
The Sun is changing the rate of radioactive decay - smokinn
http://io9.com/5619954/the-sun-is-changing-the-rate-of-radioactive-decay-and-breaking-the-rules-of-chemistry
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jcdreads
Fischbach's page, with citations of (but not links to) the original research:

<http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/ephraim.shtml>

A preprint:

<http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283>

Why do publications refuse to post links to (or at least citations of) the
original scientific articles? I mean, these links are the result of five
minutes of googling; which means the reporter communicated with the authors
themselves but didn't bother to ask for a hyperlink or an emailed citation.

The mind boggles.

~~~
mattheww
Actually the paper discussed in OP is a preprint at:
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4848>

It uses an extremely suspicious technique to test the significance of their
finding. I doubt this paper will pass review without substantial changes.

edit: The one you posted is 2 years old, but tries to explain the same effect
with a different cause.

~~~
machrider
Can you elaborate on the suspiciousness for a lay audience?

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mattheww
I'm referring here to the significance estimates of section 3.

It's immediately suspicious that the authors introduce a new type of "test"
for whatever spectra are being measured. When that happens, the authors need
to rigorously demonstrate its validity. That is not present in this preprint.

The thing that needs to be demonstrated is that their method generates a
reasonable space of outcomes. It's not clear to me that's true for their
method.

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ugh
Is it sad that the only thing I could think of when reading this article was
‘Oh great, another thing for Creationists to misquote’?

~~~
abalashov
I thought the same: "Oh, an unknown/hitherto unexplored variable - wait until
the Creationists get a hold of this!"

~~~
kd0amg
For a few years now, I've seen creationists suggesting that radioactive decay
used to be orders of magnitude faster.

~~~
bugsy
Yep. Kind of like the electric universe people have been bucking the status
quo as well and on the last comet rendez vous mission they were the only ones
to correctly predict what would happen.

~~~
randallsquared
Can you link to someone who is not an electric universe partisan who says
this?

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1053r
The most powerful words in science are, "Huh. That's weird..."

~~~
TGJ
And the most scary flying in a plane.

~~~
sukuriant
Wouldn't that be 'oops'?

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DaniFong
Presumably, someone has already checked this, but... it seems like temperature
might be the primary influence. As the temperature increases, the heavier
radioactive gases, like radon, as distributed more evenly, and higher up in
the atmosphere. Was this tracked?

The signal appears seriously weak relative to the noise...

~~~
grogers
The paper does mention this:

As an example, radon concentrations are known to ﬂuctuate seasonally, as has
been noted in Ref. [10], and it was suggested that the decay of 222 Rn could
lead to a seasonally dependent charge distribution on the experimental
apparatus. However, this eﬀect is extremely small given the low counting rates
that typically arise from radon background [11], and in any case, the PTB data
shown in Fig. 3 were corrected for background.

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joshu
Oh god, if only Oracle hadn't acquired... oh, wait.

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seldo
So, I don't want to be a whacko or anything, but... this is the plot of 2012,
the movie:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_(film)#Plot>

In the film, solar flares and sunspot activity are blamed for altering
radioactivity levels in the earth's core, causing it to rise and the earth's
crust to melt, leading to worldwide, CGI-friendly apocalypse.

The thing is, in 2009, when 2012 was filmed, nobody knew there was any linkage
at all between sunspots and radioactivity. We thought the rate of decay was
constant, and the science behind the film was bullshit. These guys hadn't
published yet -- correct me if I'm wrong.

Now it's still obviously bullshit -- the change caused by sunspot activity is
not nearly big enough to affect the planet's temperature materially -- but
there _is_ a linkage.

Which is, y'know, weird.

~~~
sbierwagen
"Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance"
was submitted in 2008.

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ajju
Cue creationists jumping on this to challenge evolution (by challenging carbon
dating) in 4...3..2..

~~~
KingOfB
Creationists? Everyone should jump on challenging carbon dating. If we can
measure variance inside of 33 days, and that's extrapolated over a few
millions of years, that could skew the numbers a bit.

But I bet the ballpark of neutrino's the sun has put out and will put out
stays relatively constant inside of some rotational variance. The output
behaving like a sin wave doesn't change things much, but if it's on an incline
or decline, that has a huge impact on carbon dating.

It seems exciting that we have an observable cause and effect and we don't
understand why. That seems like it could be a good treasure chest of knowledge
right there!

~~~
api
Yeah, true, but I still predict the creationists will be all over it.

But you could add much wider error bars to carbon dating and it still wouldn't
support creationism.

Maybe something 20 million years old is just 7 million. Fine. It's not six
thousand.

~~~
Confusion
It's more like: maybe something estimated to be 20.0 million years old (with
an error bar of 0.5 million years) should have been estimated to be 19.99
million years old, with the same error bar and hence the same precision, which
is still 20.0 million years. And that only makes sense if we weren't talking
about carbon dating, which isn't used for those timescales.

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georgecmu
_It's one of the most basic concepts in all of chemistry_

It has nothing to do with chemistry and everything with physics. If the author
gets wrong this simple distinction, what else did he get wrong?

~~~
spoondan
In 1911, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in
radioactivity. Chemistry is the study of matter, as much as (but distinct
from) physics.

~~~
georgecmu
As a matter of fact, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in _Physics_ for
her research of radioactivity ("radiation phenomena" was the exact wording).

Her Nobel Prize in Chemistry was for her discovery of new elements Radium and
Polonium.

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CWIZO
I don't know anything about this. But doesn't this mean that all age
calculations for fossils and such are completely wrong?

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marze
Just put the experiment on a spacecraft headed for Mars.

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dmoney
Could this new particle be the Higgs boson?

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jackfoxy
Seems likes using radioactive isn't the perfect random number generator it was
thought to have been.

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StavrosK
Okay, I know that the media is powerful and all, but isn't this a bit _too_
much power for a newspaper to have?

~~~
teamonkey
Changing the rate of mind decay

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bugsy
Interesting. The creationists have been saying for decades that assuming a
fixed rate of decay is a mistake. So they were right again.

