• Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    7 months ago

    Being a scientist myself, this argument is not very good. The believer can just say that god created lead as well, and didn’t wait for it to be created by decay. If god can create a universe, why shouldn’t they be able to create some lead?

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
    1·
    7 months ago

    That’s not the gotcha OOP seems to think it is. If the world was magicked into existence by a supreme being 4000 years ago, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been magicked into existence with heavy elements having decayed by an arbitrary amount or with Pb by itself. 'Tis the problem with invoking appeals to magic. And anyway a quick look on wiki says that primordial Pb was mostly created by neutron capture of lighter elements, not radioactove decay of heavier ones, so the mere existence of Pb proves nothing wrt the timeline of U decay anyway… but at that point if you’re bringing nucleosynthesis into it, you may as well point to anything higher than lithium or even atoms as a concept as “proof” rather than picking anything as exotic as uranium decay.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    I think this is bad science. Its important to call out bad science to prove that good science exists.

    I don’t think all lead is the result of radioactive decay.

    • m_f@midwest.socialOPEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Do you have some more reading about this? The wikipedia article doesn’t really touch on it.

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
        1·
        7 months ago

        The assumption is that the only way lead can exist is via a series of radioactive decay. It is a way. It is generally created in stars by a much more direct process, not through radioactive decay.

  • switchboard_pete@fedia.io
    1·
    7 months ago
    • Decay of radon-222 isn’t the only way lead can be created, just a way
    • The U238 that started the chain could pre-date the earth
    • Half life is only when half of the sample has decayed, but less than half could have decayed into lead
  • Goun@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 months ago

    That’s crazy, is this the only source of lead? Like, can’t lead come from somewhere else?

    • domdanial@reddthat.com
      English
      1·
      7 months ago

      Yeah, this post is not fully correct. The lead nail in the coffin is not that lead exists, it’s that we find it in certain mineral matrixes that don’t form with lead.

      Zircon is the most widely referenced mineral in uranium-lead dating, as the mineral rejects lead during its formation, but will incorporate uranium. So when we find zircon with lead in it, it means that the uranium has decayed and turned into lead while being stuck there, and the percentage of uranium to lead in a sample lets us determine its time of formation.