Originally posted by scottishinnz
Lol, love the "look, proof" bit!
I can't see anything that would alter the decay constant. The only way you might be able to do it would be to expose your radioactive elements to a neutron stream, but that'd cause your radioactive material to go into a run away reaction, and explode. I can see how one method could be fooled - it's easy, jus ...[text shortened]... ars to date a 25 year old rock, but when you have 7 or 8 methods yielding the same date....
When a "date" differs from that expected, researchers readily invent excuses for rejecting the result. The common application of such posterior reasoning shows that radiometric dating has serious problems. Woodmorappe cites hundreds of examples of excuses used to explain "bad" dates.
[J. Woodmorappe, The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods (San Diego, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1999).]
For example, researchers applied posterior reasoning to the dating of Australopithecus ramidus fossils.
[G. WoldeGabriel et al., "Ecological and Temporal Placement of Early Pliocene Hominids at Aramis, Ethiopia," Nature, 1994, 371:330-333.]
Most samples of basalt closest to the fossil-bearing strata give dates of about 23 Ma (Mega annum, million years) by the argon-argon method. The authors decided that was "too old," according to their beliefs about the place of the fossils in the evolutionary grand scheme of things. So they looked at some basalt further removed from the fossils and selected 17 of 26 samples to get an acceptable maximum age of 4.4 Ma. The other nine samples again gave much older dates but the authors decided they must be contaminated and discarded them. That is how radiometric dating works. It is very much driven by the existing long-age world view that pervades academia today.