Re: Shroud of Turin

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You would also say that the Turin shroud is genuine.

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Quite irrelevant to the present discussion.
Anyhow, you seem not to be aware of the last developments on the Turin shroud.

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Very relevant, since you have provided no evidence, only opinion.

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Yes, irrelevant. I will just make note of the creationists’ tendency to immediately treat the most obscure garbage pseudoscience as if it is holy writ, so long as it seems to confirm their personal prejudices. At the same time as they ignore the vast mountains of peer-reviewed evidence contradicting their beliefs.

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For one, see if you can find a single reference that uses this dating method and is not about the “shroud”. That’s a start.

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Well, the authors are serious and competent scientists, experts on cristallography that work at the Institute of Cristallography of the National Research Council of Italy. Their work has been peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal. Moreover, they have published their new dating method in 2019 and showed that, given certain conditions, it compares well with the C14 dating method but is much cheaper, doesn’t destroy the sample and is not sensitive to contamination.
So I repeat my question: what make you think that these authors are pseudo scientists that publish pseudoscience, beside the fact that you don’t like their conclusion?
For the record, here is the abstract of their 2019 paper:
We propose a new method for dating ancient linen threads by inspecting their structural degradation by means of wide-angle X-ray scattering. X-ray dating of a textile sample can be performed nondestructively and on a submillimeter area, e.g., 0.2 × 0.5 mm2, exploiting new table-top X-ray micro-sources. A theoretical formula is derived for dating linen samples directly from wide-angle X-ray scattering measurements. Our preliminary results show that X-ray dating results are in agreement with other dating sources, such as the radiocarbon method and historical records, if some conditions are satisfied. Indeed, this new dating method can be applied only to threads not older than about thirty centuries because of the saturation of the structural degradation with age. Moreover, the method can be applied only on textiles in which cellulose degradation is mainly due by natural aging arising from thermal, hydrolytic, photolytic, photochemical, and oxidative processes. Analyses can be repeated several times on the same sample, which remains unaltered for other complementary characterization procedures. The proposed X-ray dating of some ancient linen fabrics opens the way to explore limits and potentialities of this new approach and to further develop a new dating method, alternative to the existing ones for specific applications in archeological studies.

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Those would be the developments of which I’ve already pointed out problems.

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I trust that these serious and competent scientists have tested their method on a number of other historical textiles of known age for calibration, before applying it to a controversial item like the shroud? Can you enlighten us on that?

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May be, but they did not publish this work in a serious and competent journal. MDPI is not a reputable scientific publisher.

MDPI journals are not reputable.

What conditions? Be specific.

The idea of using unraveling for dating makes no sense.

Why do you make objectively false claims about journals based on your liking their conclusion?

Your copy/pasting of text does not suggest that you understand any of this.

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OK, fine, but irrelevant. You have not answered the question I actually asked: Can you find a single reference that uses this dating method and is not about the “shroud?

Did you try to find examples, and were unable? Did just not bother looking? Do you not understand why the question is relevant?

Anyway, for people genuinely interested in the weaknesses of this attempted argument for the authenticity of the “shroud”, this is a good discussion:

https://medievalshroud.com/waxsing-and-waning/

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Yes, their 2019 paper is not about the shroud.

Given that the waxs method is in its infancy, your question is irrelevant at this stage. Let’s wait to see what is going to happen in the next few years.

Contrary to you, the author of the piece you are referring to doesn’t believe Di Caro et al are pseudo scientists publishing pseudoscience. He acknowledges that their waxs methodology may eventually prove to be successful. Here is how he concludes his piece: We’ll have to wait to see if this crystallographic idea meets with better success.

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So these investigators devised new method that they believe can be used to date ancient textiles and publish a paper on it. Then they publish a paper using this method they made up to date the “shroud” of Turin. And then neither they nor anyone else ever publishes a single paper ever again using this method on anything else.

I believe my point has been made.

By all means. Indeed, you should wait for confirmation that this method is not utterly useless before citing it as evidence that the “shroud” is real. I’m glad you finally understand the point.

For those who don’t want to read the whole article, here is the entire last paragraph. I will let the reader decide if @Giltil has engaged in a bit of quote mining here:

Ignoring the Shroud for a moment, it might be thought that the possibility of dating archaeological textiles by two or three different methods could only be a good thing. If mechanical deterioration could really be used as a chronograph, then surely it would have been taken up by now, but a glance at Google Scholar tells us that ‘Multi-parametric micro-mechanical dating of single fibers coming from ancient flax textiles’ has only been cited 11 times since publication in 2014, 7 times by Fanti himself, and all of them solely in connection with the Shroud. The archaeological world, it seems, remains unimpressed. We’ll have to wait to see if this crystallographic idea meets with better success.

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We’ve only had a decade already, but the “next few” will be crucial? In 3 years you’ll agree their method is trash? Don’t make me laugh.

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The first publication for dating archeological textiles by waxs dates from 5 years ago, not really a decade. And given that it is far from uncommon that initial reception of new methods can be slow, not yet seeing publications by other independent authors using it is not unexpected.
Di Caro knows that his method is in its infancy. In order for it to gain acceptance, he proposes to involve several independent laboratories in a dating experiment using the technique he has developed and that could be carried out as a blind experiment, that is, without laboratories knowing which samples are taken from the Shroud compared with those taken from other linen fabrics, to avoid any possible bias in the data analysis by the authors of the research. I hope this type of experiment can be done. Let’s wait and see.
Now, I would like to know. Do you agree with @Faizal_Ali that the method developed by Di Caro et al for dating textiles is rubbish?

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But his initial method, that involved the facially ludicrous method of bending fibres to see how easily they break, had been suggested over a decade ago. I guess he’s given up on that one and hoping he’ll have more success with the new one. Of course, he doesn’t need any such scientific tests to believe the “shroud” is real since this was revealed to him thru some mystical experience. He’s just looking very hard for some scientific validation of his faith-based beliefs.

Can you explain, then, why he went ahead an published a paper claiming to have dated the “shroud” of Turin to the time of Jesus, when the method has still not been validated?

Why involve samples from the “shroud” at all? Especially given the controversy associated with that artifact, and the great difficulty obtaining samples? Wouldn’t it make sense to use readily available artifacts whose dates are universally accepted? What progress has he made in actually carrying out this planned study?

Another question: Why are so many religious apologists touting this work as new proof that the “shroud” is authentic, when in fact it remains an unproven and unvalidated dating method?

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  1. Because the flaws are not yet widely known, and
  2. Because they haven’t anything better.
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Again for the benefit of those too busy to read the entire article, another quote:

Fanti claims that this Shroud sample is “a thread taken in proximity of the 1988/ radiocarbon area (corner of the TS corresponding to the feet area of the frontal image) near the so-called Raes sample”… To mainstream sindonologists (mostly American) this will present a challenge. One school of thought is that the Shroud in that area is so covered in grime and contamination that any kind of experimentation with it is bound to be fruitless. Another claims that this area was substantially repaired during the Middle Ages and that threads from this region are either medieval cotton or closely interwoven with medieval cotton, and a third claims that the miracle of the Resurrection flooded the area with neutrons, which must surely have had some deleterious effect on the cellulose. Actually discovering that this piece of Shroud might be accurately dateable will disturb some of these ideas.

IOW, those, like @Giltil, who are touting this “research” as important new data that supports the authenticity of the “shroud” would first have to admit that the originally published C-14 findings dating it to the 13th or 14th century was accurate, and then explain how this new and untested technique of de Caro’s could produce a very different result and yet also be correct. A bit of a problem there.

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Also from the same article:

Q.E.D.? Sadly not. Although the authors declare no conflict of interest, which may in its commonly recognised financial sense be true, at least two are deeply personally convinced of the authenticity of the Shroud, and three were authors of a Plos One paper on the characterisation of the blood on the Shroud which was subsequently retracted by Plos One, which decided on reconsideration after “concerns have been raised” that “the main conclusions of the article are not sufficiently supported,” specifically that the extrapolation of results from a single fibre of insecure provenance to describe the degree of suffering of a tortured man were unjustifed (Carlino, Elvio; De Caro, Liberato; Giannini, Cinzia; Fanti Giulio, ‘Atomic resolution studies detect new biologic evidences on the Turin Shroud,’ Plos One, June 2017). Significantly, WAXS was involved in that investigation too. Furthermore, Giulio Fanti is convinced the Shroud is authentic based on a personal revelation in 1998 (see shroud.com/pdfs/Fanti-refl.pdf), and De Caro has published several papers justifying the visions of Maria Valtorta, whose “Poem of the Man God” was published in 1956 (e.g., Matricciani, Emilio and De Caro, Liberato, ‘A Mathematical Analysis of Maria Valtorta’s Mystical Writings,’ Religions, November 2018, and De Caro, Liberato, et al., ‘Hidden and coherent chronology of Jesus’ life in the literary work of Maria Valtorta,’ SCIREA Journal of Sociology, December 2021). The claim that the authors have no conflict of interest, when they are actually avowedly committed to the authenticity of the Shroud, is dishonest, even if their experimentation was flawlessly unbiased, which I’m sure it was.

I cannot help but see parallels between this and Burgess’ situation in the previous thread. Both have an overwhelming religious predisposition to come to their conclusions. Thus neither conclusion is credible, lacking iron-clad supporting evidence (which both articles lack).

I will further note that @Giltil’s own predisposition towards relying heavily on such flawed sources does nothing to help his credibility, or that of his arguments.

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