Evidence for a Young Earth Debunked

Creationist statement:

"The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.1 Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this "the winding-up dilemma," which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same "winding-up" dilemma also applies to other galaxies. For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the puzzle has been a complex theory called "density waves."1 The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the "Whirlpool" galaxy, M51.2"

Astronomy:

The author does not understand the nature of the arms. The arms do not contain a fixed set of stars. Stars travel out of an arm and into the next one, out of that one and into the one after, etc. The arms are believed to be compression waves that move more slowly around the center of the galaxy than do the stars. The arms are well lit because that's where most new stars are formed and so that's what we see from a distance. There's a good description at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_galaxy. You'll also find a moving picture there.

The author sounds like an "armchair scientist". He learns a couple things in scientific theory, doesn't really understand the theory, and concludes that he has discovered an inconsistency that the community of scientists who have devoted their careers to the subject have never noticed. Scientists have been thinking about the arms of spiral galaxies since Edwin Hubble discovered them in 1924, nearly 100 years.

It amazes me that people who have devoted comparatively little time to studying a subject think that they are so very smart that they will see something that many people who have devoted their professional lives to the subject have missed. I read something by Kip Thorne (astrophysicist) about this phenomenon. He says he gets mail from such crackpots (my term, not his) all the time. It's fine to look for errors and inconsistencies in science. That's how science advances. As I remember it, Dr. Thorne said something to the effect that first you have to learn the observed facts, learn the theory, and do the math, before you decide that current theory is wrong. It's pretty plain to me that this creationist author hasn't done his homework.

Creationist statement:

"According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (a violently-exploding star) every 25 years. The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the Crab Nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years. Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants. That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas."

Science:

(From Wikipedia: "Sky and Telescope" is a monthly American magazine covering all aspects of amateur astronomy....)
At https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/milky-way-supernova-rate-confirmed/ in an article dated January 4, 2006 it says: "How often do supernovae pop off in our galaxy? Using the European Space Agency's Integral satellite, an international team estimates that one of the Milky Way's massive stars explodes about every 50 years on average. This estimate agrees rather well with previous studies, but the earlier work relied on more indirect methods."

The Creationist's "the nearby parts of our galaxy" is rather vague, but let's be generous and say that we're talking about 1/4 of our galaxy as a maximum. I read one estimate that we can only see about 1/25 of our galaxy. That's because we're looking at it edge on and the nearer stuff gets in the way of seeing the farther stuff. I'll use that as a minimum.

For how long supernova remnants can be visible we have from Cornell University (http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/85-the-universe/supernovae/general-questions/410-how-long-do-supernova-remnants-last-intermediate) the following: "SNR do fade away and eventually become invisible. The time for this to happen is on the order of tens of thousands to a hundred thousand years." SNR stands for Supernova remnants. So let's do some math and see what we should expect.

• How often do supernovas form in our area of the galaxy: 1/50 * 1/4 = 1/200 ... or one per 200 max to 1/50 * 1/25 = 1/1250 ... or 1 per 1250 years min.
• How long do they remain visible on average: let's say 40,000 years minimum to 100,000 years max.
• So we should expect to see a maximum with the fastest rate and the largest visibility: 1/200 * 100,000 = 500
  and expect to see a minimum with the slowest rate and the smallest visibility: 1/1250 * 40,000 = 32

So if we can actually observe 200 that seems pretty nicely within the numbers I just calculated based on what astronomers have measured. I think that should settle the matter. But in the process of getting the numbers above, I found a couple things of minor interest...

At https://www.quora.com/Can-you-really-determine-the-age-of-the-Milky-Way-Galaxy-based-on-supernova-remnants I found a question/answer exchange between someone who had apparently been reading some Creationist material and a Dr. Devor with a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University (2008)

Answered Dec 17 2016 · Author has 1.6k answers and 2m answer views

Q. Can you really determine the age of the Milky Way Galaxy based on supernova remnants?

A. Like previous answers, I can't think of how that can be done. If you'd post a link to the article you're referring to, it might clear things up. But as things stand, I have a hunch this is just a misunderstanding, since Supernova remnants (SNRs) only last for up to about 100,000 years, while the Milky Way, is probably about 10 billion years old.

I also found https://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/why-few-supernova-remnants-do-not-indicate-a-young-universe/ which seems to be about item 2 of the article you directed me to.

Creationist statement:

"Every year, rivers and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today's input and output rates. This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, three billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations that are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years.10 Calculations for many other seawater elements give much younger ages for the ocean."

How salt is lost from the oceans:

I had thought that the links below would be sufficient to show that the above is a naive approach to the question. I'm adding this because apparently it's not.

In brief, here's what happens. Sections of the ocean are isolated as land rises or ocean levels fall. You've probably seen ocean fossils in land high above sea level that once was ocean floor. The water eventually evaporates from these bodies of water leaving the deposits of salt etc. described in the links below. The water goes into the atmosphere and returns to earth in the form of rain. That may fall into the ocean or run off into streams and eventually find its way to the ocean. (Of course, if the water ends up in a salt lake it has to evaporate again before getting to the ocean) Some water sinks into the ground in which case there may be a brief delay, in terms of geological time. It may replace other water in the water table, find its way to aquifers, come to the surface in springs, or travel a more complicated route, but it gets back to the ocean quickly for the most part and eventually for the rest. So you have less salt in the ocean and the same amount of water. I'd thought that was obvious but I guess not.

Additionally, some of these salt deposits and other salt that has escaped the sea will eventually be found by rain runoff, streams, and rivers and be returned to the sea. So the same salt can be taken to the ocean many times. How many times will our Creationist friend count it? He's counting it every time it comes in as salt input to the ocean. He shouldn't count the same salt more than once. Well, I hope that's enough said. Check out the links too if you want. There are some great pictures and further explanation.

One more thing that the need for the above two paragraphs makes me realize is that there must be a certain number of people who have nearly no knowledge about the physical world. If that's the case I guess you are easily taken in by the Creationist and con men of all sorts. Maybe you're OK with that. If you're not I'd suggest you take a course or two in general science or get a book. Find out what it's about and see if it makes sense to you. Get a book on western medicine too so you don't end up pinning your hope for a cancer cure on aroma therapy or some crazy thing. Western medicine doesn't have all the answers but you owe it to yourself to find out what answers it does have. Your life may depend on knowing. I've known a couple people, dead now, who didn't know a quack from a medical doctor and paid the price in pain, suffering, and death.

http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Mi-Oc/Ocean-Chemical-Processes.html.
This is a good overview of ocean chemistry. It talks about rates of addition to and removal from the ocean of minerals and uses Sodium (Na) as an example.

http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/saltminingg.html
"During the Paleozoic Era, beginning about 600 million years ago and ending about 230 million years ago, seawater invaded the Michigan Basin at least six times. As the seas receded and evaporated, rock and mineral deposits such as halite (rock salt), gypsum (calcium sulfate with water), liquid brines, petroleum, lime, clay, sandstone and coal were left behind."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khewra_Salt_Mine
This is kind of interesting and at least tells you that there really are large, underground salt deposits outside the U.S.

http://www.k-plus-s.com/en/wissen/rohstoffe/salzvorkommen.html
This is a salt company with some information about salt. It contains some nice pictures and talks about the origin of salt deposits too.

http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Bi-Ca/Brines-Natural.html
There is also some stuff here.

https://geology.com/stories/13/salt-domes/
This contains a map of "bedded salt deposits" and areas with salt domes in the U.S.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1019j/report.pdf
U. S. Dept. of the Interior "Annotated Bibliography and Index Map of Salt Deposits in the United States" 1957

Creationist statement:

"Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay. "Squashed" Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time scale. "Orphan" Polonium-218 radiohalos, having no evidence of their mother elements, imply accelerated nuclear decay and very rapid formation of associated minerals."

Facts about radioactive decay and the cited papers by Robert Gentry:

First, there are no conventional fossils involved, only radioactive inclusions in crystals and coal and the results of radioactive decay on the crystals and coal.

I knew nothing about radiohalos and certainly didn't have the decay sequences of U-238 (Uranium with atomic weight 238, i.e. a total of 238 protons and neutrons in the nucleus) memorized. The Creationist author references two scientific articles by Robert V. Gentry that appeared in Science Magazine in 1976 and 1974 as a basis for his conclusions. (Additional element abbreviations used below are Pb = Lead (Latin plumbus), Po = Polonium, Bi = Bismuth.) Radiohalos exist when some bit of radioactive material is included in a crystalline structure and the inclusion emits alpha particles (An alpha particle is a bundle consisting of two protons and two neutrons = a helium nucleus). Different materials emit alpha particles with different energies and the higher the energy the bigger a ring the alpha particles will make as they move out from the inclusion into the crystalline material. U-238 has a whole sequence of decays that eventually take it to Pb-206. The decay sequence is illustrated at Wikipedia. It may provide a good reference as you read what follows. You will see in the diagram not only decay by means of ejecting alpha particles but also beta decay. This is typically beta-minus decay which is the ejection of the electron when a neutron turns into a proton and an electron. This changes the identity of the element but not the atomic weight, not noticeably anyway. Ejection of an electron causes no ring. I think that's mainly since it's a light particle but maybe also because it can't interact chemically with the chrystal.

The first two sentences by the Creationist are correct. The "quashed" radiohalos only indicate to Gentry, in his 1976 article, that the Polonium-214 halo occurred in pre-coal that was in a gel-like state, to use Gentry's words. He observed elliptical Polonium-214 (not 210) radiohalos with round Polonium-210 radiohalos centered on the same inclusion in the coal. His thought was that some seismic event distorted the gel between the times that the halos formed. Polonium-214 decays quickly to Lead-210 which has a half-life of 22.26 years and decays to Bismuth-210 with a half-life of 13.73 years. Bi-210 decays to Polonium-210. The decays of the lead and bismuth emit electrons and form no halos. The Polonium decays each emit an alpha particle and so make halos. Given the length of these half-lives there's time between creation of the rings for a distortion of the gel-like pre-coal. So the squashed halos show nothing at all about the age of the formations where they were found but they may show something about the nature of coalification. The Creationist author got that entirely wrong. He didn't understand what he read and didn't even know which ring was distorted, Po-214 not Po-210.

Gentry's 1976 article concludes: "If remobilization (movement of U in or Pb out) is not the explanation, then these ratios (U-238 to Pb-206) raise crucial questions about the validity of present concepts regarding the antiquity of these geological formations and about the time required for coalification." The squashed halos were one topic of the article but he also looked at complete Uranium-238 ring sets. Measuring the Uranium to Lead-206 ratios in the centers of these halos he found it to be unexpectedly high, indicating less radioactive decay than expected for their presumed age. (Lead-206 is the eventual decay product of U-238.) This indicates that the coal was not actually in Triassic or Jurassic strata. There's nothing said to the effect that the "Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months....". All that Gentry says is that maybe the strata were incorrectly classified and that's only if remobilization did not happen, and he believes remobilization is unlikely. He never even hints that he believes that 171 million years of geologic history happened in a few months in either of his papers.

The Creationist author seems to know little about geologic periods and hasn't bothered to learn it before making his statements. Triassic is the earliest of the periods he mentions. The Jurassic is next. The Cretaceous is next, but not mentioned by him. The Paleogene is next and it's second oldest subdivision, an Epoch is what it's called, is the Eocene. Maybe the author doesn't believe in fossils but at the end of the Cretaceous the dinosaurs all died and in the Paleocene Epoch, just before the Eocene, mammals evolved from not much bigger than a mouse in the Cretaceous to some the size of a bear. That doesn't happen in a few months. Just the debris cloud from the Chicxulub impact with earth at the end of the Cretaceous period took at least a few months to clear, maybe much longer. Of course, if you read Gentry's papers you will see that Gentry doesn't even mention any more recent period than the Jurassic, and certainly not the Eocene.

The last sentence of the Creationist author, about '"Orphan" Polonium-218 radiohalos', is nonsense. Nobody knows how to accelerate nuclear decay and it certainly doesn't happen in nature. That's why it's used for dating. It is constant. And the "rapid formation of associated minerals" is just humorous. With a half life of about 3 minutes for Po-218, the minerals with the orphaned Po-218 radiohalos would have had to form within an hour to have even a millionth of the Polonium-218 left. By the end of a single day only 1/(1 followed by 144 zeros) would be left. So "rapid" is putting it mildly. Crystals don't form that quickly!

There is a mystery here. The fact that Gentry found Polonium-218 halos without a trace of their decay-parent isotopes is quite amazing given that the half-life of Po-218 is just 3.05 minutes. That doesn't provide enough time for the crystal to form around the Po-218, not even close. He states that he found no evidence of anything that could have decayed into Po-218 through beta decay, and so leave no ring. Additionally I've checked the half lives for both minus and plus beta decay parents and grandparents, which is all I could find, and the half lives are all under a minute. Though Gentry gives examples of "diminution", "obliteration", and "reversal effects" of halos that could explain most missing U-238 decay halos for his orphan Polonium-218 radiohalos, it can't explain the missing Radon-222, halo as far as I can see. So we have a mystery.

Gentry's 1974 article concludes, "In summary, the combined results of ring structure studies, mass spectrometric analyses, and electron induced x-ray fluorescence present a compelling case for the independent existence of Po halos. The question is, can they be explained by presently accepted cosmological and geological concepts relating to the origin and development of Earth?" I'm sure they can't. Nothing can explain them, nothing at all, because the half-lives involved are all too tiny compared with the time required for a crystal to form around an inclusion of Po-218 or any of its beta decay ancestors. So Gentry seems to assume that the crystals, Po-218 and all, instantaneously appeared when the earth had cooled enough for crystals to exist. It makes no sense to me.

The connection to the age of the earth is this: Since best estimates of the age of the earth are often based on Pb-206/Pb-204 and Pb-207/Pb-204 ratios (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93lead_dating), the appearance of extra Pb-206 from the decay of Polonium-218 that didn't originate from U-238 would throw off the calculations, at least if they were done with the Biotite and Fluorite samples Gentry used, making the sample look older than it actually is. This form of dating is commonly referred to as Pb-Pb dating. The extra Pb-206 would do the same thing to uranium-lead dating.

Gentry mentioned in this 1974 paper that he examined meteors and moon rocks and found no orphan Polonium-218 radiohalos. In the 1976 paper he states that he found none in the coal he was examining. So there seems to be no mystery Lead-206 in those samples and age estimates of the Uranium there, if any, should be accurate. Since there is no reasonable explanation for the orphan Polonium-218 radiohalos and they don't seem to be common I would guess that estimates of the age of the earth using Pb-Pb dating are pretty accurate.

Additionally, there are other types of dating of materials. Carbon-14 dating can reliably measure back about 50,000 years for formerly living material. But with a half-life of 5,730 years, and depending on intake of Carbon-14 from the air, as living things do, it isn't any use in dating the earth. It can tell us that the earth is more than 50,000 years old though. Uranium-thorium dating doesn't rely on accumulation of Lead and is accurate back to 500,000 years. Rubidium-strontium dating can date rocks and, though I'm not sure how far back it's accurate, the Rubidium-87 half-life of 49.23 billion years makes it look like a good candidate for going way, way back and 4 or 5 billion years for the age of the earth looks easy. So there are many ways to tell that the earth is a good deal older than 6,000 years. Also, the Creationist author made so many mistakes in his few sentences that he obviously didn't take the time to understand what he was reading or what he was saying. So much for item (9).