Willard Frank Libby

Who invented carbon dating:

Radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard Frank Libby, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960 for his work on this method. Radiocarbon dating is a way of determining the age of biological artifacts up to about 50,000 years old. It is based on the fact that carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon, is constantly being created in the Earth's atmosphere. When an organism dies, it stops taking in carbon-14, and the radioactive isotope begins to decay. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 left in a sample and comparing it to the initial amount of carbon-14, scientists can determine how long it has been since the sample died. This technique has been widely used to date archaeological and geological samples, as well as to measure the age of the Earth.

To perform carbon dating, scientists take a sample of the material they want to date and send it to a laboratory where it is analyzed using a mass spectrometer, a device that measures the amount of carbon-14 in the sample. From this measurement, the age of the sample can be calculated.