This is a false claim Bill. As Roy has pointed out, and as I further impressed upon you:
WAXS provides no independent dates!
All WAXS does is provide evidence that suggests that some fabrics may be older than others (all other things being equal). It does not(and most probably cannot) [see addendum below] provide independent dates. The dates in question come from other dating methods being performed on comparator samples.
Addendum: Correction:
A closer examination of De Caro et al 2019 (âX-ray Dating of Ancient Linen Fabricsâ) indicates that they do (at equation 8) offer an (unvalidated) method of date estimation.
However, I can see nowhere where De Caro et al 2022 (âX-ray Dating of a Turin Shroudâs Linen Sampleâ) performs this equation for the shroud. The only dating appears to be by comparison to the Carbon-dating dates for samples A, D, FII & LII.
Why not the other way around, that the carbon dating invalidates the waxes test?
Even if there is any promise in the technique, there remain a multitude of other factors which need to be controlled. Humidity varies markedly. Has the correlation of scattering against thread tension and width while spinning and looming been examined? Has the effect of storage of flax been examined? Has the variation of growing climate and plant variety been examined? Coarse, heavy cloth against the silky fine cloth?
As it stands, it is not ruled out that a scattering trend could be contrived using four samples of cloth made in 2025.
I doubt @colewd has posted a single calculation, no matter how trivial, that wasnât wrong[2] - yet you want him to delve into percentages and exponential curves? Are you trolling for miscalculations?
US grades. Equivalent of primary school level in the UK. âŠď¸
@colewd: Feel free to provide a counter-example - if one exists. âŠď¸
@colewd canât. But these guys can. And look what they found. (This is a 9 hour video, but Iâve time stamped the excerpts to the appropriate sections).
Also, as previously mentioned, Fantisâ technique is so dependent on temperature that if he is off by just a few degrees in his (very imprecise) estimate, it produces an age consistent with the C-14 dating.
I look forward to responses from Bill that deal with these objections.
Hi Ron
Good question. Both tests have error issues carbon mainly contamination and WAXS mainly temperature. The carbon date says the linen is from the 14th century. If the linen is from the 14th century the known chain of custody is France and Italy which have lower temperatures than Egypt which are some of the controls.
If you look at the paper that Faizil posted Hugh Farey had to assume chain of custody beyond France and Italy to argue that a higher temperature was responsible for the breakdown in the linen fibers.
The is a big challenge to validity of the carbon date being 14th century.
Humidity is a factor but much less of one than temperature in the model. The biggest assumption in the WAXS model is the storage temperature.
Wrong. Among other things, he showed that de Fantisâs groupâs own data provides dates that contradict their own data when applied to the other samples from which the calibration curves were drawn. e.g. the Masada fabric, which should have an aging factor of 0.7 by de Fantisâs method, actually had one that went off the scale of the chart.
Thatâs pretty funny, donât you think? What a bunch of clowns.
Yeah. They decided that the average temp and humidityin the entire country provided an accurate measure of this. How ridiculous. Especially when most of their samples for calibration were drawn from mummies that had laid in tombs for centuries.
I have not looked at the testing data on this so I donât know. I have not seen this disputed, have you?
Specifically to the shroud I agree. It is known that various contaminations can add C-14 such as bacteria. Certainly a rework would add C-14 to the sample.
A new method for dating ancient linen threads by inspecting their structural degra- dation by means of Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) [14] was recently applied to small linen samples taken from ancient fabrics, previously dated with the radiocarbon method. Our work showed that when the ancient fabrics are preserved by environmental contaminationâi.e., when they were kept in the tombs where they were foundâX-ray and 14C dating agree well [14].
The video below discusses both of the WAXS, papers, though so far, I have only watched the discussion of the 2019 paper. Itâs from the channel of Dr. David A. Falk. Who is he?
I am your host, Dr. David A. Falk, a professional Egyptologist who will answer your questions about Ancient Egypt and the Bible, and the ways that they relate to each other. I hold four graduate degrees in the fields of archaeology , Biblical studies and theology, and Egyptology. My Ph.D. is in Egyptology from the University of Liverpool.
IOW, orders of magnitude more qualified than literally anyone who is claiming the âshroudâ is authentic.
Iâve linked the video to where he discusses the serious methodological flaws with the WAXS paper, some of which have already been discussed. But to summarize.
Inadequate sample size. The data points are literally centuries apart, with nothing from the period between Medieval and modern.
No blind sampling. The investigators knew the age of the fabric samples before estimating the ages. Unbelievably shoddy technique.
Data smoothing was used to bring the results in line with what they wanted.
Very small delta for the results. This makes is essentially useless (even if we assume the test is valid in the first place) for anything prior to the Common Era. It canât distinguish 2000 years old from 5000 years old.
The measurement is performed by subjective interpretation of visual data. There is no objective data produced. This only exacerbates the effects of the lack of blind testing.
Constant room temperature and humidity is assumed, and based on the average temperature of an entire country, which is obviously ludicrous. Falk recounts Egyptian digs where the temperature was 53 degrees C, not the comfortable 22.5 degrees that the Fanti group requires.
The study does not take into account the effects of bleaching which can age a fabric by hundreds of years. All the samples, unrealistically, are assumed to be unbleached.
There is no calibration curve. Instead, the data is simply normalized by an equation. No doubt carefully chosen to produce the desired result.
Provided for the edification of anyone genuinely interested in whether there is any good reason to suspect the âshroudâ is authentic. And to increase the cognitive dissonance of others like Bill&Gil.
First the political rhetoric (shameless liar) shows you are extremely biased. I am not sure why you are afraid the shroud may be real. Since you are attempting to bring evidence to the post unlike most I am not ignoring you.
Second the video shows a criticism of the methods which are the same as Hugh was trying to make. Some of the criticisms are valid if we are trying to nail down a precise date for the shroud.
The problem is that none of these criticisms address the results that WAXS falsifies the medieval hypothesis because of the very large differences in polymer breakdown from what you would expect from a medieval sample.
The problem here is not subtile. It is a difference in measurement that is much larger than one would expect from a medieval shroud with a chain of custody starting in France and finishing in Italy.
