system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If all the matter in the universe was creates at the same time, how does carbon dating work?

I think the title is clear enough, but I'll elaborate. How can we carbon date something, if all matter was created during the Big Bang? Were the necessary components there, and carbon just wasn't created all at the same time? To me, without a lot of knowledge on the subject, it's like handing someone a brick made 10 years ago, and carbon dating also shows it was created 10 years ago, but the stuff the brick is made out of was created a lot longer before that. How does this work?
gpt
Carbon dating doesn't date the age of the matter.  Carbon dating works because when something is alive it takes in carbon.  A certain % of that carbon is carbon 14.  When the thing dies it stops taking in carbon, unless it like catches on fire or something.  What then happens is that the carbon 14 that is now left starts to decay. By comparing how much carbon something has, and what % of that is carbon 14, you can work out how long ago that thing died.  It only goes back about 60k years or so before there's not enough carbon 14 left to get a good estimate of age.