At 10:18 AM -0700 3/27/02, Mark Leisher wrote:
>Niemitz appears to have a revisionist agenda of some sort. He also questions >C14 dating. I haven't read that particular thesis yet because my technical >German is a bit rusty, The link is in English. Don't let your German stop you from judging for yourself. :-) > but I suspect he trots out at least some of the classic >bogus claims that C14 dating is a sham. > No, he doesn't. He has all-new claims :-), which IMHO have not yet been proven to be bogus. >See the sci.skeptics FAQ for C14 claim details: > > http://home.xnet.com/~blatura/skep_5.html > This isn't really relevant to Niemetz's claims at all. The sci.skeptic FAQ is addressing creationist efforts to prove the Earth is a lot younger than it is. Niemetz is discussing the problems with correlating C-14 dating through tree rings, as well as the available samples from the period at issue. These are very real problems that are well known to practitioners in the field. The creationists often latch onto legitimate disagreements and disputes among scientists (as they also do when looking at evolution) and proceed to make the unsupportable leap that this invalidates the whole field. It's sort of like saying that because the Unicode mailing list can't always agree on whether two characters are glyph variations or not, the entirety of Unicode is completely wrong. This not at all what Niemetz is doing. He does not question the basic science of C-14 dating. He's questioning the accuracy of certain C-14 samples to within a few hundred years margin of error. Specifically, he suggests that original incorrect assumptions about the dates of certain samples led C-14 dating for that period to be incorrectly calibrated. That's a lot more plausible than claiming that the Earth is only 5000 years old. Even if Niemetz is completely right, this would have no significant impact on issues like when the Earth was formed and when dinosaurs lived. Any paleontologist/geologist would tell you that their estimates aren't accurate to within +-300 years, with or without C-14 dating. >I expect a serious search will turn up thorough debunkings of Niemitz' work, >if anyone bothered. > A good suggestion. I ran a variety of search terms through Google and didn't come up with anything that I could recognize as relevant, though most of the results were in German and I couldn't read those. From what little I know of this, most of the serious discussion has taken place in German. I'd love to hear of any other links about this in either English or French. The really interesting thing is trying to debunk this claim. Exactly how do you go about proving a period of history existed? At first his claims felt to me like unfalsifiable proposition. However, then I realized that it isn't really that hard to prove the existence of earlier periods. In particular the existence of Rome and Greece is very well documented through coins, buildings, archaeology, literature, and much more. Romulus and Remus and Aeneas may be total myths, but by the time of the late Republic and the Empire, the existence of Rome is thoroughly established. Ditto for Athens and the rest of Greece. We're still digging up papyrus fragments in the sands of Egypt that establish the accuracy (and in some cases inaccuracy) of Roman and Greek literature handed down through the ages. You can walk around Rome or Athens today and look at the evidence all around you. Why can't we do the same for Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire? The question of why Europe suddenly fell into the Dark Ages has been a hotly debated subject for a long time. It's astonishing to consider that the answer might be that it never happened at all. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
