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I thought carbon dating was mostly guesswork until a grad student explained the calibration curve to me
I always figured radiocarbon dates were loose estimates, but last week a grad student at a Boise State talk walked me through how tree ring data gets used to correct the raw measurements, and suddenly those plus or minus ranges made sense. She pulled up a calibration curve on her laptop and showed how a sample from an Oregon cave shifted by 400 years once it was corrected. Has anyone here worked with calibration software, and is it as finicky as it looked?
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milaprice3d ago
I used to roll my eyes at carbon dating too, figured it was just a fancy guess with big error bars. Seeing how tree rings actually anchor the whole thing made me do a 180, those plus or minus ranges suddenly mean something real. That Oregon sample shifting 400 years is wild though, really shows how much the raw numbers can lie.
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