Re:Not Eureka (Score 1)

The greatest discoveries don't come from a "Eureka!", but from a "Huh, that's odd..." (Be careful though, the young earthers are already jumping on this to try and disprove carbon dating.)

That's pretty much what it was...."Huh, that's odd" when I saw the change associated with the flare. That's when we went and looked at the oscillations we'd seen in published data, and looked for possible causes.... As to the question of age of the Earth, if you look at the published data...it's generally decaying faster in the winter and slower in the summer, the net effect is the standard decay curve for long-lived nuclides. Some estimates for the effects on C-14 were presented by A. Sanders here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3986 It's all very interesting science, whatever it turns out to be. --JJ