The Secret in Biblical HistoryCarbon-14 dating, widely used to determine the age of ancient artifacts, is based on the radioactive decay and half-life of carbon-14. After an organism dies and ceases exchanging carbon with its surroundings, the amount of carbon-14 remaining in the sample is measured, and the elapsed time is estimated on that basis.
However, the assumption of half-life invariance is not merely a matter of calculating time. The process by which carbon-14 is transformed into nitrogen-14 takes place within the atomic nucleus, and in this process, a neutron changes into a proton. At a deeper level, this is connected to the weak interaction, in which a down quark within the neutron is transformed into an up quark.
In particular, radioactive decay occurs spontaneously even when no separate energy is delivered to the atomic nucleus from outside. Current physics explains this behavior as a probabilistic phenomenon and expresses the statistical regularity observed across a large number of atomic nuclei in terms of half-life. However, it does not predict the exact moment at which an individual atomic nucleus will decay.
This text goes one step further and raises the question of whether the fundamental condition that determines why a quark transition occurs at a particular moment within an individual atomic nucleus has been sufficiently clarified.
If the invariance of half-life is connected to changes within the atomic nucleus and, at a deeper level, to transitions at the quark level, yet the fundamental condition that determines the moment at which such a transition occurs has not been sufficiently identified, then whether it should be accepted as an absolute standard for determining the age of ancient artifacts also warrants examination.