SAWells

And if you doubt this, how is it that there are SATAN + DWARFS?

Calilasseia

Spinal Tap reference. See Hex above.

[Tangential diversion] Incidentally, am I the only one here who wonders what strange uses an inflatable satan could be put to? [/Tangential diversion]

mung bean

You mean you don't have one?

Sven

I first read this as: " And if you doubt this, how is it that there are SANTA + DWARFS?"
:rolling:

Calilasseia

Meanwhile, back on topic ....

Doubtless Dave will want to bring in various flood models as 'support' for the idea of the flood myth being 'reality'. Unfortunately, there are some nice time bombs ticking away in there as well. The camp followers from RDF are already familiar with this, but for the benefit of those who haven't seen this before, I shall summarise:

[1] Vapour canopy model : Results in thermodynamic exchanges that has Earth temperatures oscillating wildly, between those more usually associated with Pluto (and the subsequent removal of breathable gases in gaseous form as they first liquefy and then solidify), followed by temperatures more usually associated with the interior of a Bessemer furnace;

[2] Hydroplate model : Which is still presented at icr.org using the same wording that I dissected as being in violation of the gas laws that I learned at school when I was twelve years old, and also includes that absurd nonsense about the Asteroid Belt being formed from rocks hurled from the Earth, which as I demonstrated with another series of calculations requires a directed energy input equivalent to that of 895 trillion hydrogen bombs of the size of the Tsar Bomba, yet no mechanism for the production of this energy, let alone its direction to this end, appears in creationist material;

[3] Runaway subduction model : AiG (your favourite one stop shop for cut and pastes) still describes Baumgardner's computer model of geological processes as being "the world's best", yet fellow Los Alamos scientists found numerous major errors in the code and only use the model after it has been subject to heavy correction of its deficiencies. Furthermore, even Baumgardner's own code only produces runaway subduction when it is loaded with MANIFESTLY UNPHYSICAL PARAMETERS;

[4] RATE group and accelerated nuclear decay : Once again, I supplied calculations based upon real world geological and physical modelling supplied by an accredited geologist elsewhere that demonstrates the absurdity of this notion, because it results in the temperature gradient of the Earth becoming so steep that the surface becomes incandescent plasma and the core becomes hot enough for helium fusion via the triple-alpha process to take place. This happens even if we restrict ourselves to rates of "decay acceleration" that result in physically feasible temperatures. If we accept RATE's value for the "decay acceleration", we end up with an Earth whose core is over one thousand magnitudes hotter than the entire universe was during the first Planck Second of the Big Bang.

One does not even need to delve into the realms of exotica such as tensors in order to demonstrate that these models are seriously flawed. Even an elementary treatment of the topic, using calculations involving nothing more taxing than multiplications and the odd exponentiation, result in the appearance of manifest physical absurdity with every "creation model" thus far proposed. It says a LOT about creationism that its models fail even these simple tests, let alone any more sophisticated tests that professional scientists might wish to unleash at some future date.

I enjoyed a particular moment of hilarity at RDF, when I was 'advised' to go and "read some creationist material" with respect to the Hydroplate model, and upon doing so, found myself staring at a page which contained a statement so utterly absurd and at variance with the known laws of physics, that it was a wonder I didn't end up in hospital with a hernia from the ensuing laughter. The page in question was this one, which, if the reader scrolls down, contains the following on the subject of "supercritical water":

Meanwhile, let's see what happens when we turn to Kaye & Laby's Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, which is maintained online by the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, one of the premier institutions of its kind, and which is responsible, among other tasks, for maintaining SI unit standards and determining precise values of assorted physical constants. Not far from the NPL is the building that houses one of the world's atomic time standards. Let's see what the NPL has to say, shall we?

So in other words, the "supercritical water" that "Creation Science" (still waiting to hear that they've actually done any, by the way) is in the gaseous state. Indeed, I was first introduced to the Gas Laws, of which the matter of critical constants, during my school career at twelve years of age, though the material involving the partial differential equations was obviously introduced at a later time. However, even back then, the existence of critical points for a gas, and the fact that the critical points marked the region where the densities of liquid and gaseous phases were identical, was still a part of the elementary physics syllabus at that time even though an in-depth mathematical treatment had to wait until later, when the requisite tools for handling partial differential equations had been supplied in mathematics classes.

This, of course, is simply ONE example of where "creation models" fall flat on their faces. The Hydroplate model runs into more trouble because it posits the opening of the so-called "fountains of the deep", and indeed one can find YouTube animations of this alleged process which show quite clearly large torrents of water gushing out of the Giant Crack™ of the Earth. The problem with this of course is that these animations are also in flagrant violation of the Gas Laws.

Now of course, the informed reader will already be asking about the departure from the Ideal Gas Laws at extreme temperatures and pressures. The Ideal Gas Laws, which were formulated as a result of observations taking place under everyday conditions, are a very good approximation to the behaviour of real gases under those conditions, but when one starts to encounter unusual conditions, notable departures occur. However, scientists realised this early in the game, which is why later on in one's physics tuition, one is introduced to the Real Gas Laws, and such matters as virial coefficients (which forms much of the material of the Kaye & Laby page I linked to above). Even if one decides, for simplicity's sake, to use the Ideal Gas Laws to work out what will happen when one releases large volumes of water into the atmosphere in accordance with the "Hydroplate model", and accepts that it is only an approximation, one still discovers that what happens is not the emergence of great fountains of water, but bloody huge clouds of superheated steam.Not least because the water is already in the gaseous state under the conditions specified prior to release. Applying the Real Gas Laws does not significantly alter this basic fact when one applies the calculations - it merely alters the actual quantified values of temperature, pressure and volume applicable to the emerging superheated steam.

Now, anyone who happens to have a pressure cooker at home can perform a simple experiment. Heat some water under pressure in the pressure cooker, then open the safety valve to release the pressure. What emerges? Steam. First of all the gas is at a temperature that is higher than the boiling point of water at 1 bar, and secondly is at a higher pressure. Therefore when it emerges into the 1 bar atmosphere of one's kitchen, it will remain as steam.Indeed, much of the motive power of the railways of the 19th and early 20th centuries depended upon a decent understanding of the behaviour of steam in this regard (and also involved engineers in the taxing business of building boilers that could withstand elevated pressures without exploding), with this technology also being transplanted to the first ocean-going motorised ships. Therefore, we have at "Creation Science" a piece of text that would have been regarded as ridiculous by a 19th century railway or ship propulsion engineer.

I suspect it will not take too long for the message to propagate among those correspondents with at least a basic command of physics, that so-called "creation models" are best regarded as sources of entertainment rather than serious pieces of scientific inquiry.

deadman_932

*shakes his fist*
Damn you , Calilasseia, for ruining a theory with all your petty facts and physical laws!! DAMN YOU.

Yo' arms too short to box with GOD!

Calilasseia

* Grins *

Just sharing the love, Deadman, just sharing the love ...

Paul Flocken

I'll repeat:
I have never understood why, when trying to establish that their mythological god is real, they don't understand the question begging involved in using their myth-god in their arguments.

Paul

Calilasseia

Oh no, not Humphreys again - the man who can't identify his rocks correctly.

Time for me to dig out the calculations again. Just so that everyone can see how ludicrous the notion of accelerated nuclear decay is. The following is adapted from the Meert calculations, and illustrates quite nicely the absurdity of the RATE scenario. This is taken directly from the latest incarnation of my Excel spreadsheet.

First of all, we start with a value for the heat production by radionuclides decaying at the rate observed by scientists. This is given by:

Heat production per unit mass H_unit = 6 x 10^-12 W Kg^-1.

So, we now determine some additional basic facts to continue our analysis. First, we need the volume and the surface area of the Earth. Using a spherical approximation for the shape of the Earth (which only differs from the actual oblate spheroid by a small amount), and using the mean radius of the Earth (as supplied by Kaye & Laby's Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants) as the radius of this sphere, we have:

Mean radius of Earth R = 6,371,000 m
Volume V = (4/3) * π * R³ = 1.083 x 10²¹ m³
Surface Area A = 4 * π * R² = 5.1 x 10¹⁴ m²

We also need the mass of the Earth, again supplied by Kaye & Laby, which is:

Mass of Earth M = 5.976 x 10²⁴ Kg

Total heat production of the radiouclides is therefore H_total = H_unit x M = 3.585 x 10¹³ W

Surface heat flow out of the Earth is therefore given by:

Q_surface = H_total/A = 7.0297 x 10^-2 W m^-2

Given that the rocks of the Earth are a somewhat heterogeneous mixture, this elementary analysis will take an average value (supplied by Meert) for the heat conductivity of the rocks. This value is:

Conductivity C = 3.00 W m^-1 K^-1

The temperature gradient is therefore Q/C = 2.343 x 10^-2 K m^-1, or 23.43 K m^-1. This is in reasonable accord with observed reality.

The half-life of U²³⁸ is 1.419 x 10¹⁷ s (approx 4.5 billion years). From the equation for the decay constant:

λ = ln(2) / T_½

we obtain a decay constant of λ = 4.884 x 10^-18.

Now, with this value of the decay constant, we can calculate how much heat would have been produced in the past at a given point in time, using the equation:

H_past = H_present e^λ(T-T₀)

where H_present is equal to H_total above, and T-T₀ is the time interval between the present and past dates of interest. So, wind the clock back 6,000 years, and feed these values into the equation above, and we have, for standard U²³⁸ decay:

H_past = 6 x 10^-12 W Kg^-1

which, surprise surprise, is no different from that of the present.

We are now in a position to move on.

Let us now use an accelerated nuclear decay rate. Let us accelerate the decay of U²³⁸ from 4.5 billion years to just 100 years. This equals 3,153,600,000 seconds. From our accelerated half-life, we obtain an accelerated decay constant, namely λ_accelerated = 2.19796 x 10^-10.

Using the same time interval as before, we obtain a past heat per unit kilogram of 6,917,529 W Kg^-1. Reworking the heat flow, we obtain new values for the surface heat flow out of the rocks and the temperature gradient below:

Surface heat flow = 8.104692E+16 W m^-2
Temperature gradient = 2.701564 x 10¹⁶ K m[sup]-1 = 2.70156 x 10¹⁹ K Km^-1. Assuming that the core temperature is derived linearly from this relationship, we end up with an Earth core temperature of 1.72117 x 10²⁶ Kelvins.

Oh. Dear. Me.

Even if we constrain RATE's accelerated nuclear decay to values that result in physically realisable temperatures, we have some interesting results. Working this for a 500 year U²³⁸ decay rate results in a temperature gradient of 95,978 K Km^-1 and a core temperature of 6.1148 x 10¹¹ Kelvins, which means that the crust is already heated to the temperature of incandescent plasma of the sort associated with hot blue supergiant O type stars, and the core is easily hot enough to ignite Helium fusion via the triple-alpha process. For a U²³⁸ decay rate of 100 years, we are into temperature régimes at the core that are only one order of magnitude below the temperature at which Grand Unification of forces occurs and surface temperatures way in excess of those required to initiate Silicon fusion. If we compress accelerated nuclear decay to the levels posited by RATE, then sadly Microsoft Excel cannot handle the numbers as they are too big - I have to dive into Visual Basic, fire up double precision arithmetic, and arrive, on the basis of RATE's figures, at an Earth core temperature of a whopping 10¹⁸⁰⁶ Kelvins.

Consequently, I think it is safe to assert at this point that accelerated nuclear decay has problems that cannot be circumvented by either of Humphreys' three suggestions above, because even using a 500-year U²³⁸ half life would leave Planet Earth smeared all over the cosmos as Helium fusion ignited in the core and blew the surrounding plasma far out into space, while a 100-year U²³⁸ half-life would have seen Noah and his wooden barge propelled into space on a sea of winos, zinos, gravitinos and other exotic particles at the edge of Grand Unification. RATE's own chosen figure for an accelerated U²³⁸ half-life would lead to temperatures that are, quite frankly absurd - well over one thousand five hundred magnitudes hotter than the first Planck Second of the Big Bang.Now I wonder what particle physics exotica would emerge from that ball of fire?

The idea that god could use this even "before creating living things" falls apart when one realises that the result would be, at the very least, a Planet Earth whose core ignites spontaneous thermonuclear fusion in Helium, and in more extreme circumstances, a Planet Earth that is hot enough to generate families of particles that physicists have calculated would require a CERN-style particle accelerator 50 light years in diameter to produce. Either way, there would not be a Planet Earth left for living things to reside upon, and god would have been left with no other option than to park his newly created life forms somewhere else, unless he wanted them fried into oblivion in an instant. As for RATE's own figure for accelerated U²³⁸ decay, god is left looking at a Planet Earth that has become hot enough, in theory at least, to produce naked gravitons, naked quarks, magnetic monopoles and a brace of other hyper-exotic fauna from the particle physics zoo.

Sven

Very interesting, Calilasseia!

Just a question: Is H_unit an average value for all material of which the Earzth is composed? Or how is the simply multiplication of H_unit and M justified?

[snip]

Why 100 years?

[snip]

Is the assumption of linearily justified? But I guess every other assumption just makes matters worse?

[snip]

Oh, that's why you used 100 years!

Just out of interest, did you also try an half-life of 6000 or even 10 000 years?