Physics and creation -- an interview with physicist Dr Jim Mason (Creation Magazine LIVE! 3-22)

Nuclear physics is our topic today on
Creation Magazine LIVE! We'll be sitting down with Dr Jim
Mason whose PhD is an experimental nuclear physics. You won't want to miss
it. Welcome Creation Magazine Live I'm
Richard Fangrad and I'm Calvin Smith and we're pleased today
to have special guest Dr Jim Mason Jim thanks very much for joining us on
the show. My pleasure.

Alright so here's a
physics related news item. Just recently it was announced that Peter Higgs in Francois Englert were jointly awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in
Physics now this was for, to quote the Nobel
website, this was for the theoretical discovery
ever mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of sub-atomic particles and which
recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at Sir
NSE. Large Hadron Collider other there's a
mouthful I the this mechanism as it's a referred
to in the announcement generally known as the Higgs boson right that's the "God
particle". Given this nickname what should
Christians make of this discovery? Does this discovery have anything to do with proving or
disproving God or or what should we take away
from this? In no way and I'll explain that in a bit but
first, to me the Higgs boson actually provides a pretty clear demonstration of
the quite incredible design intelligence there is behind the universe.

That is in
fact the Creator God of the Bible. But to explain
that we need to understand a little bit more about
what the Higgs boson is and where it fits in our understanding of what matter is and
how it works. But I think first I'd like to comment on
that nickname matter has, the "God particle" That actually came about when a popular science writer was writing in a magazine and
refer to it as the God 'expletive deleted' particle because it had turned out to be so difficult to find. The people at the magazine thought I was
probably an inappropriate way to express it so they actually did
delete the expletive and it became known as the "God particle" but since that time it's kind of taken on
on almost religious connotation it's considered to be somehow you know a superior particle with almost
supernatural characters but it's not it's
just a particle.

In fact it's 1 of 17 particles that
comprise what's referred to in particle physics as the standard model. And understand what the standard
model is it consists of three types of particles they're called quarks which people
may have heard from and may remember the CBC program Quirks and Quarks Leptons and Gauge Bosons of
which obviously the Higgs Boson is the most recent. The bosons of which
there are now five are the particles which give us the four fundamental forces
that we have in the universe. Those are the strong nuclear force, the
weak nuclear force, the force of gravity and the electromagnetic force.

Prior to the experimental
confirmation of the Higgs Boson probably the best-known bows on was the photon which is the particle its associated
with the electromagnetic force. Photons are the things that that allow you to see light and which
make digital cameras work. The other gauge bosons are gluons
which are associated with the strong nuclear force, and that's a real name
that's what the scientists call it, the gluon I just didn't make that up. And W and
Z bosons which are responsible for the weak nuclear force.

So with photons, gluons, W and Z bosons have a theoretical explanation of 3 of the four forces in the
universe and the thing that was missing was a
theoretical explanation of gravity and and that's because there wasn't a
good theoretical explanation for the the property of mass, and mass of
course is kind of critical to the force of gravity and that's
where the Higgs boson comes in because it was the theoretical particle associated
with defining mass for all the other
particles. Now to understand how a particle can create mass for other particles consider this analogy. You got an
auditorium full of people who are movie fans and so the people you can consider to
be the individual bosons - okay -  and this room full of people is the field associated with those bosons. And so
you got some well-known movie star comes in one door the auditorium and
wants to cross over the auditorium and go out of the other door.

He's gonna have difficult time. Because people are going to want to get
his autograph and talk to him about this and shake his hand and all that sort of
thing, so he's got a heavy mass. He's heavyweight, heavyweight actor. Alright, make sense.

So if you got somebody who isn't a movie
star who comes in and wants to do the same thing they can walk cross quite
unimpeded because they're a lightweight. So
that's how a particle in a field and can create a a
property. So that's the direct significance for the
boson then, it provides a theoretical basis for mass which in turn provides
the basis for explaining gravity. To understand how this
shows the design intelligence behind the universe we need to know a little bit about the quirks and the quarks...

Or the quarks and the leptons. There are six of each. Four for them are highly unstable so, although we can create them in
the lab by banging other things together they tend to disintegrate pretty quickly and
transform back into the 2 that are stable the two quarks that are stable are the
things that make up protons and neutrons which people are
probably familiar yes One of the leptons that's stable is
the electron which is the other thing that people are probably familiar with. The other stable lepton onto something
called a neutrino which is, people probably don't know
because it doesn't interact with matter very much.

Now it turns out all the matter that we can
see in the universe is composed of neutrons, protons and
electrons. And all of the forces are comprised of
these 5 bosons. So here we have everything in
the universe that we can see, in a physical sense made out of just 3 particles. Cool.

They're just designed in such a
way that they can go together to make all
the elements that we know, with the resulting features in the
elements, that they go together to make all the compounds that we know. Put the compounds together to make all
kinds of stuff like this and this and you and me. So God has designed these
three fundamental particles so that everything in the universe can
be constructed of it. If you think a somebody trying to design
a car, for example, there are lots of different parts in a car so To be able to design something so that you
can make everything with only three distinct
parts seems to me to be an incredible bit  of intelligent design.

That's amazing. Let's talk more about this in 60 seconds. In 2001 a fossil skull found in Chad electrified the world's scientific
community. Nicknamed Toumai this creature supposedly
lived when the human and chimp lineages allegedly split making it the oldest
human ancestor ever found.

The leader of the team that
made the discovery confessed "It's a lot of emotion to have in my
hand the beginning and the human lineage I have been looking for this for so long a
knew I would one day find it so it's a large part of my life." But not
all scientists accept this conclusion for instance
Dr Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris dismissed the skull as a mere female
gorilla. With such conflicting opinions about the
same skull it does make you wonder, perhaps the
skulls discover let his emotion and desire for discovery obscure his interpretation of the
evidence. To find out more from Creation Ministries International visit our website creation.Com If you've just tuned in we're talking with Dr Jim Mason a physicist about physics and the
creation/evolution issue. That's what we're talking about today on Creation Magazine LIVE.

That's right.  Jim it's great to have you here you know
many times creationists are kind of chided, well, you know, no real
scientist believes what the Bible says that the Bible teaches a young earth, a
six-day creation, how can you possibly believe in Genesis I mean, you've go your PhD in
experimental nuclear physics You talk about radio isotope
dating all these kind of things you must be interacted
with. How do you  answer people when they ask you things
like that and say, well how can you then with what we're commonly
being taught, how does that fit with what the Bible says about a young Earth and a recent creation? Good question Cal I think the evidence from from other
branches of science like geology and paleontology in
biology and genetics are all pretty clear they're all exactly what you would
expect from a biblical account of creation. But in the age issue especially with respect to radiometric dating that doesn't seem to be the case.

And
that actually gave me a lot of trouble initially with this whole concept. As a physicist, As a
physicist. However radiometric dating isn't all it seems to
be when you look at it in some considerable detail. For example, using a technique that is
intended to measure the age of a rock from one - a molten rock from when it gets hard - we get wildly incorrect answers.

For example the lava that was formed
during the eruption Mount St Helens which was in 1980, they
get measurements all the way up to 2.8 Million years for the ages that
rocks since it became  became using that technique. Those rocks for only about what, 30, 35 years old. Exactly. So this gets traced back to one of
the assumptions, and the assumption in that particular one is that there is no of the resulting product, the
radioactive decay product in the rock when it became hard because it was hot
before hand.

So they developed other techniques that are supposed to account for that but when these
techniques are used to measure rocks they get wildly different ages, and they
should all agree. Okay. So it seems pretty clear from
looking at the results that these things that there's something amiss. And you can trace it back to the assumptions that go into the calculation the calculations themselves are pretty
straightforward but they all make certain assumptions like the one about there being no end
product in the rock to start with.

And if you look at those assumptions,
they are assumptions about the history of the rock and since no
one's been around to actually observe and record their history you can't know whether any of those
assumptions are actually true. There are assumptions about the amount of radioactive element and
and resultant stable element that are present initially there are assumptions about whether or not - it's assumption about a closed system that assumes that nothing's been added
to or removed from the sample during its entire existence. And you just can't know whether
that's the case and there certainly lots of geological processes that could could make those things incorrect. So it's the unreasonable assumptions, that no one can know, lead to the
inaccuracies in that particular dating method.

That seems to be the case
certainly when you look at the results they're just all over the place. And
when you know what the right answer is you seem to always get the wrong answer. So when you don't know what the right answer is how do you know the answer
you've gotten is right? So you're physicist and yet when we
talk about radioisotope dating the physics involved in that, here's a
physicist who doesn't believe that this particular dating method indicates that the earth is old. We'll be
back with more shortly.

Refuting Evolution is a powerful,
concise summary that explains where the common evidences
used to promote evolution in text books are wrong while at the same time showing how
creation is better supported by scientific observations. It will stimulate much discussion and help
students and teachers think more critically about the creation evolution debate. Particularly the overlooked differences between operational and historical science
and how they relate to the topic of origins Order your copy today creation.Com Welcome back this week we're talking to Jim Mason, and we're just talking
about radioisotope decay rates and these
assumptions that are made, unproven assumptions where I mean the average layperson when they
hear an expert quote, well this you know this rock here this is
you know 35 million years old. They often just go, Oh well they must know
they're talking about, and don't really understand those assumptions.

So just elaborate on that a
little more for us Sure. Many of the assumptions, as we indicated are about the history of the
rock and cannot be verified one of them which is that the
transformation from the radioactive element to the stable element has
always been the same as it is today, it has been constant, has recently been shown by several experiments to actually not be true in the short term right here
and now today. They'd looked in various
universities, looked at decay rates of well-known radioactive substances. Cobalt-60
was one of them, it was one I used when I.

Was doing my research and they found that that rate, the rate at which that decays varies on an annual basis. It seems
to be somehow related to the distance between the Earth and the Sun or maybe
the rotation in the Sun or something they don't actually know. So many people were taught that certain
radioisotopes decay at a certain rate we've measured them and so if we start here we've only got
this much, you know there's this much difference we can
calculate that, we can determine the age of something. That's just the way people
have it in their heads.

That's correct. The assumption is that it's always been the same so we can use that in the equation
and and get and "age". That's now been shown not to be the case. I guess that's like a clock that would run at different speeds.

Right?
How would you ever use it to tell time? If the clock is constantly fast or slow
that kind of thing, so that's a problem with this particular dating method -
pretty much - one of the problems.  That's great. What about carbon dating? People often
say, carbon dating of course has nothing to do with millions of years, it's a little different type a dating method than the
ones that do give those vast ages. What do we know about carbon dating, why doesn't it work either? Well, again it's based on a number of
assumptions.

A fundamental assumption and carbon dating is that - carbon dating is used for material which is originally of organic
nature because it's it's sorta made from the - right it's made  initially from photosynthesis of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere in to plant material and then animals consume the plant material and
incorporate the radioactive carbon into their biological tissue and so on And as they are alive and doing that
it reaches some kind of equilibrium. But when they stop then they're not replenishing it in the
radiocarbon starts to decay away and and by measuring the ratio the
radiocarbon to the normal carbon in the sample at any
particular time you can then theoretically calculate how
long that's been going on. But it's based on the assumption that when
that plant material was growing the ratio of carbon-14 to normal
carbon, carbon 12 in the atmosphere is the same as it is today. And if that's incorrect than
the calculated age is incorrect.

That seems like a reasonable assumption are
there suggestions that it's not? I would submit from the biblical perspective there's a
great deal of suggestion that there's not. To start with we don't know because the Bible doesn't
tell us, but carbon 14 is not essential for life carbon-12 is but not carbon-14 so it's reasonable to assume that God didn't make any. So then it would have to build up in the atmosphere so during the 1500 years that
the vegetation was growing prior to the flood, that
vegetation that essentially got buried in turn into coal, there will be a lower
amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. There would probably also be a higher amount of carbon-12 in the atmosphere because there was a huge amount of vegetation
buried and that all needs carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sustain it and that carbon dioxide would be made
pretty much all from carbon-12.

So the ratio
was quite different before the flood quite a bit smaller than it is today and
therefore the age would be quite a bit less. So if
we take the biblical history into account it makes sense that of data that we're
seeing in science. Yes.  Some creation scientists got some coal
samples from the US Bureau of Mines and actually sent them away for radiometric
dating.

Now these coal samples should have been between 38 million and 318 million years old and that instruments that are used to
measure carbon-14 can only measure down to a level that
corresponds to an age about 90,000. So anything that's older than 90,000
would not have enough radiocarbon to be detected. These samples all came back with very
large amounts of radiocarbon and all about the same
regardless of the alleged age of the coal. So the
supposed to be in a time scale  that's much much shorter than
the millions of years.

Yes. And they all had more or less the same age which is exactly what you'd
expect if all of this coal resulted from
vegetation that was buried during the flood, and grew before the flood. With a lower ratio of With a lower ratio of carbon-14 to carbon12 exactly right. Fascinating stuff will be back with more.

Many claim that our eyes retinas how
wired backwards thus they say our eyes could not have
been specially designed because an intelligent creator would
have wide them correctly. But this claim doesn't make sense. After
all octopus retinas are wired in the supposedly correct way but this site is poor compared to ours
ophthalmologist Dr Peter Gurney has shown that there are good reasons
are retinas are wired the way they are in particular allows the photoreceptors
to be in close contact with two special tissues behind the retina that are necessary for regenerating the
photoreceptors and absorbing excess heat but these tissues are both opaque so if
our retinas were wired the other way you be trying to look through to opaque
surfaces which would mean you'd see nothing. And then the eagles have the same wiring
as us and they are renowned for their eagle eyes.

Maybe the creator got it
right after all. To find out more from Creation
Ministries International visit our website creation.Com Welcome back, we're talking about nuclear
physics and radioisotope dating and nuclear decay rates with a nuclear
physicist Dr Jim Mason. So glad to have you on the program today.
Now, there was a  creationist task force that
was set up a number of years ago now to study
specifically radioisotope dating and they  - some groundbreaking
research there that the R.A.T.E. Guys (Radioisotopes And the age of
The Earth) R.

A. T. E. What is the rate program and what is some of the groundbreaking research that they were involved in? Well, as you mentioned the rate
program was a group of creation scientists who got
together to look at this issue of radioisotope decay and what it implied for
the age of the earth.

And one of the experiments they did, one of the results
that they found was a stuff we mentioned about carbon-14 So that was pretty interesting. Another very interesting work was some
that they did on some really tiny crystals called zircon crystals which tend to accumulate uranium when there are formed in uranium decays
into lead. And when they looked at the ratio of lead to uranium
in these crystals and did the normal calculations for radiometric dating it gave an age of one and a half billion
years for the zircon crystals, which incidentally were dug out very deep
in the earth by Los Alamos National Laboratory and
given to these guys to do the work. But what they also noticed was
that there was an awful lot of helium in these crystals.

Now when uranium decays to lead it
produces, for each uranium atom that decays 8 effectively helium nuclei which
then get electrons in turn into helium. And helium is, if you like a
slippery gas, it's very small it's noble it doesn't make any compounds so it leaks
out everything. It leaks out of helium balloons.  So if these zircons crystals are about one
and a half billion years old they should have had essentially no helium left in them and they had amounts of helium that would correspond to about 58% of the helium that would have been
produced by result of the indicated decay.

Okay so if they're very, very old
you just said that there shouldn't be a lot of helium there. That's because in one and a half
billion years it would've been plenty of time for the
helium to  migrate away, to leak out, to diffuse
out of  the zircon. But what did they find? Well
what they did before they found anything was, they did some
calculations of the rate at which helium would
diffuse through zircon if in fact the zircon crystals were one
and a half billion years old, and another set of calculations based on
what it would be if they were only six thousand years old. And the difference was pretty large like
it was a factor a hundred thousand so it's not even close.

And then they got some other  zircon crystals from the same bore
hole and sent them away to a lab to have this diffusion rate measured and the results came back exactly
corresponding to the prediction based on a 6000 year old earth. So it's a pretty good indication from radiometric
dating, if you like, for 6000 earth, based
not on assumptions about original content or anything like that, but
about how fast helium diffuses  through zircon. Completely unrelated. And the difference is, you can
actually measure the helium diffusion rates instead of just having that  as a bald assumption, we can measure that.

That's correct. That's very interesting. And one of the corollaries of that is that because that the amount of lead that was present it's a pretty
clear indication that there was indeed a period have accelerated nuclear decay in
the past. So that this assumption about the decay rate be in constant over
time is probably not correct, as has been demonstrated by recent
experiments.

Incredible. So it kind of all comes together. Science shows that accelerated nuclear
decay was a very real possibility and that fits wonderfully with the
Bible and it means that the rocks that are measured via this method are all artificially older. Correct, absolutely right.

Fascinating stuff, and we'll be back shortly. Creation Ministries International edifies the body of Christ by providing more than 30 years of Bible-supporting scientific research delivered through speaking engagements,
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the building up at the church by partnering with CMI. Donate today at  creation.Com/donate Welcome back today we're talking with
Dr Jim Mason and now we've been talking about radioisotope dating and how that didn't seem to fit with biblical history, but at the first of the show you made a actually quite a bold
statement when you said, well you know the evidence from biology,
genetics, geology even paleontology seem to  fit exactly what you'd expect
from what the Bible says.

Now that's probably a very shocking
statement to many people. They would say,  really? I thought all the evidence pointed
evolution. And coming from a scientist. Coming from a scientist.

So, could you explain what you
mean by, give us some the evidence that you feel is just so blatantly obvious.
Right, I'll try. I'm gonna start with biology
and here I'd like to quote a Nobel laureate, Dr Jaques Monod. I'm going to read this to make sure I get it right he said "But the major problem is the origin of
the genetic code and its translation mechanisms. The code
is meaningless unless translated.

The modern cells
translating machinery consists of at least  50 macromolecular components which are
themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise
than by products a translation. When and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine." In other words, the
instructions for making proteins that are encoded in DNA. Can't be decoded unless you've already
made some proteins using those machines to make the proteins. It's the chicken-and-egg problem.

Precisely. Or the CD in the CD player you have instructions for how to make a
CD player on the CD... How do you make the... Exactly.

Now it is indeed
difficult for evolutionists to imagine how that came about because it can't
come about by slow and gradual processes. But it's perfectly in agreement with what's in the Bible. And then in genetics what we've learned about
multi-level codes is that they can't come into existence spontaneously, they have to be
created by something.  And yet we have this incredibly
complex code in the DNA that we don't really understand yet, it's many, many layers and people, they say that happened by
accident.

Now on the other hand we have the SETI, the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence scientists, who are listening to to radiation from the cosmos because
they say if they see a code it'll be an indication of an
intelligence behind the code. So on the one hand they say if
you see a code it indicates intelligence behind it. On the
other hand you got all this complex code in the DNA, well I just got my accident. I mean
come on.

Actually they're contradicting
themselves in their own in their own worldview right? Correct. Okay, well
there's two great evidences what else? Ah, and in genetics again the geneticists tell us that, by looking at
mitochondrial DNA which is inherited through the female line that we have all descended from
one woman. Imagine that. With three sub lines.

And by looking at the Y chromosomal DNA
it says we've all descended from one man. Now that's exactly what you
would expect from the biblical account of creation, with the bottleneck at the flood reducing it to the three daughter-in-laws of Noah. Right.
What else could there be? I guess it's just the fact that many
people just never been exposed to the arguments, I guess that you know
CMI, Christian Ministries is known for on the website and things like that. The website is excellent yes, it has all this stuff available on the website
and it's just a great source of information Tremendous.

And even the R.A.T.E. Material, I mean if you're watching you can go to creation.Com type in RATE or get the RATE book there, "Thousands not billions" just brilliant summary of that research, fascinating stuff.  Creation dot com that's we want to
go to get more this information and we'll see you next time here on
Creation Magazine LIVE! Thanks so much for joining us. It's been my pleasure..