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 | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | 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/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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