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Creation Day 3: God creates the "chemical" breath of life
God's step-by-step 'timed process' in creating plants on Earth. If you know the precise radioactive isotope found in a substance and that isotope's half-life, you can calculate the age of the substance.
Did you also know that the food you eat is radioactive? Every time you eat and digest food into your body, you are also digesting radioactive carbon-14. In fact, all living things, both plants and animals, have radioactive carbon-14 inside of them. Carbon-14 is a weak radioactive isotope of carbon with 2 extra neutrons. Because carbon-14 has a half-life of 5730 year, scientist use carbon-14 to find the absolute age of all carbon-based materials up to 60,000 years old.
Let's pretend that you just discover ed a fossilized leg bone of a cow buried in your backyard and you want to know the approximate time when the cow died. All you have to do is send a small sample of the bone to a laboratory equipped with an accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) and have it tested for the
presence of carbon-14. If the bone sample began with 1 gram of carbon-14 when the cow was alive, after 5,730 years you would be left with 0.50 g and only 0.25 g after 11,460 years. As I mentioned earlier, Carbon-14 can only be used to date carbon-based materials that are younger than 60,000 years old. At 60,000 years, carbon-14 would change into stable nitrogen-14.
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