I was in History class the other day and I asked how people are able to get “accurate” dates for how old certain objects are. He said something along the lines of there are certain elements in materials and they decay overtime, half life this so we know roughly how long ago it was made.
I’m a mathematics major and am proficient in physics. I understand the concept of exponential decay and half-life’s. My questions is how do we know how much of a material we are measuring there initially was? To me, without knowing that, we could say that something was made whenever we want it to be made. Clearly I’m missing something but I can’t quite figure it out.
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Really depends on what you’re looking at. Carbon dating is one method. Another method would be, if you dug something up, to look at how much sediment is on top of the object and use geological data to determine how long it took to get buried. Another method would be by comparing it to known objects of the same time period.
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