Creation Day 3: God creates the "chemical" breath of life
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God's step-by-step 'timed process' in creating plants on Earth
The method of calculating the radiometric date of a rock can also be compared to using an hourglass to tell time. You can use the hourglass to tell time if you know several things: • the amount of sand in the top of the hourglass when it started flowing; • the rate that the sand flows through the hole in the middle ; • the exact time it took until the last grain of sand emptied from the top chamber of the hour glass. Instead of using popcorn kernels or sand grains, scientists use several well- known radioactive isotopes to determine the absolute age of a rock. Isotopes are unstable , which means they have too many neutrons packed into their nucleus. They are always trying to move to a more stable state (not radioactive). They do this by giving off radiation in the form of alpha and beta rays. Radioactive decay is a spontaneous process in which an isotope loses alpha and beta particles from its nucleus to form a new stable element.
The thing that makes the radioactive decay process so valuable for determining the age of an object is that each radioactive isotope decays at its own fixed rate, which is expressed in terms of its half-life. When the isotope has lost half of its radioactive alpha and beta particles, it has reached its half-life.
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