This is going to be one hard column to write because it's awful hard to write something about nothing. But I'll give it a try.
Let's start as usual by looking this thing up in a dictionary. Half-life according to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, is "the time required for something to undergo a process" Well, that's a lot of help. The time required for something to undergo a process. What in the world does that mean? The implication, of course, is that half-life applies to something other than radioactivity. To carry out the implication, the dictionary continues, "as a: the time required for half the atoms of a radioactive substance to become disintegrated b: the time required for half the amount of a substance (as a drug, radioactive tracer, or pesticide in or introduced into a living system or ecosystem to be eliminated or disintegrated by natural processes 2: slang dealing with popularity.
Well, that sure corrects me. It applies not only to radioactive material, it applies to drugs, pesticides and pop stars. But wait. Whoever heard of the half-lives of drugs and pesticides? Don't they just kind of deteriorate according to environmental conditions? There's nothing inherent in them that would indicate some internal clock ticking away, which is the implicit connotation of the radiation definition. And here I thought it was a physics term.
But wait. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged, which was published in 1966, has this to say about half-life: "Physics. the time required for one half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate." It also refers to a more precise term for the, let's let the cat out of the bag, property, half-life period.
Half-life is a property like color, hardness, and well, gravity. Now we really know what half-life is, or at least we know about as much about half-life as we know about gravity, well, no, because we know gravity diminishes. What do we know about half-life? Well, let's start by determining how we begin to measure half-life. In 1896, as in 110 years ago, Henri Bacquerel discovered X rays and other types of radiation experimenting with uranium. In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered polonium and radium. In 1928, three decades later, Hans Geiger came up with his radiation counter. By this time, alpha, beta and gamma radiation had been discovered, but more on that later.
How did Geiger's counter count?
A metal tube is filled with gas and sealed on each end with insulators. A stiff wire connects the two insulators at the end. The notion is that the metal tube is one electrode and the wire the second electrode. A voltage is applied that's just to the point of creating, but doesn't create a current across the gas. When the counter encounters radioactive emissions, the emissions ionize the gas allowing a current to flow. The current is picked up by audio or visual means to measure the strength of the radioactive emissions.
Let's pause for a second and see what's really happening here. Ionization is defined as the gain or loss of an electron, so just saying the radiation is ionizing the gas so a current will pass is not saying much of anything. Let's activate the counter by applying a small charge to the tube. Ionization, which is defined as an atom gaining or losing an electron, with losing the electron being considered the more common process, is another word for field replacement. See column 08-05. The radiations, emissions, are field replacing the electrons in the atoms of the gas. Because a charge has been applied to the tube, these electrons are not attracted to where there is a surplus of electrons, the tube, but rather to the wire, which relative to the tube has a deficit of electrons. Thus, the emissions spark a current in the wire. While the theory of the counter is that the gas de-ionizes after each radioactive particle passes through the gas, allowing for the counting process, the current fluctuates simply because when the wire reaches the same potential as the tube, the gas starts absorbing the radioactive emissions. The wire then regains its potential difference with the tube and the process is repeated. The stronger the radioactive emissions, the faster this process is repeated, resulting in the deadly click-click speed up so popular in radiation horror movies.
Splitting hairs, you say? Who cares what the explanation of the ionization is, it all ends up the same. But if the explanation is conceptually wrong, then all the conclusions about radiation that follow are actually wrong. The notion that a single particle ionizes the gas which immediately returns to its un-ionized state awaiting another particle gives the visual image that the counter is actually counting individual particles when in fact it is only measuring the level of radiation. That's not splitting hairs, because here's what happens when these geniuses believe they are measuring individual particles. They begin to name the types of radiation and relate it to the particles that make up an atom.
Therefore, penetrating particles are beta particles or electrons and alpha particles are non-penetrating particles and therefore must be from the nucleus of the atom. These are the neutrons that give the nucleus its mass and the protons that give the nucleus its countercharge to the orbiting electrons.
Because the opposing forces pushing the protons apart is held together by the strong force (all this, by the way, is conceptual, made-up stuff), beta particles are only released when the atomic number of an element is high, a condition which means that the strong force is not strong enough to overcome the protons' force of opposition. We'll get back to this in a minute because it's the crux of the half-life hoax.
The third type of radiation is gamma radiation, which is high frequency stuff you want to keep away from. Gamma rays are the stuff that burns you to a crisp in an atomic explosion. According to the gospel, they are extremely short electromagnetic radiation that is emitted as a result of the redistribution of electric charges in the nucleus resulting from the neutrons or protons being rearranged, read fission or fusion. Another name for them is high-energy photons, you know, the particle that was created to describe the dual nature of light as a wave particle after Einstein's discovery of the photoelectric effect.
The remarkable thing about the creation of all these particles is, well, just like the planets that are continually changing position, there is nothing causing the change. There's no outside influence producing the change. The alpha particles get their energy from Einstein's E=mc2. You see, the mass lost with the decay is converted to kinetic energy that the departing particles embody. Beta particles are emitted when a neutron is changed into a proton. Obviously, something else is happening here. Of course it requires creating another particle, but what the hey. When the neutron becomes a proton, an unseen neutrino appears on the scene. With little or no mass, the neutrino, which carries a lot of momentum, that stuff that moves the planets, shares its energy with the beta particle and off they go. The energy, of course, also comes from Einstein's E=mc2. The mass of the parent is larger than the sum of the masses of the offspring, which means, the difference is the source of the energy producing the motion.
Again, this is all happening in a vacuum, as just a sort of property of nature, without outside affect. The elements were just formed this way, and with the imperfect strong force, hey, empirical science can make it imperfect if it wants to because it made it up in the first place when someone observed that there couldn't be protons in the nucleus of an atom holding the orbiting electrons (with no visible source of motion) in orbit because they would all repel each other. Viola, the strong force which, because heavy elements decay, must be imperfect.
The second feature of all this balderdash is that empirical science is dealing in specific numbers of specific particles as a result of its misinterpretation of what is happening in the Geiger counter. This conceptual "particalization" of the counter results leads to really deluded conclusions. Although the notion that atoms have a fixed number of electrons orbiting their nuclei in prescribed shells has long been discarded, at least by forward thinking empirical scientists, the myth of the structured atom remains firmly fixed in the empirical firmament. Thus, in beta decay, where the number of protons, and thus the atomic number, is increased by one, unstable isotopes become stable isotopes when a beta particle is emitted, you know, one click. Of course, it may take a lot of clicks for the isotope to become stable, but that's because each click involves an electron from an individual atom. Over a period of time, all the atoms of the unstable isotope will have emitted an electron. How long a period of time? Well, with unstable isotopes, you can time it and then put it down on a chart. No big conceptual whoop here to cloud the issue. The unstable isotope simply becomes stable after a certain number of clicks. We'll get to what's actually happening in a minute.
With Alpha decay, we have a different story. Here the clicks represent departing protons and neutrons, otherwise known in the simple science of empiricism as a helium nucleus. One click, one neutron/proton pair in the air, two clicks, two pairs dancing away, and so forth. Because this results in the loss of both mass, that very clear term made up to define whatever the heck it is that using the orbits of planets to compute the amount of matter in a planet is, and charge, results in the alchemist's glorious goal of transmuting one element into another, although me thinks the alchemists weren't to worried about turning uranium into lead. They already had plenty of that to go around.
So how long did it take for the transmutation to occur? Could the empirical measurers sit around counting and waiting for the radioactive substance to become stable? Not unless they were immortal, because it simply went on click, click, clicking along, measuring out each of its little helium nuclei with every click. So, determining how long it would take to lose its radioactivity required the services of a super mathematician. You see, the number of clicks required to lose radioactivity was a function of time versus the loss of mass. Thus, all that was necessary was a formula that would plug in the number of clicks over time and the loss of mass over the same time, and then the life of the radioactivity would be known. How do empiricists measure the loss in mass of a radioactive particle, you ask. Well, just like the parallax used to measure the distance to the stars is smaller than each of the possible variables that would affect the measurement, it's therefore, like specie evolution, a settled matter, it has just been measured, the complex process of determining the loss of mass has been accomplished. Don't ask, the empiricists say, take our word for it.
But just as the impossibility of parallax has been buried in apparent brightness tables and light shift factors, so has the measurement of mass been buried in the explanation for half-life. You see, it's fairly obvious that no one can measure the loss of mass in something that takes five billion years to lose a small portion of its mass. So instead of measuring the loss of mass, empirical science measures the half-life of the element. This is done by taking uranium and comparing it with the presence in the rocks of the Earth of what the uranium decays into. First, take the time for an atom of the most stable uranium, U-238, to decay into lead. Then you take the number of uranium atoms in the sample and compare it to the number of lead atoms in the sample. Forget the only way to count atoms is weight, or the empirical mass. Once this ratio is established, using the time formula, the age of the rock can be computed. Why half-life? Well, the individual atoms are emitting helium (boy, don't even get into the measurement of helium in the atmosphere as proof of the uranium clock) on a random basis. No one can say with certainty which uranium atom will provide a click at any one time. Being random, empirical science has to use statistical averages to figure out with precision the point at which all the uranium will be lead. Thus, during half a radioactive element's life, half the atoms will click away their helium atom. So, we now know what the half-life of the element is. Then, of course, it's a new beginning. Half the remaining atoms will then click out their helium atoms halfway to the end of the period, and so forth. Got that? Good. I won't ask the question, if I only drink half of the water in my glass each time I take a drink, will I ever run out of water? There'll always be half left, don't you know.
The age of the Earth, by the 19th Century had been settled, like everything else, on a religious basis. When Darwin's species evolution came along, the need for a much longer time for the species to transmute, so to speak, from one to another was required. Buffon had attempted to compute the age of the Earth by using how long it would have taken to cool off, and Kelvin refined these figures considerably, to about 20 to 40 million years. This was still not long enough, but Kelvin would go no higher. Then the discovery of radioactivity was used to provide the unlimited amount of time necessary for species evolution. Why anyone in their right mind would think that radioactive elements in the Earth would keep its surface in a stable enough condition to allow the orderly decay of uranium into lead for billions of years is beyond me, but then it also requires the corresponding beliefs that the Earth gives off the same amount of heat it takes in each day and that helium in its atmosphere can't escape the Earth's gravity. Come to think of it, it takes the same mentality to believe uranium decay can compute the age of anything that believed the age of the Earth could be computed by reference to the begats in the Bible.
The Earth started hot and it's growing cold in space. The elements on the surface of the Earth exist in the combined field of the sun and the internal emissions of the Earth. Fields control the existence of matter. On the surface of the sun, no element can exist, and the only element that is measured is helium, the final product of the breakdown of atoms before the particles that make up the nucleus are themselves broken down and emitted as electromagnetic emissions. See the above-mentioned column 08-05. The atom is not made up of a bunch of made-up particles, it is made up of units in the nucleus with a residual charge that attracts electrons into an orbital cloud around it. See columns 18, 19-05.
Uranium probably isn't radioactive in the orbit of Pluto, and it probably is so unstable it can't exist in the orbit of Mercury, but on Earth, it's a boundary element, one that is slowly disappearing (probably more slowly than in the past because of the Earth's cooling, its field diminishing). It does so simply by losing units from its nucleus, the described alpha particles. Beta particles are simply electrons with at rest motion directed with magnetic means, while gamma radiation is the short wave emissions resulting from one of the units unraveling into its constituent electrons as a result of some violent manipulation.
Alpha emissions are the natural result of an element having too many units in its nucleus for the field. The field is dictating what happens to the element, not some inert process inherent in the element. That's about it for nature. When it comes to the beta and gamma radiation, the hand of man has to intervene. It's no different than lightning being a product of nature and electrical circuits the product of man. By taking an element that is what I call a boundary element, instead of a melting point, we are talking about a point past which an element cannot exist in the field, an element that is breaking down in the field, and in doing so, is emitting part of itself, and conceptualizing that process with the use of a detector, a Geiger Counter, as a click, click, click that can be counted, is bad enough. But then to make up some elaborate conjecture that the age of a rock, and therefore the age of the Earth, can be determined by knowing how many atoms of an element the rock has, compared to how many atoms of what the element will break down to, is fantasy.
With this process, empirical science has moved past its naming obsession, monkey see, monkey say, and entered a whole new arena, monkey hear, monkey conclude.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com