Creation's Tiny Mystery

Given the above information, we need to understand why Brown asserts the association of uranium and polonium halos presents a problem for a young age of the earth, and then determine whether the reasons for that assertion are scientifically valid.

The basis for his assertion is found in the second sentence of paragraph 2. There the claim is made that it would take from 3 million to 190 million years to produce well-developed (mature) uranium halos. In other words, Brown attempts to call into question a young age of the earth by saying that it must have taken millions of years for uranium halos to form in the minerals in which they are found. He fails to say, however, that the millions of years that he claims are needed for uranium halos to develop is neither a scientific fact, nor a part of my creation model, but is instead a deduction at which he arrives by assuming a uniform radioactive decay process throughout geological time. But as discussed in my book, the assumption of uniform decay is just a corollary of the fallacious uniformitarian principle. In other words, the millions of years which Brown assigns to the development of uranium halos are imaginary because they are computed on the basis of a false assumption.

Paragraph 2 of Brown's review concludes with a reference to the Creator producing unnecessary "evidence" for events which did not occur in reality. With all due respect, the reader should understand that here my colleague is arguing against a straw man of his own devising, for the scenario described in his second paragraph is completely foreign to my creation model. Specifically, he mentions the in situ creation, sometime within the past million years, of polonium centers for polonium halos, and uranium halo centers for well-developed (mature) uranium halos. At first glance this statement may seem to fit into my creation model, but this is an illusion. One irreconcilable difference between my creation model and the above comment is the reference to the in-situ creation of uranium impurity centers for well-developed (mature) uranium halos. In Brown's own words this "requires the uranium centers and halos are in every way indistinguishable from halos that would be produced by the uranium decay series as presently observed." But since the "the uranium decay series as presently observed" is undergoing uniform radioactive decay, then it seems that Brown is referring to the creation of uranium centers with characteristics which he interprets as evidence of uniform radioactive decay over an extended period of time.

This whole idea is foreign to my creation model. Nowhere do I propose that uranium halo centers were created with the characteristics associated with uniform radioactive decay over an extended period of time. Such a scenario implies, first, that the uranium centers were created with artificial characteristics, and second, that uranium halos in granites were not produced by alpha-particle interaction with those rocks, but instead are just colorations which were directly imprinted into them.

This view is conceptually, philosophically, and scientifically at variance with two major tenets of my creation model—namely, (1) that polonium halos are genuine evidence of an instantaneous creation of the Precambrian granites precisely because alpha particles emitted from rapidly decaying primordial polonium atoms did produce polonium halos in those rocks (in other words, polonium halos are truly autographs of radioactivity that had only a [p. 317] fleeting existence), and (2) that uranium and thorium halos likewise resulted (via an accelerated decay process) from the interaction of alpha particles from uranium and thorium centers that were created simultaneously with the granites.

In my model uranium and thorium halos are post-creation entities which formed via an enhanced radioactive decay process during one or more of the three biblically-based singularities described in my ICC paper. On this basis, I can easily account for the close association of uranium and polonium halos,, such as shown in Figure 1. I must conc~ude, therefore, that the problems cited in the second paragraph of Browns review concerning the association of uranium and polonium halos are due primarily to his use of the errcneous uniformitarian principle and the associated uniform decay rate assumption, and secondarily to the introduction of an idea which is completely foreign to my creation model.

In paragraph 4 Brown argues for a secondary rather than a primordial origin of polonium halos in granites, but unfortunately he overlooks nearly all the scientific evidence which negates this hypothesis. Through many experiments over the past two decades I have shown the unequivocal differences between the secondary polonium-210 halos in coalified wood—meaning those that resulted from water transport of uranium daughter activity—and the several types of primordial (independently created) polonium halos in granites. Brown does not at all deal with the vast differences in uranium content and transport rate between granites and gel-like wood (the early stage of coalified wood), nor in any way attempt to provide experimental evidence for a secondary origin of polonium halos in granites. Instead, he argues against a primordial origin of polonium halos in granites using arguments which appear to be based on scientific fact. The following discussion presents another view of those arguments.

In the beginning of paragraph 4 Brown argues against primordial polonium halos using an idea initially proposed several years ago by one of the other reviewers (Dutch). His main line of argument utilizes a particular concept of the isotopic composition of primordial polonium. Using this concept Brown arrives at what he feels should be the composition of halo centers at present, and then notes that I have not reported such compositions. All this leaves the impression that something must be wrong with my conclusion that polonium halos in granites are primordial. Unfortunately, some very important information was omitted from Brown's discussion. We shall see that the picture changes considerably when all the pieces of the puzzle are included.

Readers should understand first that I have never said, or even remotely suggested, that primordial polonium would be composed of the isotopes cited in paragraph 4 of Brown's review. His definition of primordial polonium is quite different from mine, and the reader is entitled to know the reasons why the two are fundamentally different.

What my colleague has done—apparently unwittingly—is to combine two results from experimental physics together with a theoretical result of the evolutionary Big Bang model, and then lumped everything together as if it is based on experimental nuclear physics. In particular, Brown claims "well-established empirical relationships between isotope abundance, half-life, and binding energy per nucleon . . ." establish the composition of primordial polonium as he states it. If all parts of this statement were true, there would be some scientific justification for Brown's version of primordial polonium. The problem is, however, that one crucial part of the above statement is not true.

Specifically, while nuclear physics has established empirical relationships between half-life and binding energy per nucleon, it definitely has not established a pattern of primordial isotope abundances as Brown claims is the case. The pattern of isotope abundances to which Brown refers—which also forms the basis of his definition of primordial polonium—is in reality the end result of theoretical calculations pertaining to the Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe.

To understand Brown's version of primordial polonium the reader needs to understand how cosmologists view the origin of matter. First, because modern cosmologists believe only the two lightest elements—hydrogen and helium—were made in the Big Bang, they must find some way to account for all the heavier elements in the universe—including those composing the earth, sun and planetary system. Their theory is that these heavier elements were formed billions of years ago in fusion reactions deep inside certain stars. As explained in my book, they also believe interstellar space became sprinkled with heavier elements as more and more stars exploded through eons of time. Then, through processes which have never been clearly defined, supposedly the remnants of these violent explosions somehow reaccumulated to form other stars, one of which is assumed to have been the proto-sun, the forerunner of both our sun and the earth.

Here we must pause to separate fact from assumption. It is doubtless true that some chemical elements are produced in stellar fusion reactions—by charged particle reactions, or by slow neutron capture (the s-process), or by rapid neutron capture (the r-process)—but it is [p. 318] just sheer fiction to assume that all the heavier elements in the universe were produced by such reactions. But this is what modern cosmologists do, and on this basis they proceed to theoretically calculate the primordial isotopic abundances of all the heavier elements.

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