anything to this blog, and I was wondering what should go on next. But to my surprise, I've realized that I'd forgotten to publish the other findings behind the R.A.T.E. team that I'd researched. So, in the interest of being thorough, here's the stuff I meant to put on this blog last year:

According to the R.A.T.E. team's second volume, Andrew A. Snelling tackled the problem of radiohalos, a subject which somehow keeps coming up in spite of repeated refutations. (Baillieul, 2005; Isaac, 2005) it bears noting, before we explore Snelling’s actual treatise, how the initial research proposal was phrased. The research was to, “resolve the question if Po halos are special evidence for the created rocks only or could they also occur in Flood rocks.” This, of course, is a false dichotomy. In other words, the possibility that polonium halos are evidence for neither Creation nor Flood, is not even considered.
Snelling begins with a radical shift in tactics. In the past, it had been argued, chiefly by Gentry, that polonium halos were evidence of in situ Creation. (Gentry, 1986) But Snelling destroys this argument forever. In the very opening sentence of his chapter, he states:

"The ubiquitous presence of 238U and 210Po, 214Po, and 218Po radiohalos in the same biotite flakes within granitic plutons formed during the Flood falsifies the hypothesis that all granites and Po radiohalos were created, but testifies to the simultaneous formation of these radiohalos." (Vardiman, et al., 2005:101)

In other words, Snelling has admitted the critics of Robert Gentry were right! The radiohalos don’t prove Creation. It was pointed out (in an earlier post) how Gentry worked closely with the RATE team, and so it stands to good reason that this means he endorses this new viewpoint. But, according to Snelling, these radiohalos do indicate that all such halos formed at the same time, and that they formed during Noah’s Flood. Why ever should that matter? What’s Snelling driving at?
Essentially, Snelling says that during the Flood event, rapid alpha decay occurred, causing uranium-238 to produce amounts of radon-222. This same Flood event caused some hydrothermic transporting of the radon within fissures of the biotite to other areas of the crystal, where it then decayed into polonium, leaving a halo.
This re-interpretation of polonium halos has some advantages. It acknowledges transport of radon through the biotite, which critics of Gentry’s work have always been quick to point out. It also acknowledges that the polonium halos should be along the same fissures as the uranium-containing grains. But right away it also runs into some problems. Here are a few of the major ones:
Snelling gives no particular reason why one should choose his model over the existing one, and leaves open some rather gaping holes. For example, even though he might be right about hydration within fissures of biotite, if there were something which accelerated alpha decay, then it would affect such decay in both 238U and 222Rn. The half-life for radon is a little less than four days (3.8, in fact), so if four billion years’ worth of alpha decay for 238U took place within one year (being generous to the 40 days and 40 nights of Noah’s Flood), then the half-life of radon’s alpha decay would have been reduced to a mere fraction of a millisecond (.08208 milliseconds, to be precise) – far too quick for transport to have taken place to form any separate Po halos. Also, choosing the Flood as the Biblical event which marked rapid decay rates is somewhat arbitrary. Why not some other point, such as when Egypt was struck with the ninth plague of darkness? Or perhaps the moment when the sun was purportedly halted in mid-sky while the Israelites slaughtered the Amalekites? Perhaps the parting of the Red Sea was caused by a rapid-decay event which vaporized the water? Snelling is biased in favor of Noah’s Flood only for reasons of theological continuity. But the biggest problem is one that was alluded to earlier. Any such rapid alpha decay would generate fantastic amounts of heat. Yet if biotite is heated much higher than 150° C, the halos become annealed and disappear! What mechanism does Snelling propose dissipated so much heat that Po halos were able to form in newly crystallized biotite? Amazingly, he doesn’t! He merely states that hydrothermal fluids might move and dissipate some of the heat from plutonic granites, but “an additional, as yet unknown mechanism would have been needed to remove the heat generated by the accelerated radioisotope decay.”
The above quote points to an Appendix C at the end of the chapter to deal with the problem further. There is a very special quote there which illustrates fully the failings of the creationist mindset on this matter:

…All creationist models of young earth history have serious problems with heat disposal, because there is simply too much geological work that has to be done in too short a time. Of course, the perception that there is a problem with disposal of heat is based on our present understanding and observations of heat production from radioactive decay and of heat flow, which are then applied using uniformitarian assumptions to geological processes in the past. But if geological processes have not been uniform in their rate and operation in the past, the uniformitarian assumption to project the present back into the past does not apply. In a nutshell, the perception that there is a heat problem is based solely on our understanding of these processes in the present, our ignorance of what actually happened during the catastrophic upheaval of the Flood year, and the Scriptural restriction to young earth modeling. (Vardiman, et al., 2005:184)

There is a logical fallacy known as ‘appeal to ignorance.’ One simply can’t find a better example of such than this.

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