Real Science Radio: Earth & Mercury's Decaying Magnetic Fields

Jefferson

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Earth & Mercury's Decaying Magnetic Fields

This is the show from Friday May 30th, 2014

Summary:

* Boy do the atheists have a problem: Real Science Radio co-host Bob Enyart interviews physicist Russ Humphreys on the Earth and Mercury's rapidly decaying magnetic fields, and on Dr. Humphrey's fulfilled predictions about the magnetism of the distant planets Uranus and Neptune. With Earth losing 10% of it's magnetic field in just the last 150 years, and Mercury's even faster drop, materialists have to appeal, once again, to claims of wildly coincidental occurrences to explain our observation of such rapid loss on planets that are allegedly billions of years old.

* From the Popular RSR Site YoungEarth.com:

* Earth's Magnetic Field Decay: As summarized by University of Maryland geophysicist Daniel Lathrop, “In particular, over the last 150 years or so, the Earth’s magnetic field has declined in strength about ten percent, and continues to decline in strength [as is evident] every time people go and make new measurements.” Creationists point out that this rapid decay is not expected in such a brief snapshot in time if our planet were 4.6 billion years old. On the other hand, these careful, long-term, and worldwide measurements that document the rapidly decreasing strength of Earth's magnetic field are consistent with a young Earth. Lathrop, not surprisingly, is an old-earthgeophysicist who nonetheless acknowledged this data at the opening of and midway through the 2013 program Magnetic Shield, an episode of The Weather Channel's Secrets of the Earth with theoretical physicist (emphasis on the theoretical), Michio Kaku.

Creationist physicist Russell Humphreys of Sandia National Labs has updated his previous work by publishing Earth's Magnetic Field Is Decaying Steadily, which includes global data through 2010. Humphreys observes that, "in 1968 the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) began more systematically measuring, gathering, and analyzing geomagnetic data from all over the world. This group of geomagnetic professionals introduced a 'standard spherical harmonic representation' of the field called the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, or IGRF. Every five years starting in 1970, they have published both dipole and non-dipole components of the field. Using older data, the IAGA also extended the model back to the beginning of the twentieth century. With the issuance of the latest data set, IGRF-11, we have a standardized set of geomagnetic data from 1900 to 2010. You can download it free of charge as an ASCII file..." (Incidentally, Humphreys also published accurate predictions of the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus before NASA's Voyager mission confirmed his work.)

The steady and rapid decay of the energy of the Earth's magnetic field as documented by the most careful measurements over the forty-year period from 1970 to 2010 is also consistent with previous published results using data going back to 1835, and by inference from other observations, apparently, going back to the 1100s A.D. Further, as with forensic accounting and statistical analysis, numbers can often tell a lot about data, and in this case, analysis of the field strength measurements helps to confirm the validity of the data. Humphreys writes further that the decay patterns, "weigh heavily against the idea that there is currently a 'dynamo' process at work in the core that would ultimately restore the lost energy back to the field. Without such a restoration mechanism, the field can only have a limited lifetime, in the thousands of years." For example, if the energy of the field has been dissipating at the current rate, going back only a million years would produce such heat that the oceans would have burned off the Earth, which clearly they have not.

See also the Real Science Radio Mercury Report at rsr.org/mercury#magnetic-field for that example of a second planet experiencing a rapidly decaying magnetic field and hear Bob Enyart and Fred Williams talk about the Earth's decay rate at RSR's Spiders & Termites & Magnets.

Here's the point: A four-billion year old Earth would have reached stasis long ago whereby changes in something as globally significant as its magnetic field would occur only very slowly. And since the Earth could not sustain the necessary increased energy backward in time for even a million years, let alone billions, to explain its current strength and decay rate, this is significant, worldwide evidence that appears to undermine the alleged great age of the Earth.

* Exercise for the Student: The laboratory experiment represented in the following photo has / has not provided evidence in support of the old-earth "dynamo theory"?

dynamo-experiment-lathrop-UofMD.jpg
 
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Jukia

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You do realize that the earth's magnetic fields have decayed, reversed, increased, decayed, reversed, increased etc numerous times? Oh, sorry, perhaps you don't. Because being a good Christian, Pastor Bob would never suggest what he did on his show and in this post if he was aware of that.
 

Yorzhik

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It should be noted that not all scientists agree that reversals are what caused the magnetically alternating strips at the mid-Atlantic ridge. Reversals, in any model, is a complicated problem, and Occam's Razor just might support a non-reversal theory best.
 

Stripe

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Hey, Jokia is here with nothing to offer again. :chuckle:
 

Jukia

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It should be noted that not all scientists agree that reversals are what caused the magnetically alternating strips at the mid-Atlantic ridge. Reversals, in any model, is a complicated problem, and Occam's Razor just might support a non-reversal theory best.

Citations please.
 

Nick M

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You do realize that the earth's magnetic fields have decayed, reversed, increased, decayed, reversed, increased etc numerous times?

Evidence? Not citations, just generalize all your claims you make. We are waiting.
 

Jukia

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Evidence? Not citations, just generalize all your claims you make. We are waiting.

Oh Nicky, see I asked Yor for citations. That means I asked him for the evidence from scientific journals with respect to the claim he made about the magnetically alternating strips on either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge. It is pretty obvious that most oceanographers and geologists were surprised (see scientists can be, and actually enjoy being surprised) to find strips of ocean floor on either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge showing pole reversals. It was determined to be evidence of pole reversals as well as the movement of tectonic plates away from the mid-Atlantic ridge. Sorry, Stripey, but it sortof blows your mentor Dr. Walt Brown out of the water. Now he is suggesting that there are other scientists who believe there is another mechanism for this striping. I asked for him to back up his claim.

Just to make it clear to you, Pastor Bob's show is often not very scientifically accurate. He takes great joy in misrepresenting science on Jesus's behalf (or at least based on his particular interpretation of Jesus). But to really try to understand the science you need to go to the scientific literature not your Holy Book or Walt Brown's particular flight of fancy.
 

gcthomas

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* Exercise for the Student: The laboratory experiment represented in the following photo has / has not provided evidence in support of the old-earth "dynamo theory"?

*Exercise for Enyart/Jefferson: The laboratory experiment represented in the following photo has / has not actually been run at full speed yet?


With the sphere spinning at 45 miles per hour, and a little help from electro*magnets, the team saw short-lived magnetic bursts within the sodium. When the spinning ramps up to nearly 90 miles per hour later this year, the sodium might generate a field without the extra nudge. If so, and with one second of the experiment equaling 5,000 years of Earth time, the researchers could see a reversal before everyone else on the planet.


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...begins-reverse-180951166/#OBuCWMSGRUoBGRkG.99

 

Bob Enyart

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Jukia, our listeners heard a physicist discuss your concerns...

Jukia, our listeners heard a physicist discuss your concerns...

Hi Jukia! Those who've listened to the show heard a physicist discuss the issues you raised above -- and not just any physicist but -- the very scientist who is an expert in magnetic fields who, apparently alone in the history of the world, had successfully published predictions, later confirmed by NASA, of the strength of the fields of Uranus and Neptune, and of the wildly rapid decline of Mercury's field strength. (Similar to a thousand other atheist claims, materialists say that Mercury's rapid decline is not evidence for its youth but is instead merely an amazing coincidence -- that just when we happened to measure it, we caught it in a wild decline, just like the Earth! Wow, double coincidence.)

Also Jukia, I don't recall if you've ever commented on our question at rsr.org/jukia:

Do Atheists Even Have a Hypothesis on Origins? Because atheists don't have a workable hypothesis to account for human consciousness, therefore they don't even have a theory to explain where we've come from, let alone a robust theory. The following pattern shows that atheists do not have even a hypothesis on origins, as demonstrated by these six irrefutable observations:
- the origin of species for Darwin begins with species already in existence
- the origin of stars begins with the explosion of existing stars and with protostars
- the origin of genes that code for new proteins begins with modifying existing genes
- the origin of species by neo-Darwinism begins with existing complex reproducing life
- the origin of life on earth is increasingly seen as seeded from already existing alien life
- the origin of the universe is increasingly explained by appeals to the pre-existing multiverse.

This pattern demonstrates that many in the public, following a gullible media, have undue confidence in the claims about origins from materialists. Consider also the origin of something as relatively simple as the eye's trochlea (click or just Google: PZ trochlea), for which famed evolutionist PZ Myers admits that a lifetime of studying Darwinism gives him no insight into how such utter simplicity could have evolved. Then how about something complex? In very general terms, how might a material process originate to encode a protein sequence onto a DNA molecule? Atheists have nothing. And they will forever have nothing, because a high-level understanding of physics and information affirmatively demonstrates that the laws of physics do not include symbolic logic functions. Information is not physical, and hence, strictly material systems cannot give rise to information systems.

Jukia, I know that years of annoyances between you and others here at TOL build up to anger and resentment. If you go to your grave never having asked the Lord to forgive you of your sins, then for eternity you will miss out on enjoying the Lord and enjoying the fellowship of any of your friends or loved ones who love Him. Also of course, then there would never then be reconciliation between you and me and the many others here who have also prayed for you over the years.

Sincerely,

- Bob Enyart
http://realscienceradio.com
 
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Bob Enyart

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Hi gct! Are you a wagerin' man?

Hi gct! Are you a wagerin' man?

Thank you gcthomas for responding. Yes, there is more of the experiment to come. Thanks for pointing that out!

*Exercise for Enyart/Jefferson: The laboratory experiment represented in the following photo has / has not actually been run at full speed yet?

So, are you a wagerin' man? If so, what kind of odds would you like? What kind of bet?

- Bob Enyart
http://rsr.org
 

Bob Enyart

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Hi Trathca! Were you just being argumentative or did I miss your point?

Hi Trathca! Were you just being argumentative or did I miss your point?

Hi Tyrathca! Considering your jibe against Stripe...

So you can add one more thing to the list of evidence to ignore?

Of course a planned experiment is not evidence. It's a planned experiment. Seems that Stripe merely used the vernacular to make his own scientific prediction that the experiment will fail. As with Stripe, possibly, the reason that I presume that the experiment will fail is because I have been persuaded by the evidence that there is no dynamo in the Earth (nor in Mercury, nor in Uranus, nor in Neptune). So, because Daniel Lathrop modeled his experiment by assuming the existence of a dynamo, young earth creationists generally are convinced that his experiment has a tremendously high likelihood of failure: failure, that is, from the old-earth perspective but success from our perspective, in supplying yet another bit of experimental evidence that undermines old-earth assumptions. For, without a dynamo, Earth's magnetic field would be decaying at easily measurable rates, and that process could not have gone on for millions of years. This is why atheists believe in dynamos, and that they can explain our solar system's magnetic fields, even though the possibility of that is shrinking even faster than are our planets' magnetic fields. :)

So Tyrathca, to be explicit, when you said that regarding this planned experiment that Stripe was ignoring yet another bit of evidence, were you simply being argumentative?
 
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gcthomas

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Hi Jukia! Those who've listened to the show heard a physicist discuss the issues you raised above -- and not just any physicist but -- the very scientist who is an expert in magnetic fields who, apparently alone in the history of the world, had successfully published predictions, later confirmed by NASA, of the strength of the fields of Uranus and Neptune, and of the wildly rapid decline of Mercury's field strength. (

Humphry's claim was for a magnetic field prediction accurate to no more than several orders of magnitude - of course it was met! It would be like be predicting the temperature with my seaweed for this time next year as 15 deg C plus or minus 50 degrees. I would be shown right by the Met Office and my seaweed theory would be confirmed by the experts!


imp-203a.jpg


The straight line in Figure 1 shows the maximum magnetic dipole moment (a measure of the strength of the magnetic field's source) of each planet at creation, according to my theory. The present-day magnetic moments depend on the size and electrical conductivity of each planet's core and on the age of the solar system. Using accepted models (which are really only guesses) of the cores' and an age of 6,000 years,6 I estimated the present magnetic moments for the Sun, Moon, and all the planets for which we had magnetic data in 1984.2 The values I got agreed well with the measured values shown by the solid dots in Figure 1. In 1984 we had no magnetic data for Uranus and Neptune. I estimated magnetic moments of roughly 2 to 6 x 1024 Ampere-meters2 for both planets. Because of the uncertainty about the interiors of those planets, I widened my prediction to "on the order of'" 1024 A m2, by which I meant that the magnetic moments would be between 1 x 1023 and 1 x 1025 A m2. And regardless of assumptions about planetary interiors, if the present field of either planet had exceeded the maximum (the line in Figure 1), my theory would have been falsified. There is no definite minimum, but values several orders of magnitude lower than the prediction would cast serious doubt on my theory. Thus I proposed that the Voyager II measurements would be a good test of my hypothesis.
http://www.icr.org/article/beyond-neptune-voyager-ii-supports-creation/



Notice that the measured fields for Neptune/Uranus are nearly two orders of magnitude below the predicted maximum line, but he still claims it as a 'hit'.
 

GuySmiley

Well-known member
Humphry's claim was for a magnetic field prediction accurate to no more than several orders of magnitude - of course it was met! It would be like be predicting the temperature with my seaweed for this time next year as 15 deg C plus or minus 50 degrees. I would be shown right by the Met Office and my seaweed theory would be confirmed by the experts!


imp-203a.jpg


The straight line in Figure 1 shows the maximum magnetic dipole moment (a measure of the strength of the magnetic field's source) of each planet at creation, according to my theory. The present-day magnetic moments depend on the size and electrical conductivity of each planet's core and on the age of the solar system. Using accepted models (which are really only guesses) of the cores' and an age of 6,000 years,6 I estimated the present magnetic moments for the Sun, Moon, and all the planets for which we had magnetic data in 1984.2 The values I got agreed well with the measured values shown by the solid dots in Figure 1. In 1984 we had no magnetic data for Uranus and Neptune. I estimated magnetic moments of roughly 2 to 6 x 1024 Ampere-meters2 for both planets. Because of the uncertainty about the interiors of those planets, I widened my prediction to "on the order of'" 1024 A m2, by which I meant that the magnetic moments would be between 1 x 1023 and 1 x 1025 A m2. And regardless of assumptions about planetary interiors, if the present field of either planet had exceeded the maximum (the line in Figure 1), my theory would have been falsified. There is no definite minimum, but values several orders of magnitude lower than the prediction would cast serious doubt on my theory. Thus I proposed that the Voyager II measurements would be a good test of my hypothesis.
http://www.icr.org/article/beyond-neptune-voyager-ii-supports-creation/



Notice that the measured fields for Neptune/Uranus are nearly two orders of magnitude below the predicted maximum line, but he still claims it as a 'hit'.
Do you think that nearly two, is the same as several?

Also, its only nearly two below his maximum line, not below the prediction.

It looks like you are stretching here just to come up with some kind of criticism. Weak.
 

gcthomas

New member
Guy,

Don't you think that a 'prediction verified by NASA' claim that gives a number but accepts measurements up to many thousands of times smaller as confirmation is a bit weak also?
 

GuySmiley

Well-known member
Guy,

Don't you think that a 'prediction verified by NASA' claim that gives a number but accepts measurements up to many thousands of times smaller as confirmation is a bit weak also?
That chart spans 15 orders of magnitude, getting the right one seems like a successful prediction to me.
 

Stripe

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What were the predictions made by the evolutionists again?
 
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