Timeline for What evidence would there be if radioactive decay changed 7,000 years ago?
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6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 15, 2022 at 7:36 | comment | added | Vikki | (2/2) Hallstatt plateau between 2400 and 2800 aBP, which is especially frustrating because it makes it extremely difficult to accurately carbon-date artifacts from a critical period of human technological development. | |
| Feb 15, 2022 at 7:32 | comment | added | Vikki | The residual C-14 in an object is not a monotonic function of age - it depends on both the object's age and on the concentration of C-14 at the time the object was formed. For instance, if the C-14 concentration in the atmosphere declines at the right rate over time (due to things like large amounts of old, C-14-less carbon entering the atmosphere from volcanic activity or marine outgassing or fossil-fuel burning or whatnot), objects covering a wide range of true ages will all have the same apparent C-14 age; one real-life example of this is the (1/2) | |
| Nov 1, 2019 at 22:48 | vote | accept | Vogon Poet | ||
| Mar 12, 2022 at 1:20 | |||||
| Oct 28, 2019 at 13:59 | comment | added | puppetsock | It's the Dirac large number hypothesis. The Oklo reactors are roughly 2 billion years old. The cosmological ideas extend to something like 14 billion years. The crucial thing is the fraction of the age of the universe, specifically, the fraction between the big bang and the event you are looking at. The variation in things like the fine structure are thought to have occurred possibly a few million years after the big bang, and so from our era, a minute fraction of the age of the universe. So, interestingly, the Oklo reactors don't preclude something going on that early. | |
| Oct 25, 2019 at 20:39 | comment | added | llama | Natural reactors are a very important point. There are a couple of people (namely John Webb) who think they've found astronomical evidence of spatial variation in the fine structure constant from telescope data, implying that it's changed throughout the life of the universe. Oklo is one of the things that makes this doubtful | |
| Oct 25, 2019 at 14:02 | history | answered | puppetsock | CC BY-SA 4.0 |