Earth’s Magnetic Field Decay

In the previous article I talked about the irregular movement of the poles and how many magnetic pole reversals are known to have happened throughout history.

Physics Lesson
Something that I haven’t seen many people acknowledge is that these pole reversals require energy. I poked around on YouTube looking for a demo video of the nerdy professor flinging himself off his chair by reversing a gyroscope. Unfortunately, I’ll have to post that later. I did find this video which shows how much gyroscopes resist change when the gyroscope bends sideways over empty space without falling. The reason for this is Newton’s first law of motion, “An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by a net force.” Change in motion requires energy and energy has a tendency to dissipate, not concentrate. This is the second law of thermodynamics “The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.” In English that means things tend to go from a state of higher order to greater disorder. Things fall apart, wind down, break down, and grind to a halt.

Our magnetic field is no exception. The Canadian Geologic Survey says “Magnetic fields decay, and we can show that the existing geomagnetic field would disappear in about 15,000 years unless there were a mechanism to continually regenerate it.” This is a reference to the current theory of where our magnetic field comes from. The restriction that the system must be sustained over the course of billions of years is applied to any proposed model. This ensures that it lines up with our geologic time scale, which in turn lines up with the evolutionary biology model, which is measured by radioisotope dating. “Many mechanisms have been postulated to explain how the magnetic field is generated, but the only one that is now considered plausible is analogous to a dynamo”. It makes sense to make scientific theories line up with existing models, I just want people to understand the chain of assumptions and contingent truths. The data is not allowed to speak for itself, it is not examined in a vacuum. So let’s just look at the data.

Data
“For example, the total intensity at Toronto has decreased 14%, from approximately 64,000 nT to 55,000 nT, during the last 160 years. ” – Canadian Geologic Survey – Secular Variation

“Archeomagnetic evidence shows that this decrease has, in fact, been going on for the last two thousand years, and that the strength of the dipole now is only about half of what it was two millenia ago. The dipole strength is currently decreasing at a rate of about 6.3% per century, and were it to continue to decrease at that rate, the strength would reach zero in approximately 1,600 years.”

” It appears that only about five percent of neutron stars, the most strongly magnetized, undergo significant field decay;” – Neutron Star Field Decay could impact what we know.

“We also know from studies of the magnetisation of minerals in ancient clay pots that the Earth’s magnetic field was approximately twice as strong in Roman times as it is now.” – British Geologic Survey, Magnetic Flip

“Human beings have been on the Earth for a number of million years, during which there have been many reversals, and there is no obvious correlation between human development and reversals. Similarly, reversal patterns do not match patterns in species extinction during geological history.” – same as above.

“Satellites in low-Earth orbit over Southern Africa are already showing signs of radiation damage suffered as a result of the Earth’s magnetic field weakening above our part of the planet.” – Sunday Times, New Zealand (quoted in archive).

Amateur Project to track magnetic field change – http://www.rense.com/general51/mag.htm

Conclusions
Well, I’m not really drawing a definite conclusion. Just think about the possibilities and the underlying assumptions that hold them up. Does obscure subjects like geomagnetism really matter to you personally? Well, if you walk outside one day and see an aurora borealis above your head in the middle of the day, then suddenly it becomes the most relevant thing in the world. You’ll be able to tan in no time.

No matter what the generation mechanism of the magnetic field it is still subject to entropy and thus decay. Even if the field is able to wondrously re-generate itself, that regeneration takes energy on a global scale. The field would naturally decay by itself if it were static, such as the iron core being a giant bar magnet. The fact that it flips, moves, and jerks around means it’s using up even more energy. Some day that energy is going to run out.

Earth’s Magnetic Poles

In Star Trek, the USS Enterprise travelled through space independent of any planet. They sustained themselves using advanced technology. One of these technologies was deflector shields, for warding off all the lethal solar radiation (and being a good plot device). On our nice little planet Earth, we also have a shield to protect against solar radiation. The Earth’s magnetic field serves as a shield against high energy particles blasted out from the sun continually. Without it, well we’re not quite sure, but it’s bound to be unpleasant.

The image on the right shows the magnetic field. The direction of the sun can be seen because the field is compressed by solar wind. Also, notice that the Earth’s magnetic field is far larger than the planet. David Coppedge, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory pointed out “Shuttle and space station astronauts operate within Earth’s protective Van Allen belts and gravitational field. So far, only the Apollo astronauts have ventured outside our safe bubble into the cosmic shooting gallery. The longest mission, Apollo 17, lasted only 12 days. Fortunately, none of the flights occurred during a solar flare. Had the space travelers received such a blast, they would have been dead within minutes.” This is a serious danger for a mission to Mars because of the extended length of the trip.

So now that we know why we care about the Earth’s Magnetic Field, what’s it up to these days? At least for me, I pictured the magnetic field as being as stable as the rock I stand on. (The Earth is a gelatinous glob of molten lava with a thin film across the surface, ponder that). So how do I say this? According to the Canadian Geologic Survey, as of 2001 the magnetic north pole is moving at 40km per year. More over, it’s not really moving in a predictable pattern in the long run. It staggers around Canada and the Arctic, seemingly at random.

Some people have taken all of this recent movement as an indication that we are very close to undergoing a pole shift. Geologic evidence shows that the poles have flipped multiple times throughout history. So the north pole was south and so on. Scientists were originally saying “don’t worry about a pole flip, they take thousands of years and the field just goes down during that time.” Of course, then the implications of that sink in. The Observer has a couple of articles discussing the implications of field collapse using computer simulations. Then I find more scientists with complex computer models showing how the Earth will be saved. Problem is, I’ve found two of them, and they contradict each other. I’m an amateur at a lot of this, but one thing I do know are computer simulations. I’m a computer programmer, in fact I’ll be writing computer simulations this summer. Computer simulations are entirely dependent on the assumptions you encode in them. They’re useful but do not think a computer is any more impartial than a human beings, they’re just fast math calculators.

So where is the real science in all this? It’s hard for people not to assign meaning and emotional value to subjects like this. The most neutral, scientific position is probably also the least helpful “Gee, that’s odd.” The natural tendency is to attract to the most comfortable position, or what benefits us the most. The truth of the matter is that our lives depend on something going on inside of the core of the planet. Something that, when we’re really honest about it, we barely understand.

(More Research on Earth’s Magnetic Field in the next article.)

Carbon-14 Dating

Carbon-14 Dating, or just Carbon Dating, is an extremely useful dating method that’s been in use since 1947. Carbon Dating is part of a larger field called Radioisotope dating which is our primary method for assigning date to fossils, rocks, skeletons, and parchment. “Before the 1940s, scientists had no accurate way of determining the age of fossils or other ancient objects” notes Lemelson-MIT. Radioisotope dating is, to my knowledge, basically the only way that we date fossils, rock layers, and by extension the age of the Earth. Since it is so crucial we’ve gotten very good at it. We have advanced machines with amazing levels of accuracy and procedures to avoid any contamination. So let me explain how carbon dating works and then we’ll get on to some interesting stuff.

Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of regular old carbon. From what we know, carbon-14 is created in the upper atmosphere by solar radiation colliding with nitrogen to produce carbon-14. It then drifts down through the atmosphere and is absorbed by plants, which are eaten by herbivores, then carnivores, and it enters the cycle of life. Living things sustain a present day level of about 1 carbon-14 atom in 1 trillion atoms. When something dies, it stops taking in carbon-14 by breathing and eating, so the clock begins. Carbon dating allows us to track the time of death with great accuracy because it has a very short half-life. Half the amount of carbon is depleted every 5,730 years. This means that for a finite 1 gram sample there will be absolutely no carbon-14 left in the sample after around 230,000 years. So these are the base assumptions for all radioisotope dating (remember axioms?):

• Original Amounts known (present day values used)
• Rate of decay must be constant (present day measurements used)
• Closed System assumption (rocks should not cross-contaminate)

As I mentioned, we’ve gotten really good at this radioisotope dating thing and so scientists have developed “Isochron Plots” to test assumptions 1 and 3. Rate of decay isn’t really double-checked but it is based on the basic atomic structure of the atom. So now you know more about radioisotopes than 99% of the world.

Here’s the interesting part: when scientists go out and sample every fossil, rock, peice of coal, marble, wood, or any fossil they find low levels of Carbon-14 in them. Now remember, anything past 250,000 years (or earlier) should be totally carbon dead if the assumptions hold. This was originally attributed to limited machine accuracy. But machine accuracy has improved, in fact, scientists have known about this problem for over 20 years. The obvious conclusion was that something they were doing was contaminating the samples (assumption 3). So they scour the lab, set up the most strict procedures. Before doing a test they dunk a sample in acid, then base, then acid again to remove any outside contamination. What they found is that the carbon levels remained. Eventually, people working at the carbon dating labs concluded that the samples must be contaminated out in the field, before it ever got to the lab, and dropped the issue. Carbon dating is only used for things considered recent for this reason.

It took a group of very unorthodox scientists called the RATE team to look at it again. This is why I like people who go against the grain. They came up with the idea of testing the contamination assumption by carbon dating diamonds. Diamonds are the perfect choice; they are the hardest substance in the world, they’re made from carbon, they can’t be infiltrated by water, and they’re assumed to be ancient, dating back to the origins of life on this planet. They collected multiple diamonds from multiple layers in different mines all around the world and selected the world’s premier carbon dating labs to have them tested. No one had bothered testing diamonds because they are very hard to test and should be entirely carbon-dead. What they found is that diamonds have a similar range of carbon-14 as most fossils do. If you use uniformitarian assumptions we can calculate the age to approximately 58,000 years old. That’s a big difference from the expected 1-2 billion years. (poster)

There’s four definite possibilities that I can see from this data. One or more of the 3 base assumptions are wrong or if all assumptions hold, diamonds are really 58,000 years old. Interestingly, no one is claiming that all diamonds are 58,000 years old because it doesn’t fit with anyone’s model quite right. At the very least, this data should call into question the unswerving accuracy of radioisotope dating methods. Being off by a factor of 1,000 is not acceptable in most academic circles.

(I’ll be getting back to this topic in a later article.)

Further Comments: I had a friend bring up the issue of statistical outliers.  These are common occurrences of things that do not agree with the general trend.  Most of the time these outliers are thrown out as errors.  He pointed out that if you threw out the main body and instead kept any outliers that agreed with you then you could make the data say whatever you wanted.  First off, people are dumb but I’d think that even a very biased person would notice throwing out MOST of the data that they personally generate.  So this is essentially based on the conviction that these people are being dishonest.

That aside, I asked Dr. Baumgardner (primary researcher) about this directly.  He said that there actually WERE some outliers in the data that he threw out because he felt they were errors.  Well I guess we caught them.  Except for, the samples (a minority) he threw out actually showed younger dates than the rest of the group.  So he’s actually showing the oldest dated samples.  The samples that were thrown out dated to closer to 11,000 years, which would be much easier to reconcile with a young earth model.  This batch used a different cleaning process which he believed was suspect because one of the ingredients contained carbon.  Instead he kept the ones that, while presenting trouble for an old earth, also didn’t fit perfectly with his model.

I think the main criticism that can be leveled at this point is that they haven’t tested ALL the diamonds in the world, so you can’t prove a non-existence.  The diamonds they did test were from all over the world and different beds and elevations, even some from alluvial deposits.  I’ve heard other researchers have confirmed these results but I went looking and couldn’t find anything else.  Usually private companies, like carbon dating labs, don’t publish papers in journals, it’s not their primary motivation.  And to anyone who would like to make up a story about how diamonds are a special case and how C-14 dating still works on everything else, remember this was made to test why all fossils have relatively young C-14 dates.

Facts and Meanings

This next section is entitled “We’ve Got Problems” or put another way, we’ve got serious impediments to our ability to see the world in a neutral light. Not only that, but I’ll be looking at some evidence that doesn’t line up with some people’s if not everyone’s beliefs.

I’ve been held up on writing the next couple articles because in doing research and finding primary sources I’ve run into a bit of a firestorm on the internet. What I’ve found is that it is very threatening to cite a fact without assigning it a meaning. Said a different way, every number, study, or graph is implied to have a deeper meaning that must fit with the cohesive whole. This seems to be a universal theme in human beings that deserves some self-examination.

Think of the stars in the sky. They are points of light distributed (almost) randomly with varying brightness and color. To the best of my knowledge they are not arranged in a particular fashion with regards to Earth yet we form constellations out of them. We form constellations by connecting the dots of all these stars, that’s implying meaning. Then we get this funky wireframe which we decide is a very Earthly shape, more meaning. Then we tell a story about that Earthly shape, then we link that story in with a whole mythology of stories to form a network of meaning. Then an American comes along and stamps the meaning with a (c) symbol meaning they can sue you for meaning something else with their meaning.

…

So what’s the meaning to all this meaning assigning? Well, that’s probably just perpetuating the cycle. Facts exist by themselves, whether we give them a meaning or not. The meanings that we give them also can’t change the facts. So no matter what you think of it, it’s a fact that humans assign meaning. Ponder that one for a while.

Does the line actually exist in this plot? What about the equation?

Other things to ponder:
Are there multiple levels of meaning?

Can you agree on some meanings and not others?

What would a school be like if they only taught facts and not meanings?

Is implying observations reflect reality a meaning?

Meanings bridge the gap between science and philosophy. Meanings are philosophical values that we assign to facts.

Further Comments: Ah, my little three circle interconnectedness diagram.  I meant well with that thing but it’s the last time you’ll ever see it I think.  The idea was to fill it in step by step.  So that people would have this great epiphany of the interconnectedness of everything.  I’d show the completed one but I think it got deleted in a harddrive format.  Microsoft trumps Ultimate Truth.

Something to note about Facts and Meanings: There are a nearly infinite number of facts.  There is a tiny tiny number of meanings that our brains will allow us to assign.  Therefore, working with our tiny, safe world of meanings limits the number of facts we need to consider down to only a grossly intimidating number whereas the total number of facts would make a person collapse in despair and die.  Survival mechanism.  Don’t think about it too much.  A pretty sure sign someone is going crazy or shifting worldviews (same thing from an outside perspective) is  that the facts they begin taking in and considering important starts growing or starts shifting.  Paranoid Schizophrenia is essentially when you start taking in too many “irrelevant” facts (like the arrangement of leaves on your front step) as important and start disregarding “important” facts (like what MSNBC says) as lies.  The way that we judge that this person has not found the Truth is that they become disfunctional.  The implicit assumption there is that knowing the truth will lead someone to be a functional individual.

Voice Recognition Software

those thinking about getting some voice recognition software to help me in making this webpage so I downloaded a couple products and tried a couple new things in so I’m still testing out some of the products that I’m using right now. Unfortunately I’m finding that there are a couple problems in it back. See with these programs. It doesn’t always recognized the everything that I say. Sometimes it throws and unnecessarily of words and sometimes in mistakes and breathing techniques. and then I’m going to have to be left with the pool lead singer who regularly typing. aid there’s a couple setbacks to the technology. Maybe one day human beings will rise above is permitted was recognized in software. sad and made more close magazine a wasted most of today with useless technology and badly programs software. I am not saying that I could do better but I think I won’t even try. Joe says signing out.

(I am using talk it type it )