Timeline for Has the half-life of an isotope ever been accurately predicted before it could be measured?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 19, 2020 at 10:59 | vote | accept | Nathan Long | ||
| May 27, 2020 at 1:59 | comment | added | Nathan Long | @MaxW There are definitely those who can't be persuaded, but don't write people off categorically. Good arguments persuaded me away from YEC, and there are many personal stories on the BioLogos website of a similar nature. I continue to try to improve my understanding of how all the pieces of evidence fit together. The most helpful explanations to me are those that tell not only what is known, but how we know it. Those are the kinds I want to offer in my own conversations. | |
| May 26, 2020 at 20:03 | comment | added | MaxW | @NathanLong - Don't waste any effort trying to convince young earth creationists that their belief is wrong. They have seen "The Flintstones" on TV and know that people and dinosaurs roamed the earth together. Corollary:"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It frustrates you and annoys the pig." | |
| May 26, 2020 at 15:00 | answer | added | Jon Custer | timeline score: 6 | |
| May 26, 2020 at 14:10 | comment | added | Jon Custer | Other options would be the relatively recently created elements, but there good accuracy of the predicted lifetimes is getting within an order of magnitude. | |
| May 26, 2020 at 13:54 | history | edited | Nathan Long | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 26, 2020 at 13:52 | comment | added | Nathan Long | @Mithoron My apologies if my question doesn't meet your standards. I'm very much a beginner. My motivation: decay rates are used in radiometric dating, and young earth creationists sometimes allege that decay rates may have changed. I'd like to know if there exists a function that can accurately tell us the half life of any isotope based on its structure and the basic nuclear forces, such that half lives can't have changed unless nuclear forces have. An accurate prediction would be strong validation for such a function. I would leave quantifying the accuracy to the judgment of respondents. | |
| May 26, 2020 at 13:34 | review | Close votes | |||
| May 27, 2020 at 12:08 | |||||
| May 26, 2020 at 13:33 | comment | added | Ed V | @Mithoron My thought was that making an accurate prediction, and then finding experimental verification, is what science is about. I agree completely about the accuracy aspect. The bismuth example had a predicted range that was way too large and the experimental half-life was near the lower end. I am not impressed with that. If a new isotope were to be created and had an experimental half-life within 10 or 20% of an a priori prediction of the half-life, I would be impressed and say it was a significant achievement. But YMMV. | |
| May 26, 2020 at 13:15 | comment | added | Mithoron | @EdV What is supposed to be excellent about it? Unless clarified, I don't think this question is OK, at all. There are theories of nuclear structure and all kinds of predictions. Maybe about only thing that would make this viable is the notion of accuracy. If clarified - how accurate is accurate enough. | |
| May 26, 2020 at 10:20 | history | edited | Nathan Long | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 26, 2020 at 5:17 | comment | added | MaxW | Actaully $^{209}\ce{Bi}$ would seem to be an example. Theorists had evidently long suspect that the isotope was radioactive. See for example: "A SEARCH FOR α-PARTICLES FROM THE DECAY OF Bi209" E. P. Hincks and , C. H. Millar, Canadian Journal of Physics, 1958, 36(2): 231-251, doi.org/10.1139/p58-027 | |
| May 26, 2020 at 2:49 | comment | added | Ed V | I think the answer is probably technically no: it was not until fairly recently that we knew bismuth is actually radioactive, albeit with a ludicrously long lifetime. But this is an excellent question, particularly if lifetimes are restricted to a billion years or so. | |
| May 26, 2020 at 2:20 | history | asked | Nathan Long | CC BY-SA 4.0 |