Radiocarbon Dating (Carbon-14 dating)
Post date: Oct 10, 2016 8:36:56 PM
Check out this article below on Radiocarbon Dating from: http://axial.acs.org/2016/10/10/discovery-of-radiocarbon-dating/ An excerpt of the article and picture of the article is posted below.
Willard F. Libby (right), the physical chemist who conceived of radiocarbon dating, with graduate student Ernest Anderson. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-03868, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Image taken from the ACS article cited in the links listed above (and below)
National Historic Chemical Landmarks: Honoring the Discovery of Radiocarbon Dating
On Oct. 10, the American Chemical Society will dedicate a National Historic Chemical Landmark at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, in honor of Willard Libby’s discovery of radiocarbon dating. Libby’s method for dating organic materials by measuring their content of carbon-14 provides objective age estimates for carbon-based objects that originated from living organisms. Libby’s discovery greatly benefitted the fields of archaeology and geology by allowing practitioners to develop more precise historical chronologies across geography and cultures.
Libby was inspired Serge Korff’s 1939 discovery that the bombardment of the atmosphere by cosmic rays produced neutrinos. Korff predicted that the reaction between these neutrons and nitrogen-14, which predominates in the atmosphere, would produce carbon-14, also called radiocarbon.