What I want to do in this video is
kind of introduce you to the idea of,
one, how carbon-14 comes about, and how
it gets into all living things.
And then either later in this video or in future videos
we'll talk about how it's actually
used to date things, how we use it actually figure out
that that bone is 12,000 years old,
or that person died 18,000 years ago, whatever it might be.
So let me draw the Earth.
So let me just draw the surface of the Earth like that.
It's just a little section of the surface of the Earth.
And then we have the atmosphere of the Earth.
I'll draw that in yellow.
So then you have the Earth's atmosphere right over here.
Let me write that down, atmosphere.
And 78%, the most abundant element in our atmosphere
is nitrogen.
It is 78% nitrogen.
And I'll write nitrogen.
Its symbol is just N. And it has seven protons,
and it also has seven neutrons.
So it has an atomic mass of roughly 14.
Then this is the most typical isotope of nitrogen.
And we talk about the word isotope
in the chemistry playlist.
An isotope, the protons define what element it is.
But this number up here can change depending
on the number of neutrons you have.
So the different versions of a given element,
those are each called isotopes.
I just view in my head as versions of an element.
So anyway, we have our atmosphere,
and then coming from our sun, we have
what's commonly called cosmic rays,
but they're actually not rays.
They're cosmic particles.
You can view them as just single protons, which
is the same thing as a hydrogen nucleus.
They can also be alpha particles,
which is the same thing as a helium nucleus.
And there's even a few electrons.
And they're going to come in, and they're
going to bump into things in our atmosphere,
and they're actually going to form neutrons.
So they're actually going to form neutrons.
And we'll show a neutron with a lowercase n, and a 1
for its mass number.
And we don't write anything, because it
has no protons down here.
Like we had for nitrogen, we had seven protons.
So it's not really an element.
It is a subatomic particle.
But you have these neutrons form.
And every now and then-- and let's
just be clear-- this isn't like a typical reaction.
But every now and then one of those neutrons
will bump into one of the nitrogen-14's
in just the right way so that it bumps off
one of the protons in the nitrogen
and essentially replaces that proton with itself.
So let me make it clear.
So it bumps off one of the protons.
So instead of seven protons we now have six protons.
But this number 14 doesn't go down to 13
because it replaces it with itself.
So this still stays at 14.
And now since it only has six protons,
this is no longer nitrogen, by definition.
This is now carbon.
And that proton that was bumped off just kind of gets emitted.
So then let me just do that in another color.
So plus.
And a proton that's just flying around,
you could call that hydrogen 1.
And it can gain an electron some ways.
If it doesn't gain an electron, it's
just a hydrogen ion, a positive ion, either way,
or a hydrogen nucleus.
But this process-- and once again, it's
not a typical process, but it happens every now
and then-- this is how carbon-14 forms.
So this right here is carbon-14.
You can essentially view it as a nitrogen-14
where one of the protons is replaced with a neutron.
And what's interesting about this is this
is constantly being formed in our atmosphere,
not in huge quantities, but in reasonable quantities.
So let me write this down.
Constant formation.
And let me be very clear.
Let's look at the periodic table over here.
So carbon by definition has six protons,
but the typical isotope, the most common isotope of carbon
is carbon-12.
So carbon-12 is the most common.
So most of the carbon in your body is carbon-12.
But what's interesting is that a small fraction
of carbon-14 forms, and then this carbon-14
can then also combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide.
And then that carbon dioxide gets
absorbed into the rest of the atmosphere, into our oceans.
It can be fixed by plants.
When people talk about carbon fixation,
they're really talking about using mainly light energy
from the sun to take gaseous carbon
and turn it into actual kind of organic tissue.
And so this carbon-14, it's constantly being formed.
It makes its way into oceans-- it's already in the air,
but it completely mixes through the whole atmosphere--
and the air.
And then it makes its way into plants.
And plants are really just made out
of that fixed carbon, that carbon that
was taken in gaseous form and put into,
I guess you could say, into kind of a solid form,
put it into a living form.
That's what wood pretty much is.
It gets put into plants, and then it
gets put into the things that eat the plants.
So that could be us.
Now why is this even interesting?
I've just explained a mechanism where some of our body,
even though carbon-12 is the most common isotope, some
of our body, while we're living, gets made up
of this carbon-14 thing.
Well, the interesting thing is the only time
you can take in this carbon-14 is while you're alive,
while you're eating new things.
Because as soon as you die and you
get buried under the ground, there's
no way for the carbon-14 to become part of your tissue
anymore because you're not eating anything
with new carbon-14.
And what's interesting here is once you die,
you're not going to get any new carbon-14.
And that carbon-14 that you did have at you're death
is going to decay via beta decay--
and we learned about this-- back into nitrogen-14.
So kind of this process reverses.
So it'll decay back into nitrogen-14, and in beta decay
you emit an electron and an electron anti-neutrino.
I won't go into the details of that.
But essentially what you have happening here
is you have one of the neutrons is turning into a proton
and emitting this stuff in the process.
Now why is this interesting?
So I just said while you're living
you have kind of straight-up carbon-14.
And carbon-14 is constantly doing this decay thing.
But what's interesting is as soon
as you die and you're not ingesting anymore
plants, or breathing from the atmosphere if you are a plant,
or fixing from the atmosphere.
And this even applies to plants.
Once a plant dies, it's no longer taking in carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere and turning it into new tissue.
The carbon-14 in that tissue gets frozen.
And this carbon-14 does this decay at a specific rate.
And then you can use that rate to actually determine how
long ago that thing must've died.
So the rate at which this happens,
so the rate of carbon-14 decay, is essentially half disappears,
half gone, in roughly 5,730 years.
And this is actually called a half life.
And we talk about in other videos.
This is called a half life.
And I want to be clear here.
You don't know which half of it's gone.
It's a probabilistic thing.
You can't just say all the carbon-14's on the left are
going to decay and all the carbon-14's on the right
aren't going to decay in that 5,730 years.
What it's essentially saying is any given carbon-14 atom
has a 50% chance of decaying into nitrogen-14
in 5,730 years.
So over the course of 5,730 years, roughly half of them
will have decayed.
Now why is that interesting?
Well, if you know that all living things have
a certain proportion of carbon-14 in their tissue,
as kind of part of what makes them up,
and then if you were to find some bone-- let's
just say find some bone right here
that you dig it up on some type of archaeology dig.
And you say, hey, that bone has one half the carbon-14 of all
the living things that you see right now.
It would be a pretty reasonable estimate
to say, well, that thing must be 5,730 years old.
Even better, maybe you dig a little deeper,
and you find another bone.
Maybe a couple of feet even deeper.
And you say, wow, you know this thing right over here
has 1/4 the carbon-14 that I would
expect to find in something living.
So how old is this?
Well, if it only has 1/4 the carbon-14
it must have gone through two half lives.
After one half life, it would have had 1/2 the carbon.
And then after another half life, half of that
also turns into a nitrogen-14.
And so this would involve two half lives,
which is the same thing as 2 times 5,730 years.
Or you would say that this thing is what?
You'd say this thing is 11,460 years old, give or take.