I’ve looked through that document, and it does no such thing.
For starters, the WAXS technique they’re using doesn’t measure age. It gives information about crystal structure. The author is claiming a 2,000 year age for the shroud on the basis that it has the same crystalline properties as a piece of cloth from Masada. But his results dn’t even support that.
Here’s his WAXS plot data:
Even if his WAXS plot was showing sample age, and there’s no reason to think it is, his plotted line for the Turin Shroud doesn’t actually match the plot for the 2,000 year old sample.
Sorry I haven’t had time to keep up with this discussion, but other dating methods based on crystals, like zircon crystals for U235/238 dating, date the crystal itself, providing an upper bound on the age of the object in which the crystal is embedded. Is this also the case here?
Before we get too deep into this latest attempt at “evidence”, let’s just consider this question: Why would someone who has just developed what they claim to be a new method for dating ancient artifacts choose to focus one of their first papers describing the method on the “Shroud” of Turin? I can’t think of any legitimate scientific reason that someone would to this. They would, instead choose some objects on whose age everyone agrees.
And then use it for several years until it establishes a pedigree equivalent to that of radiocarbon dating.
Then, and only then, would we be justified in concluding that the apparent discrepancy between this method and the C-14 dating of the “shroud” is due to some reason other than that this new method simply doesn’t work.
Definitely not. WAXS (Wide Angle X-ray Scattering) is an X-ray crystallography technique that differentiates material based on X-ray scattering angles. Anyone wanting to tie the results to the age of a sample would need to explain why any variation in structure they’ve seen is age-related rather than due to any of the many other possible causes of variation.[1] Simply plotting five lines isn’t enough, especially when the plot doesn’t show a consistent change and doesn’t even have labelled axes. This is just not a dating technique. They might as well be claiming the Turin shroud is 2,000 years old because they’ve measured it with a ruler and found it’s intermediate in length (but not width!) between an Egyptian mummy-wrapping and a onesie.
there’s a paper here that shows how results can vary for the same piece of material if treated with heat, methanol and/or pectin. ↩︎
This. This is as close to a “conclusive proof” of the non-authenticity of the shroud as one could get from empirical observation, short of time travel.
If you wrap a cloth on someone in a way that their face should leave an imprint, it would have to wrap around their head, not somehow leave a seen-from-the-front image as the bad attempt of a portrait we find on the shroud.
Hi Dan
There is evidence in the paper from several controls that the method can predict age. Age in itself does not affirm authenticity but it has renewed my interest in the shroud as scientific evidence for the resurrection. Additional evidence is the sudarium which is the head piece of Jesus where many blood stains matches the shroud. What is fascinating is that they are currently in different locations the sudarium Spain) and the shroud (Italy). An interesting discussion of sudarium is on https://shroud.com
Both the shroud and the sudarium are mentioned in the gospel of John.
Here is the full article for anyone who hasn’t seen it already. My main observation here is the method comes with a stack of assumptions about the conditions under which cellulose tends to polymerize. It’s interesting, but not well validated.
Bill, this is an incredibly lame paper. Here’s an example:
Recently, new dating methods of textiles have been proposed based on the mechanical analysis such as breaking strength, Young modulus, and loss factor and on opto-chemical analyses (by FT-IR and Raman spectroscopies) as a function of the age of the fabric [13,14,15]. These new dating methods are possible alternatives to the radiocarbon dating of textiles [16].
When someone cites something to support a claim, as in the last sentence, the cited literature should support the claim.
Most people, when citing a book, cite a specific chapter(s) or page(s). That’s not the case here. Nothing in the abstract or the chapter titles suggests agreement with the claim.
Have you read the whole book so that you can point us to the way it supports the claim that this is a viable alternative? The whole paper depends on that and I don’t see a speck of evidence to support it.
Can you point to specific evidence (not words) that you find convincing?
The usual response from believers is that the image was produced by some miraculous burst of radiation of some other unique event, so it would not be expected to look like that.
@giltill I think you found an interesting paper, but it remains to be seen if the archeology field will adopt the method. It’s too early to say, and the method is so new we should not expect more.
I also think@Faizal has a point; the image on the shroud is consistent with an artistic depiction on linen, not a projection of a face wrapped in linen. That does not preclude it from being special, but I think you can understand why many remain skeptical.
Yes, saw that one (a very limited validation set), and eight other papers citing the method. This is still a small group of authors (note the names in common between papers). Papers introducing great new methodologies tend to accumulate thousands of citations because everyone is using that new method. That has not happened YET, and as I noted it is TOO EARLY, with the method introduced only three years ago.
Maybe this will become the next Kaplan-Meier method (the top ten? most cited papers in all of science), maybe it will find a few niche uses, or maybe it will fizzle compared to other new methods being introduced (did you see those?). Maybe it’s great, and maybe it aint … when archaeologists start using it in large numbers, we can see that in the citations.
Like Faizal, I find that applying a new method to make claims about the Shroud is kind of unusual. If you want to validate a method, that first thing you do try to replicate measurements made by standard methods and compare, describing the differences. You want to be careful about what claims you make, because your new method could be wrong (it doesn’t have a fraction of the validation that C-14 has, yet).
Next you look for patterns in the differences - like what happens to the estimate when the sample has been exposed to less than ideal conditions. When does the method work as expected and when does it not? There are a lot of assumptions made in the paper, but no exploration of the effect on the method when these assumptions are violated.
Finally, for a new method to replace an old one, you build a case based on many examples that the new method works better. THIS IS HARD TO DO. I base this on my experience as a statistician, and I must have done dozens of these studies. You need a really large test set, minimally hundreds of samples - I don’t see that here, not yet. It’s just way too early to claim this method is more accurate than carbon dating.
AND, I really do think @Giltil found an interesting paper, so I’m trying to give it a fair evaluation.
The authors of Bill’s paper breezily ignore that and assert that it was a wrap:
The Turin Shroud (TS) is the most-studied archaeological object in the world [1,2]. The TS is an ancient linen cloth, 4.4 m long and 1.1 m wide, which wrapped the corpse…
That tells you all about their integrity you need to know.
IntCal20, the latest carbon 14 curve, is based on tens of thousands of data points involving absolutely dated material such as tree rings and varves. When there is a comparable rigor for this scattering technique, I will pay attention. Until then, I would not waste time questioning the AMS carbon dating by three independent labs which confirm the shroud as one of the typical medieval fakes produced in that period. As a exemplary fraud, it is actually pretty interesting.
