The Shroud of Turin: What's Your Opinion?

[nooooby]

Mr Farey, in my opinion your responses demonstrate a level of obstinacy that appears unreasonable. Allow me to demonstrate why:

Well, no. A piece of cloth cut from the Shroud was dated three times independently by a well recognised and frequently used method to come up with a 14th century date. A few fibres from the vacuuming of the space between the back of the cloth and its lining were tested

In 1988 the equipment needed large samples as it was less advanced, by 2013 scientific equipment is much more sensitive and needs far less material. a classic example is DNA analysis in crimes.

The material used for the tests is indisputably from the Shroud and is the only current way modern scientific analysis can be carried out. I am sure Professor Fanti would love to conduct a modern STURP type study, but he can’t so he has done what he can with what he has got instead. In doing so he has massively advanced the evidential base.

they cannot be said to be much of a threat to a radiocarbon date.

this is pure opinion. My opinion, (and Prof Fanti etc) is that it does indeed put the C14 results under considerable doubt.

Needless to say, none of these methods, formally published in peer-reviewed journals though they be, have received any general acceptance as methods of dating archaeological textiles

Again, this is opinion. Peer reviewed is the scientific method, if the science is invalid, anybody in the world can prove it. They have not yet done so, so it stands.

The church, in the person of Cardinal Ballastero, has specifically repudiated any investigation at all of the fibres

So what! is he a scientist? Why has he repudiated it?

The other readers on this thread can make up their own mind as to whether the new dating tests are valid or not.

I have a question for you. Why did you omit these tests from your response?
The implication is that you are cherry picking evidence to support your case and only answered evidence that undermines your case when someone points it out. This makes you look partial and unreasonable.

 

[nooooby]

Thank you, but I am standing on the shoulders of giants, in this case Prof Fanti and his team.

 

[thistle]

These photos can speak for themselves and require no comment on my part. The participants on this thread can decide for themselves whether or not they bear any similarity without the condescending advice of a skeptic that doesn’t even believe that Jesus could walk on water.

The photos don’t look the same!

 

[leonhardprintz]

Mr Farey, in my opinion your responses demonstrate a level of obstinacy that appears unreasonable … The implication is that you are cherry picking evidence to support your case and only answered evidence that undermines your case when someone points it out.

You didn’t ask for an exhaustive list. You asked the following question “Have there been any such alternative dating tests?”. Hugh Farey actually answered it. Yes there had. He gave some examples, Fanti’s mechanical tests and Roger’s vanilin test. He even discussed them. And now you’re complaining about the list not being exhaustive.

He even went through one of the examples from Giulio Fanti, and how relying on chemical or mechanical properties becomes problematic when dating artefacts. Just about everything change those properties overtime depending upon temperature, humidity, handling etc… Similarly he discussed the problems with the Roger’s test.

You didn’t interact with these points at all. Instead you now speculate on motives for not discussing other tests of a similar nature.

I don’t think that’s fair.
noooby:

My opinion, (and Prof Fanti etc) is that it does indeed put the C14 results under considerable doubt.

I think there are problems with Fanti’s papers. I’ll post about those laters, unfortunate I have a really high work load this week (like last week as well) so I might not be around much.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Thank you all for your views.

Nooooby:
I’m sorry you should think that I was trying to deceive you. You asked a fairly casual question to which I gave a perfectly reasonable reply. If you had wanted a detailed scientific refutation of Giulio Fanti’s dating experiments I could have given you one, but you didn’t.

The first paper you quote, from the journal Vibrational Spectroscopy, was published some time after Fanti publicised his Shroud findings in his book Il Mistero della Sindone. Surprisingly the peer-reviewed paper does not mention the Shroud’s date at all. It does claim that “well used and understood techniques for chemical analysis can be used for dating linen”, but such are the parameters that would have to be allowed for that in fact they never are used for dating anything. They are used to characterise the chemistry of textiles, but it has not been found by anybody else that they are useful for dating. The other papers you cite are from a conference about the Shroud, whose peers consisted entirely of people who both knew Prof. Fanti and were already convinced the Shroud was authentic.

Your remark that 1 dating technique found the Shroud 14th century but 4 others found it 1st century is wide of the mark. Only one of 7 others found it 1st century. The final date was achieved by selectively collating some of the dates and averaging them out.

When you say that by 2013 very small samples can be tested you are entirely correct. My point was only that we have no way of knowing how representative the tiny fibres are of the Shroud as a whole, and no accurate way of knowing how the Shroud’s environment could have affected the mechanical and optical properties of it. It is this which has caused the Catholic Church, the putative owners of the Shroud, to deny the validity of Fanti’s claims. This statement: “The material used for the tests is indisputably from the Shroud,” is manifestly untrue. As it happens I believe it probably is, but to claim that it is indisputable is… er… disputable.

When I said that “none of these methods, formally published in peer-reviewed journals though they be, have received any general acceptance as methods of dating archaeological textiles,” you replied that: “if the science is invalid, anybody in the world can prove it.” I don’t think that makes any sense. All you have to do to show that I am wrong is to find a single archaeological textile which has been dated by any of Fanti’s methods. There aren’t any.

The other readers on this thread can make up their own mind as to whether the new dating tests are valid or not.

Of course. They probably have. And God bless them.

The implication is that you are cherry picking evidence

I think (as Leonhard has pointed out), that is unfair. I mentioned two scientists of repute who thought they have found alternative ways of dating the Shroud, and some of the ways they did so. If you want more information you only have to ask for it.

 

[CatholicTurk]

I have watched bunch of documentaries and read studies that are saying the same things as were cited above by multiple people. My personal conclusion: without a doubt, the probability of it being authentic and real is much greater than not…

 

[Hugh_Farey]

the Pray manuscript, that dates to about three hundred years before the 15th century

Thanks, Tryphon. It is important to see the Pray manuscript in context, which I fear very few sindonologists do, probably following the example of whoever first imagined he could see it as evidence of the Shroud. The one with the alleged ‘poker holes’ on is the lower of two, the top one of which shows a dead Christ with no beard and no blood, although he is naked and posed like the body in the Shroud. It is incredible to me that someone wanting to depict Christ on the basis of a known image should so ignore his facial features and his wounds.

The bottom picture is entirely typical of literally hundreds of pictures that go by the name “The Three Marys”, 'The Holy Women at the Tomb" or “The Myrrh Bearers”. By the 11th century, these almost invariably did not show any building or cave within which the Resurrection could have taken place, but only a rectangular stone box, decorated in various ways, a rectangular stone lid, invariably at a peculiar angle, and a shroud, crumpled or folded. An angel stands on or near the lid, and the three holy women occupy the other side of the picture. This is true of countless examples, and it is true of the Pray manuscript. It is wholly fanciful to suggest that the ‘rectangular stone lid’ is in fact the Shroud itself, and even more so to suggest that the zig-zag pattern on the lid, which is not untypical of several other such pictures, represents herring-bone weaving. It almost certainly represents the pattern on the stone of a particular version of the sepulchre, such as was made by the thousand across Europe for the “Quem quaeritris” Easter ritual. Several other such pictures have similar patterns, more clearly representing varieties of stone.

It is true that both the sarcophagus itself and its lid carry patterns of small circles, one of which is in the same configuration as the poker holes on the Shroud, and I have no convincing explanation, even to myself, as to what they might represent. However in my opinion to assume that the artist sketching this image chose the poker holes alone, in the wrong place, to suggest the Shroud is too far-fetched to be credible. Needless to say lots of people disagree with me!

 

[leonhardprintz]

Well I’ll be I had some extra time tonight.

I’ll have to do it in three parts.

I have checked your point around mechanical dating by Professor Fanti and although you acknowledge this study as pointing towards authenticity before quickly balancing this out with a BUT, it seems the eminent Professor’s work goes far further than this one study.

So I decided to sit down and read these reports tonight, though I might be a bit longer to reply on more aspects of them. I’ve worked with Raman Spectroscopy both during my bachelor and master thesis when studying at Aarhus University’s Institute for Physics and Astronomy. Their application to organic fibres would be outside of my expertise, since I applied the technique to study the surface property of graphene.

First of all the “one study” you’re talking about, is basically one of the reports you produced in that post. Albiet, beyond mechanically testing the fibres breaking strength and elasticity, Fanti also used Raman Spectroscopy.

I don’t want to let loose a barrage of technical words, but I want to at least summarise what one of the techniques does. Raman spectroscopy uses infrared radiation to study the prevalence of certain types of molecular bonds in a substance. The molecular bonds between say a hydrogen atom and a carbon atom, or a carbon atom and an oxygen atom, or a methyl group and a carbon atom, so on and so forth, can undergo vibrations when stimulated by radiation of the right sort of wavelength. They’ll absorb this radiation.

Exposing a meterial to a calibrated laser source and using a spectrographic detector we can get an absorption spectrum that indicates something about the relative frequency of various bonds.

In the paper, in both papers in fact, of those that were put up on the MATEC Web of Conferences, we have a discussion of just those two techniques: Mechanical properties and Raman spectroscopy.

 

[leonhardprintz]

Hugh Farey wrote made the lions share of what constitutes a problem with Fanti’s methods, I’ll try to fill in some other issues I have with it, though my expertise is in materials science.

I find that Fanti in these papers don’t adequately discuss the potential problems there could be with these tests. He does make a small attempt to test whether heat could be a problem. He heated up fibres to 200C in an oven and used those as controls, and found no difference at all for the mechanical test and apparently a few centuries of difference for the Raman test, though here we don’t see the actual data.

He arrives at a date by taking the area under various of the peaks, and deriving a number that he puts against a model he put together. He makes a reasonable assumption that various aspects will decay with exponential rates (always a good assumption to first order), and applies that to a model made from taking these various other fibres from medieval manuals and mummy linen, and fitting the best fit to it.

The problem is that he gets an answer which is 752 B.C. ± 400 years. However they also remark that the fibres which had been heated in the oven showed “a bias of some centuries”, so they subtract that bias and arrive at 400BC±300 years. In the paper however there is no discussion of how increased temperatures would affect this, so it looks rather like they put it near the ballpark of what they wanted here. Chemical effects of this type are exponential with temperature. It clearly affects the result quite significantly, but they just don’t do due diligence here to weed out the effect or discuss its size here. Its quite a red flag.

The other papers you listed are pretty much the same experiments with minor variations. I wish I could read the first one you listed, but its currently behind a pay-wall, so I’m afraid I can’t discuss it.

I think its an interesting novel technique, however its also very much a garbage-in, garbage-out technique. Comparing fibres that have been stored in stable environments to the shroud is not a straight forward comparison.

And again, Fanti in no way discusses these differences, so critiquing the studies in this is quite fair.

 

[leonhardprintz]

What is worse is that his model of mechanical degradation has a lot of parameters he has to fit against a few samples. A bunch of exponentially decaying functions with some eight different variables, and one linear function he chose (because it fit better). Its very, very iffy. That he’s able to fit anything against it is no shock. When I worked with Rietveld refinement and crystallographic data, I once showed a professor that I had achieved a precision for a structure much higher than the reference values. He asked me “Did you have a comparison that was more certain?” and I replied “No? I just assumed a simple orthorhombic crystal, and let the computer refine the variables successively” and then he replied “Useless, with that many parameters you can fit an elephant to that data”

This, both the Raman test he made and the mechanical multi-parameter-model he used has to be compared to plain old C-14 dating.

C-14 dating has one parameter only, the amount of C-14 the atmosphere around that time when the crop for the historical item was harvested (which is a known quantity). After that its just a matter of measuring the C-14/C-12 ratio using a sufficiently powerful mass spectrometer (usually a small particle accelerator), and presto you have the age.

There can be uncertainties to this technique, but in this case they would be miniscule. The decay rate of C-14 is constant and nothing chemical, and no natural environment on Earth can affect it even slightly.

The same is not true of chemical or mechanical properties of these fibres.

Furthermore we don’t have good reasons from any other evidence to distrust the C-14 data directly. There are no severe contaminations of the Shroud sufficient to affect the date. And since the 2002 restoration there’s not much of a chance left for a repair patch to exist. In order to explain how the Shroud can have a wrong C-14 date, you have to argue that something caused the quantity of C-14 to change. I can’t claim it to be impossible, but William of Ockham would have something to say about that.

For these and for other reasons I think the newer techniques should be seen in the light of the C-14 dating technique, if and until good reasons for doubting the C-14 date is put forward.

 

[tryphon]

Thanks, Hugh. I guess we see different things in that image. I see the long hair of Jesus, in a very similar pattern to what is shown in the Shroud. I see a beard, unless he was supposed to have an extremely long chin… Obviously, they did not have the much clearer image afforded by the photographic negative, in the 1100s.
It seems to me that the object with the very unique “L” shaped line of holes, which does not appear elsewhere on that object is a strong clue to a depiction of the burn holes in the Shroud. We will have to agree to disagree, respectfully, of course!

 

[undead_rat]

C-14 dating has one parameter only, the amount of C-14 the atmosphere around that time when the crop for the historical item was harvested (which is a known quantity).

Furthermore we don’t have good reasons from any other evidence to distrust the C-14 data directly. In order to explain how the Shroud can have a wrong C-14 date, you have to argue that something caused the quantity of C-14 to change.

It is not necessarily true that “C-14 dating has one parameter only.” If you believe in the accounts of the Holy Gospels, then you know that Jesus’ corpse vanished from the inside of a sealed tomb. Of course science does not have other data on what residual radiation might be left from by a vanishing corpse, but that does not mean that the possibility must be discounted. A neutron flux is a second possible parameter.

Antonacci and Rucker do not “distrust the C-14 data.” They just want that data to be interpreted correctly. As they have pointed out, that interpretation was dominated and directed by the atheist head of Oxford’s C-14 laboratory, Prof. Edward Hall. He manipulated the raw data which had a variance of 250 years in order to achieve the result of a date, and he failed to consider the linear relationship that the data had with its distance from the Shroud’s image.

The Shroud does not have a “wrong C-14 date.” It does not have any C-14 date at all. The data that was retrieved from the C-14 testing is not indicative of a date. It indicates an event, an event that is clearly described in our Holy Gospels. Unless, of course, one wants to discount that truth.

Role of Radiation in Image Formation on the Shroud of Turin

Formation of the image on the Shroud required three things: a discoloration mechanism, energy, and information. There must have been some process or mechanism that caused discoloration on the top portions of the fibers that make up the image on the

www.academia.edu

 

[nooooby]

All you have to do to show that I am wrong is to find a single archaeological textile which has been dated by any of Fanti’s methods. There aren’t any.

Ok, Fanti’s used 13 different test samples to prove the method’s he was using were accurate. Do you want me to publish them?

This thread has had some consistent themes from the sceptics, eg show me the scientific evidence and we are only interested in the Truth. Well Fanti has provided the scientific evidence and the response we get is akin to modern day Pontius Pilates; “Truth, what is truth?”

I would bet any amount of money that if any new dating tests demonstrate a mediaeval date, the sceptics would be citing them as scientific evidence that corroborates the C14 dating. The fact that the only new peer reviewed dating tests demonstrate an much earlier date is greeted with a barrage of these “tests are not valid because we disagree with them”. Therefore they say the 1988 C14 dating is valid, the 2013 era tests are not. Oh dear…

The comments from both Mr Farey and leonhardprintz are very long on rhetoric and very short on peer reviewed science demonstrating that Fanti’s new tests are invalid. comments such as:

he other papers you cite are from a conference about the Shroud, whose peers consisted entirely of people who both knew Prof. Fanti and were already convinced the Shroud was authentic.

are totally irrelevant, as the Fanti papers have been published for peer review, anybody in the world can oppose them scientifically.

The central charge still stands:

Show the peer reviewed scientific studies that demonstrate that Fanti’s results are invalid. I am not interested in your opinion or additional waffle. if you cannot, then on the basis of your own criteria Fanti’s results stand and you must concede the point.

 

[po18guy]

I’m certain it has been mentioned, but Fr. Robert Spitzer, Physicist and founder of https://www.magiscenter.com/, sheds light on the entire testing debacle. Read and watch a short video here. There are also several interviews done by Doug Keck with Fr. Spitzer on EWTN/YouTube. Fascinating for those interested.

Fr. Spitzer’s description of the incredibly complex and clearly not man-made image are extremely convincing. Why would the world oppose it?

Because it hated Christ first.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Show the peer reviewed scientific studies that demonstrate that Fanti’s results are invalid. I am not interested in your opinion or additional waffle. if you cannot, then on the basis of your own criteria Fanti’s results stand and you must concede the point.

How very like Undead_rat you sound! I’m afraid you miss the point, which I thought I had made quite clearly. If someone discovers a new method of dating textiles, and goes to the trouble, not to say expense, of constructing an extremely subtle machine for measuring various mechanical parameters of single fibres, and then, using numerous known textiles from museums, created an accurate calibration chart, you would have thought that archaeologists would be beating a path to his door, or constructing their own machines, in order for the method to be used in their own researches. It simply hasn’t happened. For all I know it may be the greatest advance in archaeological dating technique since thermo-luminescence, but the fact that it hasn’t caught on at all speaks volumes.

A while ago you were quite sensibly asking me for evidence to support my view that the Shroud is not authentic, and I did my best to do so. I have presented what I know about Giulio Fanti’s experiments to the best of my ability, and explained why it is not thought that in terms of provenance, treatment or statistics the results can be considered conclusive. Leonhardprintz, above, has done the same. I have no objection to your thinking differently.

I would bet any amount of money that if any new dating tests demonstrate a mediaeval date, the sceptics would be citing them as scientific evidence that corroborates the C14 dating.

You would lose your money. I have myself read numerous lists of why the Shroud cannot be authentic and publicly refuted every one, from misquotations in the bible to false archaeological comparisons. I am not necessarily convinced by non-authenticist claims any more than authenticist ones.

The fact that the only new peer reviewed dating tests demonstrate an much earlier date is greeted with a barrage of these “tests are not valid because we disagree with them”.

You do not appear to have noted that the only paper regarding these results to be published in a peer-reviewed journal does not mention the Shroud’s date at all. The Matec Web of Conference proceedings are published “under the scientific responsibility of the conference editors” according to Matec’s website.
You also seem conveniently to have forgotten that the radiocarbon dating paper was published in the single most respected peer-reviewed science journal in the world.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Fr. Spitzer’s description of the incredibly complex and clearly not man-made image are extremely convincing. Why would the world oppose it?

In an earlier response to another longer lecture by Fr Spitzer, I listed a detailed refutation of the first twenty major factual errors he makes, with fully referenced sources. Feeling that it would not be fair to criticise him without giving him a chance to reply, I have sent the same list of errors to the magiscenter for consideration. It has not seen fit to reply. Almost the first thing he says in the video you mention above is that the Shroud was radiocarbon dated to the 15th century. This is plain wrong, and easily refuted by a glance at the paper published in Nature, which is also reproduced at shroud.com.

Because it hated Christ first.

No. Because the truth of Christ is not enhanced or maintained by erroneous facts or misrepresentations.

 

[po18guy]

1. Who are you?
2. What are your qualifications?
3. Please list the dates/times that you personally examined the image on the shroud.
4. Details regarding spectrographic analysis and other scientific tests, of which you personally conducted or witnessed are required, since you are the accuser here.

Thank you for your cooperation.

 

[undead_rat]

Almost the first thing he says in the video you mention above is that the Shroud was radiocarbon dated to the 15th century. This is plain wrong,(. . .)

Antonacci (the former prosecuting attorney) uncovered the raw C-14 data. At least one of those dates was 15th century.

 

[nooooby]

Mr Farey,

How very like Undead_rat you sound!

This is an ad-hominin attack that you mean to discredit me with (no offence undead_rat!). This is in response to the direct challenge to provide peer review scientific evidence that invalidates Prof Fanti’s results that demonstrates an much earlier than medieval origin for the Shroud’s linen cloth.

You have manifestly failed to provide this and therefore any reasonable person can conclude there is no such evidence and therefore the point is now conceded.

Therefore, although you will no doubt try to continue as if nothing has happened, I at least will now participate on this thread on the basis that Prof Fanti’s results have scientifically demonstrated that there is a reasonable basis for a date of origin of the cloth consistent with the authentic case.

The C14 dating results have now been undermined by these new tests, this is a major problem for the sceptics.

 

[leonhardprintz]

I’m not sure what the point of these questions are po18guy. The issue is the science, not my qualifications. The authenticists don’t have to present their qualifications, so I don’t see why I have to.

Who are you?

I am a graduate student of Aarhus University.

What are your qualifications?

Bachelor in Nanotechnology and a Master in Physics specializing in Surface Physics.

Please list the dates/times that you personally examined the image on the shroud.

I have not done so. Like you I rely on the evidence others have gathered. The Shroud of Turin has been examined for all of three weeks in total. The rest is a discussion about the evidence gathered during that period of time, or from other known fragments of it.

Details regarding spectrographic analysis and other scientific tests, of which you personally conducted or witnessed are required,

That’s a weird request. You want me to list all the experiments I conducted while I was at campus? Its not like those are all necessarily documented. You can have it on good faith that I personally used a Scanning Tunnel Microscope for more than a year. I similarly worked with many ultra-high vacuum techniques. I’ve used Raman spectroscopy more than once, including on a world-class facility at University of Southern Denmark while studying a sample of graphene we had attempted to grow on a metal. We didn’t find the telltale signs of C-C bonds in that case though. I’ve operated a particle accelerator used for C-14 dating, and so I have at least a cursory level of familiarity with that technique.

po18guy:

since you are the accuser here

I also have little red horns.