Monday, January 14, 2008

Did God created the rocks of our Earth in less than 3 minutes?



Did God created the rocks of our Earth in less than 3 minutes?
By
Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi


The Old Testament relates that the earth was made in seven days. Most geologists believe that even God couldn't accomplish the task quite that fast.
It has been mentioned that the earth is billion of years old. This is the modern view; the ideas of James Ussher, the theologian who calculated in year 1650 from the biblical record that the earth was created on the morning of 28th October in the year 4004 B.C. held sway well into the nineteenth century. According to Stephen Hawking, the noted British cosmologists the Universe or earth came into existence between Time 0 and the following trillionth of a second about fifteen billion years ago. Indeed there are those who even today ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary and claim that the biblical legends tell the true story of the earth's creation and history. Up until the 17 and 18 hundreds most everybody believed that the earth was young. A mere 6 thousand years or so.
No where in the Bible or any other religion does God tell us the exact year of creation. But by simply studying the scriptures we can certainly get an idea of when and how this took place.
Scientists with the help of radioactive dating method tell us that the earth is billions of years old, was formed in a molten state; and that it took millions of years for the earth to cool to its solid state that we know today. But still today many young earth creationists believe that the earth was created instantaneously about 6 thousand years ago.
Both of these are belief systems. Neither one can be proven because no one was there to witness the event, and it can not be repeated. But we can examine the evidence and decide which one is more plausible.
Over the last 10 to 20 years, evidence has been gathered which seems to indicate that the earth was created in an instant as mentioned in different religions. The evidence comes from the study of a feature of many igneous rocks ( rocks made by lava).
Most geologists have long accepted a “magmatic” origin for large granite plutons, “batholiths” in which crystallization is imagined to have attenuated over million of years, their magmatic view was technically challenged by Robert Gentry, a physicist with a yen to confirm the biblical tale of genesis. He suggested that the polonium halos, which are found in the minerals biotite and fluorite in granites and associated pegmatites, prove that the host rocks were created, not from magma, but almost instantaneously during the Day-1 of the Genesis Week.
When God created the earth, He left His signature in the earth's foundation granite (type of rock) in the form of microscopic spheres created by pinpoints of the element Polonium 218. Polonium-218 is radioactive and has a half-life of about 3 minutes (in other words, they emit radiation for only a few minutes). In its decay process, this element emits alpha particles. These subatomic particles mark the surrounding rock, producing spheres around the initial pinpoint of the element. If a rock is cut and examined under a microscope, these spheres appear as halos around the initial tiny deposit of the element. Halos produced by other radioactive elements differ from the halos produced by Polonium 218.
The rocks of the earth had to have been created and solidified within about 3 minutes for this element to have left its halos. If the earth had been in a molten state any longer than this, all the isolated points of Polonium 218 would have disappeared, leaving none to cause halos when the rock solidified. However, all evolutionary theories say that the earth was molten for million years.
Since Polonium 218 halos are found by the trillions throughout all the granites of the world, all of that granite had to originally become solid in for less than three minutes, when it was first created, in order for the Polonium 218 has to form properly.
There are many Polonium 218, 214, and 210 halos in granite; in fact, careful specimen counts and extrapolations based on them reveal that there are trillions upon trillions of them in granites all over the world. The situation gets more interesting with Polonium-214 halos. The half life of Polonium-214 is .000164 second. This means that the rock would have to cool in less than 1/1000th of a second after the polonium-214 was created. No known processes of nature can cool and solidify a rock that rapidly.
When a small speck of inclusion of a radioactive substance, such as Uranium-238, is trapped in the rock, the uranium emits alpha particles which destroy the crystal structure of the mineral. Since the alpha particles are emitted from the uranium with a particular speed, the alpha particles can travel only a certain distance through the rock before they stop. When the alpha particles stop, they discolor the rock. Since the alpha particles are emitted in all directions, a spherical shell of discoloration is produced.
While uranium is decaying to lead, it passes through fifteen steps. When an atom of uranium emits an alpha particle, the atom no longer is uranium but becomes thorium which in turn gives off a particle and turns into another element.
The size of each halo is determined by the speed of the alpha particle, for each element in the decay chain has emitted particles with a specified velocity. Thus if one finds a halo of a certain radius, he often can determine what element formed the halo from the radius alone.
Polonium-218, polonium-214 and polonium-210 are the radioactive substance which are responsible for three halos in the characteristic five-ringed uranium halo. These three isotopes of polonium are found today only mixed up in Uranium-238. This is because polonium decays so rapidly that it cannot be stored for more than a few minutes. The only reason it even exists is that it is constantly being formed by the decay of uranium.
Two factors are required before a halo can form.
· A small speck of a radioactive substance must be included in the molten rock before it cools.
· The rock must solidify and form a crystal before all of the radioactivity is ended.
Many theories have been put forward against the Gentry’s hypothesis. According to different geologists Gentry is physicist, not a geologist. He doesn’t follow accepted geologic reporting practice and consistently fails to provide the information that a third party would need to collect comparable samples for testing. Gentry utilized microscope thin sections of rocks from samples sent to him by others from various places around the world.
Gentry also provides no explanation for how polonium alone finds its way into biotite and fluorite, or why radiation damage haloes in these minerals are common in areas of known uranium enrichment, but rare where uranium abundance is low.

Since this granite is the basement rock, forming a thick layer, with the continents of the world above it and the basalt and magma below it, all this continental foundation had to be formed solid in less than three minutes time. With the fact in mind, there is little reason to expect the magma below and the continents above to have been formed in million years, if the granite between them was formed in less than three minutes.
Is it possible that this proves God created the earth in an instant?
There are still lots of questions to be answered?
Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi
Geologist
Ranchi, India.
Nitish.priyadarshi@gmail.com

References:
Chaudhuri, N.K. and Iyer, R.H. 1980. Origins of unusual radioactive haloes, Radiation Effects, v.53,p.1-6.
Feather, N. 1978, the unsolved problem of Po halos in Precambrian biotite and other old minerals. Communication to Royal Society of Edinburgh, v.11, p. 147-148.
Gentry, R.V. 1970. Giant Radioactive Halos: Indicators of Unknown Radioactivity”. Science, V. 169,pp. 670-673.
Gentry, R.V. 1974. Radio halos in a radiochronological and cosmological perspective. Science, v. 184, p.62-66.
Gentry, R.V. 1992. Creation’s Tiny Mystery. Earth Science Associates, Knowville, TN, 3rd Edition.
Gentry, R. V. A. Rev. Nucl. sci. 23, 347 (1973); Nature 244, 282 (1973); 252, 564 (1974).
Snelling, A. A., 2000. Polonium radiohaloes: Still "a very tiny mystery". Impact 326 (Aug.), i-iv.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Polonium_haloes_indicate_a_young_earth
http://www.grisda.org/origins/15032.htm
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v278/n5702/abs/278333a0.html
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5041/

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