Assumptions baked into the VMS carbon dating

[MarcoP]

This is pure speculation. Since we have hard data, I think sticking to them is the best possible approach. More carbon testing could potentially find that there are pages that are more than 60,000 years old, therefore time-travel or alien technology is involved.

Yes, that point is pure speculation.
But why are you characterising what i've said in that way? I haven't claimed once that the results for the samples are incorrect. How is saying "we might find more samples like one of the samples we used" in any way similar to potential time travel and alien influence?

They are similar in all being pure speculation, so you get my point. It’s probably just me, but I cannot make sense of arguments that compare evidence with speculation.
Of course, there is speculation and speculation, and aliens are in different category, I apologize.

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Maybe this has been mentioned already, I don’t know much about statistics, it’s possible I misunderstood something or made errors, but this is how I understand it:


The sample from f26 results in a carbon measure (14C fraction) of 0.9380 ± 0.0041 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

I used a python script to repeatedly extract 4 samples from a gaussian with mean 0.9380 and sigma 0.0041. This simulates four samples taken from a single page, different values are due to instrument error alone. The script computes the mean standard deviation for these groups of 4 samples, and I get 0.0038; I understand that this is the expected standard deviation for 4 samples taken from a single page. The 4 VMS measures are closer to each other, with a standard deviation of 0.0030.
In 66% of cases, four measures taken from the same page would result in a standard deviation >0.0030.

The 4 VMS measures are less spread-out than what is expected for 4 samples from the same page. As Hodgins says, this suggests that “a single object was measured 4 times”.