I'd like to begin this article by describing one example of Carbon-14 dating, performed by one of the leading labs in the dating field. Their carefully done report is a classic illustration of the controversy that exists between most secular scientists and most Biblical creationary scientists.
The Hawkesbury Sandstone formation, near Sydney, Australia, is a massive and spectacular mass of hard rock, often used for construction of buildings in Sydney.(1) There are three principle layers of rock -- massive sandstone, sheet sandstone, and some thin mudstone. Although it is massive (7,700 square miles in area and up to 820 feet thick) it shows many of the features of deposition in fast-flowing waters. There are cross-beds, sloping at about 20o, some are up to 20 feet high, within the flat-lying strata. These were probably formed by huge sand-waves, swept by massive water flows. A number of lenses of mudstone contain many fossils, mostly of fish, sharks, and aquatic plants. Geologists have assigned it to the Middle Triassic 'age' (225 - 230 million years old), based on fossil content and the relative sequence of rock layers in the Sydney Basin. This "stratigraphic dating" is the technique most widely used by conventional geologists who believe in the long timescale of the Geologic Column.
The Bundanoon quarry found a finger-size piece of wood impregnated within the hard sandstone. Some Australian creationist scientists obtained part of this wood, and sent it to Geochron Lab in Boston for careful 14C analysis. Contrary to usual practice, they didn't tell the lab where it had been found, or what 'age' they expected it to reveal. This was to prevent possible bias in the dating tests.
The lab applied normal procedures, treating it with hot dilute hydrochloric acid to remove all the carbonates, then with hot dilute caustic soda to remove any humic acids or other organic contaminents. A 13C/12C measurement showed high probability that modern contamination was not a factor. The sample wood was found to contain measureable 14C, and the final age was determined to be 33,720 +/- 430 years BP.
That "age" is obviously very much younger than most secular scientists could accept, and very much older than most creationists think it really should be. We'll use that "age" as an example in the main discussion about Carbon-14 dating, and the probable sources of the controversy. That comes in the last several pages of this article.