When you make up your own rules, you can always win the game—and no one is better at making up rules than Ken Ham.

In the course of constructing his now-crumbling creationist empire, Ham has created an alternate reality in which humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction a few thousand years ago after peacefully using them for transport and companionship.

First, let’s define a theory in a better way than the textbook describes it.

“A theory has its genesis in a hypothesis, which is a working assumption as to why we observe something—an educated guess.

Symbolically, the process of radioactive decay can be expressed by the following differential equation, where N is the quantity of decaying nuclei and k is a positive number called the exponential decay constant.

The meaning of this equation is that the rate of change of the number of nuclei over time is proportional only to the number of nuclei.

Their motivation is obvious: all techniques consistently yield age estimates far older than the purported So where to start?

I imagine that I will return to this topic some time in the future, as Ai G has published a number of articles and books that discuss radiometric dating methods (and the Potassium-Argon method in particular).

Most of the evolution teaching is included in Chapters 7 and 8, which include a ground-up presentation of Darwinian evolution (chapter 7) followed by a lengthy argument for the age of the earth (chapter 8) and the various dating methods that supposedly prove evolution in the fossil record. Pages 220-221 of the textbook defines a theory as a guess, or an idea of how or why something might happen.

This is consistent with the assumption that each decay event is independent and its chance does not vary over time.

where is the half-life of the element, is the time expired since the sample contained the initial number atoms of the nuclide, and is the remaining amount of the nuclide.

But whatever your passion for decaying metals and your level of chemical comprehension is now, I want to share my confidence that you can follow along just fine.

Anyone can learn technical jargon (queue Wikipedia page for Potassium Argon Dating); reading this post only requires a knack for scientific reasoning.