{"id":14957,"date":"2014-05-15T03:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-05-15T08:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=14957"},"modified":"2014-05-15T03:00:34","modified_gmt":"2014-05-15T08:00:34","slug":"how-old-are-you-lets-flip-a-coin-to-find-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/14957","title":{"rendered":"How Old Are You? Let&#039;s Flip a Coin to Find Out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/galileospendulum.org\/2014\/05\/14\/the-predictability-of-randomness-and-the-age-of-earth\/\">The predictability of randomness and the age of Earth<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The uranium-lead transition isn\u2019t the only one used. There\u2019s also the rubidium-strontium transition (with a half-life of 49 billion years), the potassium-argon decay (1.3 billion years), and a handful of others. The key in all these cases is to have a rock \u2014 meteorite or otherwise \u2014 with enough atoms of the given types to perform measurements. One we don\u2019t see in the list is \u201ccarbon dating\u201d: carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,700 years, so it\u2019s useful for archaeology and dating the remains of animals from the relatively recent past, but utterly useless for measuring the age of Earth.<\/p>\n<p>But why is a random process like radioactive decay useful as a clock?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The predictability of randomness and the age of Earth The uranium-lead transition isn\u2019t the only one used. There\u2019s also the rubidium-strontium transition (with a half-life of 49 billion years), the potassium-argon decay (1.3 billion years), and a handful of others. &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/14957\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}