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White to move and mate in two #418 - atomic clocks [1]

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Date: 2023-10-15  

While not a total Dawkins fan in light of his recent misogynistic/borderline racist comments, the man has undeniably produced a great body of work in the field of evolutionary biology. I’ve read several of his works, but the thing that stands out for me is his chapter on radiometric dating from The Greatest Show On Earth. An excerpt from that chapter:

The half-life of rubidium-87 is 49 billion years. The half-life of fermium-244 is 3.3 milliseconds. Such startling extremes serve to illustrate the stupendous range of clocks available. Although carbon-15’s half-life of 2.4 seconds is too short for settling evolutionary questions, carbon-14’s half-life of 5730 years is just right for dating on the archaeological time scale, and we’ll come to that presently. An isotope much used in the archaeological time scale is potassium-40, with its half life of 1.26 billion years, which decays to argon-40. and I’m going to use it as my example, to explain the whole idea of a radioactive clock… and then magic happens.

That last bit was paraphrased, because I ran out of time and I know you’re all chafing to get at the chess puzzle.

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