The enigma of Gentry'sHalos:

began my investigations into Creation Science almost twelve years ago when I gave my life back to Jesus Christ.  Intellectuals are driven by a "need to know" force within them.  Being of an intellectual mind, I asked questions - and lots of them, regarding Creation studies.  I first came across Dr. Duane Gish and the folks from the Institute for Creation Research who certainly spurned me on the road of my own discovery.  However, it was while attending Missions training at the former Last Days Ministries in Texas that one of my fellow students introduced me, via video, to a man named Dr. Carl Baugh.  This man had come to LDM to record a six hour lecture series (all done off the top of his head by the way!) and it was a lecture series that had me glued to my seat.  This single, indirect meeting altered my life and both introduced me to, and intrigued me with, his "Creation Model". This also led me to my own investigations as well as researching numerous other works of tremendous men and women of science and of God.

    I had the honour and privilegeof sharing on the subject of this essay to the 3,500 people who filtered through the fourth annual Creation Fair held in Glen Rose, Texas. I too, have also now held six hour public lectures on Creation and Evolution but there's not much doubt that Gentry's enigmatic halos are one of my favourite studies and subjects.

    The enigma begins by a study of rings left behind in the Granite crust of the earth, namely in the Biotite(Mica) crystals in the rock.

(PO₂₁₈ Radiohalo,courtesy of
Earth Science Associates. Used with permission)
 
 
 

    Dr. Robert Gentry¹took over hundreds of thousands of samples of the granite crust world wide and consistently found these halos formed in the rock.  As you can see in the picture, it is a series of microscopic rings (or "halos") formed around a speck particle.  The particle is a radioactive element trapped in the rock when it was formed.  As the element broke down radio actively (through a process called Radioactive Decay) it left behind a ring of radiation damage with each step.  We know precisely which element it was by the ring pattern and the size of the rings, and we know by experimentation in the lab just how fast these radioactive particles break down.

    Now understand that geologists basically agree that at one point in our past the entire granite crust was together in one piece, not broken up into continents and such as it is now.  It formed one giant continent (typically referred to as "Pangea") and wrapped around the entire globe as one solid structure.  At some point in our past this crust broke up, drifted apart and formed our continents, folding and buckling into Mountain ranges and trenches.
    According to uniformatarianist theory, this gigantic crystal structure formed out of molten lava and should have taken in the vicinity of 300 Million years or more to grow.  This is in stark contrast to what the bible claims in that the Lord created this planet in less than a day.
 

The Evidence and how it works: (AKA:  Gentry's halos simplified - sort of)

    Sorry to get technical on you,but bear with me - this gets fun.
    In his samples, Gentry found parentless polonium halos  (Polonium, symbolized by PO, is an element).  Radioactive breakdown occurs when a heavy, radioactive element loses a part of itself, say an electron.  When this part flies off (this is what we call "Radiation"), we are left with this element which is now different atomically - it has a completely different structure. It is a new element, a daughter element.  That element, before it lost its electron, was a parent element.  The chain continues when the new daughter element which is also unstable, loses another particle. It now becomes still yet another daughter element in the generations of radioactive breakdown.
    In this case, Uranium breaks down (decays) through a series of generational steps:  Uranium breaks down into Thorium, which breaks down into Protactinium (Just try to say that one three times fast!), to a different type of Uranium, to a different type of Thorium, to Radium, to Radon, to...  Polonium!
    The generations continue on but I think you get the point;  Polonium is part of the natural, radioactive decay chain of Uranium to Lead.  If you want to get technical about it, here is a diagram of the complete chain of generations:

    Congratulations, you just received a crash course in nuclear physics.  But we're not finished yet.

    When we say that Gentry found "Parentless" polonium halos, it is because normally polonium is found in the Uranium to Lead radioactive generations.  Uranium is normally the parent of polonium.  However, the halos Gentry found indicated NO predecessor element.  In other words, Polonium itself was the very element that was trapped in the rock when it formed.
 

The First Implications:

    The problem for uniformitarianism is that the Parentless PO₂₁₈ halos Gentry found have a half life of approximately 3 minutes.  For all intents and purposes, in the space of seven half  lives of an element, the element is essentially gone - it has broken down radioactively and doesn't exist anymore. In other words, the Polonium that made these rings didn't exist for anymore than 21 minutes!  If the granite crust was ever in a molten state it would have destroyed the rings!  Yet, here they are, preserved for our viewing.  What does this mean?
 
 

    It gets better however: He also found parentless halos from Polonium 214, a different isotope of the same element.  Whenever I hold a Creation science lecture I always offer a quarter to anyone who can tell me the half-life of Polonium 214. Believe it or not, I have lost my quarter on more than one occasion!
    Polonium 214 has a half  life of  0.000 164 seconds!  What does this mean?
 
 

   Literally as fast as you can snap your fingers, Earth was there!

...But it gets better than that.
 

The effects of the speed of light on Nuclear Physics:

    There remains one small dilemna, a slim possibility:  That radio decay rates in the past were slower than they are now.  Now as ridiculous as this sounds, this could be suggested.  This would mean that radio decay rates slowed by many magnitudes in order to achieve this result.  As impossible as this might seem, I didn't like the fact that there was two possible conclusions to this enigma.  Then the answer came to me - about two o'clock in the morning as I lay in bed stewing over this.  (What? Hasn't that happened to you?)
    Back in 1981, an Australian by the name of Barry Setterfield "resuggested" something that had already been proposed before:  That the speed of light appeared to be slowing down!²  He based this hypothesis on his studies of the measurements taken of the speed of light over 250 years. Graphed, they charted an apparent exponential decline.
    Teaming up with a mathematician, Trevor Norman, they used what was then the largest computer available in Australia to calculate that the speed of light would have been infinite

(Please see important addendum for corrections to this page)

    Besides the radical implication that light had a beginning, (Gen 1:3) this seemingly impossible claim has several lines of evidence which appear to corroborate this hypothesis. For example, V.S. Troiski, (Radiophysical Research Institute, Gorky) a Soviet scientist, had come to the same conclusion (that of a decaying speedof light) by completely independent cosmological observations.³ Setterfield initially documented some 13 different "constants" (for examplePlanck's constant), some of which would change relative to c while others would not: they behaved exactly as would be predicted.
    T.C. van Flandern (US naval observatory, Washington)  concluded after 26 years of comparing gravitational clocks (such as moon orbits) to nuclear clocks that either gravitational clocks were speeding up, or nuclear clocks were slowing down.⁴
    Nuclear clocks slowing down would be a predictable end result if the speed of light were decaying. Interestingly, this brings up the very point I am trying to make: if the speed of light were to increase, the speed at which radioactive particles decayed would also increase.  This seems to be implied even by some radiohalos themselves. ⁵
 

More startling implications:

    So let's now go back in time, back to the formation of the earth.  Now whether you subscribe to an old earth age or a young one, the point remains the same:  Anything approaching 6,000 years ago and the speed of light was infinite or near infinite.  So when this granite crust was formed, the half life of PO₂₁₄ was, technically:
 
 

    Now because you and I are finite human beings who cannot understand infinite, I have endeavoured to explain to people what this means in terms of just how fast this entire planet, our home, terra ferma, came into existence.  The best that I can do is:
 
 

    Now, based on this information, I would ask:  Does this evidence support a molten ball of lava naturally cooling into a planet?  Or does it support supernatural, ex-nihilo creation?

You be the judge.
 
 

References:

1.  Dr. Robert V. Gentry's publications on the subject of radiohalos is incredibly extensive. You can view the list for yourself at his website,  http://www.halos.com/report.htm
2.  Barry Setterfield has several articles on line, the reference is linked if available:
    Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman:  Atomic constants, light and time. 1987
    Barry Setterfield:  The vacuum, light speed and the red shift 1999, updated Feb 2000
3.  V.S. Troiski, Astrophysics and Space Science, Vol 139, 1987 (pp 389-411)
4.  T.C. van Flandern, Is the Gravitational Constant Changing? Precision Measurements and Fundamental Constants II,1984 (pp 625-627)
5.  P. Ramdohr, 1957.  Gentry documents these blasting halos on his web site, suggesting higher energies in the past from radioactive decays.  (Subtitle "Possible Evidence of Enhanced Radioactive Decay from 'Blasting' Halos", RADIOACTIVE HALOS IN A RADIOCHRONOLOGICAL AND COSMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
 

About the Author:

    Ian Juby is a technology education assistant at a high school in Pembroke, Ontario.  He has spent almost twelve years in personal studies of human origins and presents the creation model in schools, churches and private groups.  He is a member of Youth With A Mission and is registered with MensaCanada.  (Though in typical mensan fashion, he forgot to pay his membership fees and has not had his membership renewed!  -I.J.)
 
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