Cosmogenesis and The Shroud of Turin Dennis Mitton 2013

Carbon -14 and carbon dating offer up some interesting points about health physics theory. The fact that there is any C-14 around is interesting in itself: with a half-life of only 5,7 years we would

e!pect any trace to be long gone. "s a general rule, radioacti#e materials $ not including daughter products - are considered fully decayed after se#en half-li#es. %ay you ha#e a sho#elful of radioacti#e material. "fter se#en half-li#es &about 4 , years in the case of C-14' less than one percent of the

original amount would remain. (o out a bit further $ ten half-li#es $ to about si!ty thousand years for C-14 - and you ha#e less than point-one percent remaining. To get a feel for )ust how much that is imagine stopping by the local casino with a thousand dollars in your poc*et and lea#ing an hour later with a dollar. +ut C-14 is here and there,s plenty of it. -ow. Two reasons. The first reason is that C-14 is being continuously created #ia cosmogenesis. This is interesting &well, to people who li*e this stuff/' because e#en though it is naturally made it is not considered a 0natural, isotope as it wasn,t part of the original isotopic in#entory of the uni#erse. -ow is it made. 1magine a cosmically generated neutron hurdling through space for ages. 1t mo#es along, minding its business for a couple billion years or so and then$ bam2 $ it careens into earth,s upper atmosphere and its relati#ely dense tangle of atoms. 1t stri*es a nitrogen nucleus which absorbs the rogue neutron, spits out a proton &now on a mad hunt for hydrogen', and, as the 3rench say, viola2 Carbon-14. The other reason we ha#e radioacti#e carbon comes from atomic weapons testing. The "rgonne 4ational 5aboratory calculates that about three percent of our C-14 is the result of weapons testing. "nd a #ery small percentage comes from nuclear power generation. 5i*e all isotopes found in nature, radioacti#e carbon e!ists in a generally unchanging ratio with its non-radioacti#e brethren. 1n the case of carbon, #irtually all of the stuff is C-16 or C-17. Carbon-14 ma*es up the tiniest of ratios but it,s enough to count and that ma*es it useful. +iological systems $ plants, animals, and our body $ are carbon based and don,t recogni8e any difference between the radioacti#e *inds of carbon or the normal run-of-the-mill stuff. 9hen cells need carbon they ta*e the ne!t in line

without hesitation. They recogni8e no chemical difference &based on electrons' though there could be a radioactive difference &based on nucleons'. %o inside this cell, or inside our bodies, we mirror the ratio of C-14 to C-16 that e!ists in nature. 1t is this en#ironmentally constant ratio that is the *ey to radiometric dating. "s C-14 is created in the upper atmosphere so, too, is the e!isting in#entory decaying. :hysicists ha#e figured this ratio out and find that for e#ery C-14 atom floating about there are about a trillion normal atoms. "nd $ since you and 1 and trees and plants all breathe - -we all ha#e the same ratio inside us as well. "s we breathe in this carbon laden air those atoms are ta*en up by our bodies in the same ratio. %o. 9hat happens when we die. 9hat happens is that we stop breathing. "nd when we stop breathing and stop ta*ing in that carbon something begins to happen. ;our cells retain that carbon but the radioacti#e types start to decay. %o, if a tree dies and falls into a bog it has one C-14 for e#ery trillion C-16,s. +ut now, centuries later, it has less and less C-14 but the C-16 says the same. 9hat gi#es. 9hat gi#es is that we are obser#ing a tiny little atomic cloc*. The less C-14 we find compared to C-16 the more isotopic decay has been going on and the more time has passed. 1n other words, the less C-14 we find, the older the tree is. 5et,s wor* it out on a piece of gopher wood your neighbor finds in his bac*yard while searching for 4oah,s "r*. ;ou need two analyses: one is from a li#ing tree nearby and one is from your gopher wood. ;ou chisel off a little piece of each and send them out to a lab. ;ou get the results bac* and the li#ing tree has a specific acti#ity &the amount of acti#ity per weight' of 7.5<=-1 +>?gm for C-14. ;our gopher wood sample shows @.<@=-6 +>?gm. +oth show the same relati#e amount of C-16 gi#ing e#idence of a change in ratio. %o we ha#e three bits of information: how many be>uerals of C-14 our gopher wood has, how many our li#ing tree has, and how long it ta*es for half of a pile of C-14 to decay. "nd wouldn,t you *now it. There,s an e>uation that allows us to input all those numbers and figure out )ust how long ago that gopher wood tree >uit breathing. 9e start with the standard decay formula:

Then we put in our *nowns:

9e do a little manipulation to sol#e for T which represents the time elapsed:

"nd there we are2 Time elapsed, or A-ow long ago did that tree die.B e>uals:

%o maybe that piece of wood came from the "r*. :retty fun right. %o what does this ha#e to do with the %hroud of Turin. 9e should $ since clothes in anti>uity were made of natural materials be able to get a sense of the age of the %hroud using C-14 dating. 4ow there are #ariables when measuring C-14 $ mostly stuff li*e preparation techni>ues - so we aren,t going to get anything close to a year, month, and day. &This is also because half-life calculations are statistical in nature but that,s another topic/' +ut this isn,t the purpose of radiometric dating. 9e want to be able to determine a range. "nd the real >uestion in this case $ 0was this the burial robe of Cesus., - is something that we can,t e#en approach using dating methods. 9hat would help us, though, is to be able to determine whether or not the materials from the %hroud date to around the time of Christ. 1f dating re#eals an age of a couple hundred years then it lends weight to the argument that the %hroud is a pretty darned good fa*e. 1f we find that it,s a couple of thousand years old then we say 0possibly, and mo#e on to other techni>ues and >uestions. %o how old is the %hroud. " whole bunch of pretty smart people got together and planned a great pro)ect. They cut pieces from se#eral different ancient cloth samples $ the %hroud, mummies, paintings $ and sent them unlabeled to se#eral different labs around the world. The labs didn,t *now which cloth was from the %hroud or e#en if they had a sample from the %hroud &a 0blind, test'. They shared a protocol so e#eryone processed the samples in the same way and then ran their dating tests. To no one,s real

surprise the %hroud was wo#e from a cloth manufactured during the Diddle "ges. Eh well. 1t was a good story and made a few people into semi-famous authors. Fead the research paper here: http:??www.shroud.com?nature.htm. 1t,s a model of great research methods and e!perimental design. There are lots of interesting ways that dating is used. -ere,s another abstract outlining the use of dating to determine the age at death using teeth. (ood stuff: http:??adsabs.har#ard.edu?abs?6 54atur.477..777% . 9ith its short half-life carbon dating is only good for

relati#ely short times $ tens of thousands of years - but the concepts and methods translate directly into wor* with other isotopes with half-li#es of millions of years.