Homely Scientist

Carbon-14 has to be one of my favourite isotopes.  Yeah, it’s geeky, but the discovery of C14 lead to radiocarbon (C14) dating.  This has allowed us to know (roughly) how old something is.  One thing not really discussed in the media is that a C14 date is in radiocarbon years.  Not calendar years.  They differ from calendar year anywhere from a few hundred years to a few thousand.  Yeah, that’s a lot.  So when we report dates in papers we stick to reporting radiocarbon years and then give an estimated corrected date.  The estimated date even changes as the technique is refined.

I’ve submitted samples for C14 dating.  I’ve done the usual ones which take pretty large samples and the really cool mass spectrometer ones that only need tiny samples.  It’s all cool.

1940: Scientists Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben discover carbon-14, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope present in organic matter.

Kamen and Ruben, working at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Manhattan Project, made their discovery while using the university’s cyclotron to bombard matter with particles.
Source: Wired News: Feb. 27, 1940: Want a Date?

If you’d like to learn more about C14 dating check out this Wikipedia entry.

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