The arguments of champion politicians 
It’s worse than that - AFAIK there is only one WAXS tested object for which the WAXS date is not a C14 date used for WAXS calibration. So they are saying that the C14 dates of the samples match the C14 dates of the samples.
The exception is the shroud - where the dates don’t match.
3 Likes
I think he meant that the chain of custody from the 13th century onwards was known.
Though that’s not true either.
This is true. The differences are so large that measurement error cannot account for the differences given the medieval hypothesis. So far we have not nailed down the explanation. This is where the case sits at this point.
Since we can trust the carbon date, the WAXS method, as it so often can be made to match its results, is reliable. So now that we have established the reliability of “WAXS dating”, when ever the two methods give conflicting results, we drop all of that trust we had for the carbon date (forgetting all about how our trust in WAXS was completely predicated on that), and assert that the carbon date’s the one that must be wrong.
Problem solved. Easy! 
No answer, naturally.
1 Like
Hi Roy
The chain of custody is in the historical record.
Where was the shroud at the beginning of the 14th century, in e.g. 1325?
A fellow sea lion
That is how I understood him.
What I perceived as a lie was his statement that the WAXS “study” presented any problem for the medieval dating of the relic. There has been more than enough information presented already that should have disavowed him of that notion.
As I have already admitted, I failed once again to consider that he might actually be stupid enough not to understand this.
Hi Faizal
The problem here is not subtile. The breakdown in polymers is way beyond what you would expect from the medieval hypothesis given a chain of custody that is at relatively low temperatures.
For the breakdown to be what it is and an age of 700 years you would need it to be held at extremely high temperatures.
End of the dating abstract.
To make the present result compatible with that of the 1988 radiocarbon test, the TS should have been conserved during its hypothetical seven centuries of life at a secular room temperature very close to the maximum values registered on the earth.
You have no evidence to support that claim. The WAXS paper is, at best, so seriously flawed that no serious journal would consider publishing it. At worst, it is deliberately fraudulent.
Continuing with my current working hypothesis that you are merely honestly confused and not also knowingly committing fraud, I will offer an analogy that might help you better understand Falk’s objections (which, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding) are not identical to Farey’s, nor what you presented the to be.
Suppose, with his next paper, Fantis decides to try yet another dating method. This one involves casting chicken bones into a circle and interpreting the pattern to determine the age of an artifact.
He uses the same linen samples as in the 2019 paper to calibrate his results. e.g. he takes the sample from a mummy from Thebes and notes that it has been carbon dated to between 1000-720 BC. He then casts the chicken bones and declares that the pattern is consistent with a dating of 1000-720 BC. He continues the same process with the other samples. Each time he already knows the age of the sample and each time he reads the chicken bones as giving the same date as the C-14 dating.
Having decided that his new method is just as accurate as C-14 dating, he now decides to use it on the Shroud of Turin. To his shock and amazement, he finds this time it does not confirm the published C-14 dating. Instead, he reads the chicken bones as saying that the shroud dates to the first century CE, near the time of the death of Jesus. He concludes that the C-14 dating was wrong for this sample, and the shroud could have been the burial cloth of Jesus.
Do you think his conclusion is justified? Please explain how you determined your answer.
3 Likes
As has been repeatedly pointed out to you Bill (with evidence) this is a false claim.
You have been presented with evidence that:
- the carbon-dating shroud sample was not significantly contaminated
- that enormous levels of contamination would be needed to turn a 14th century date into a 1st century date – “64% of the shroud would have to be such contamination”
You have presented no contrary evidence.
You therefore have no more basis for the ‘contamination problem’ than you did for the ‘cotton problem’. You have repeatedly made these claims, in spite of being told repeatedly why they are wrong.
At this stage it is neither “political rhetoric” nor being “extremely biased” to call you a “shameless liar” – it is simply basic observation skills!
You asked the following question two years ago:
My response was that this tactic was ineffective because Creationists will just keep on dishonestly repeating the argument as though it had never been defeated – as you are demonstrating on this thread.
But even shaming you for your dishonesty is ineffective as (as @Faizal_Ali points out) you are “shameless”. And as everybody here already knows you are a liar, you suffer no reputational harm.
So it would seem that you are ‘free’ to lie to your heart’s content – limited only not doing so to an extent that you become ‘disruptive’ and fall afoul of the moderators.
We in turn are ‘free’ to treat you as a pinyatta – or perhaps an annoying buzzing insect to be swatted is a better metaphor.
You have made your bed Bill – you must needs lie in it.
1 Like
By “extremely high temperature” you mean 27.5C?
[Source]
And that temperature is based on the assumption that the temperatures assumed for the tiny number of comparators (9, I believe), that the model was built upon, are correct (and that no other explicit or implicit assumption of the model is invalid).
Addendum: I would note that the assumed temperatures for the samples would appear to have been country-averages, rather than long-term averages taken in the tombs (and other locations) where the linens were discovered. It seems perfectly conceivable that an Egyptian mummy’s tomb might be underground, and experience consistently lower temperatures than those on the surface, thus biasing the relationship between temperature and age in the calculation.
4 Likes
It also seems to me facially obvious that the long term average temperature gives little important information.
If your home was kept at a constant temperature of 20 degrees, that would be a very different environment than one in which it was kept at -20 degrees then at +60 degrees on alternate days, even though the average temperature would be the same in both cases.
3 Likes
Hi Faizal
This quite a claim and needs more than a few people who nit pick at it for support. For the result on the Shroud to be so inaccurate that the polymer breakdown is 3x by the measured parameter more than expected being meaningless would be extraordinary.
You would completely have nullified polymer breakdown over time as a method of determining age. Is this the claim you are prepared to support?
Hi, Bill. Here is another discussion of some of the problems with the WAXS paper, taken from the comment section of Falk’s video. As usual, I look forward to your intelligent and informed commentary in response:
Okay, I have actually read the (newest) paper and reproduced their calculations and plotted the graph. Basically, I have several observations:
The Turin Shroud sample’s aging factor which is stated as 10.0±0.2 does not actually follow from the other tabulated numbers from which it is supposedly obtained. If you plug the numbers from the table and do the calculation yourself, you obtain 10.14±0.24. This is actually closer to the Massada sample whose value is 10.27±0.09. They must have made an error somewhere because I have checked that not even the unluckiest rounding could have produced a value less than 10.05.
Anyway, this only helps their case.I find it curious that in figure 3 of their 2019 paper they showed the scattering plots for only 4 out of the 9 samples (labelled A, D, FII and LII), and so it happens that exactly these 4 are the ones to feature again in the newer paper’s figure 2. It’s clear they knew already in 2019, when developing the method, which samples they are going to compare the shroud to in their next paper.
I kind of wish I could see the other samples as wellThe biggest issue in the 2019 paper (and the latter paper) is their rescaling. Obviously, because the sampels are of different size etc, their brightness will differ. But the question is, how can we reliably establish how to rescale them? The only way to do it is to assume that some part of the spectrum is age-independent. They chose, rather arbitrarily, to say that the region of q between 1.5nm to 4nm is their area of rescaling. But why this one? How can they know the results in this region are age-independent? Why stop at 4nm and not, for example, at 6nm?
Notice also that the figure is on a logarithmic scale, so all rescalings by a common factor correspond to, on a logarithmic plot, to moving the plots up and down (rigidly). Basically, they said “we are going to move the plots up and down so that the leftmost part of the plot aligns between all samples, and we are then going to see how the other peaks differ from each other. Hurray! 4 of our 9 samples align monotonously with age across the whole spectrum! Let’s plot that and establish that as our method”. (In this case I would like to see what happened to the other 5 samples, lol!)Then they measure the Shroud. They rescale it again according to their method of matching the 1.5nm<q<4nm. And what do they get? The Turin shroud’s data does not align with their 4 samples at all. The peaks agree with what they want to see, but who says the method must be about the peaks? I can decide equally well, that I want to measure the age based on the intensity at q=6nm, or at q=18nm. If I do that, then suddenly the Turin Shroud is newer than all of the samples, including the 2000 AD sample. It has negative age by that standard! Basically, while the previous 4 curves were essentially exactly the same shape, the Shroud’s curve is of significantly different shape.
Basically, I am saying that had they decided not to use the range of 1.5nm to 4.0nm but, let’s say 1.5nm to 6.0nm, then the whole spectrum of the turin shroud would be much lowered. So low, that it would suddenly appear older than the 3500 BC sample.
Basically, the way I see it, if you gave the data to ten people, they will probably all decide on a different rescaling and different criteria for measuring age. Depending on what method they, they would choose, they would get any result between 3500BC and 3000AD. Technically, if you want to say that the shroud is between 3500 BC and 3000AD, you would be correct, but it doesn’t take an X-ray to know that, lol.My conclusion is that there was a good chance (and certainly all opportunity) that they curated the rescaling interval such that the shroud would fall bang on where they wanted it to fall. Even a slightly different choice of the normalisation interval would have produced hugely different results (and by that, I mean up to millennia different results). The Turin shroud sample simply does not follow the pattern the other 4 samples do, and therefore, you can wiggle it in many different ways to make it look like it fits reasonably well while also reaching your desired conclusion.
This brings me to my next point, if you cherry-pick the data in your methods paper and make your method look better than it is, it will eventually backfire on you when you actually compare a new sample to your old data. I bet the turing shroud is not an outlier in the whole of 9 other samples. It’s just that those other 5 and the Shroud together are so much more messy than the 4 they’ve chosen to publish.
3 Likes
You quote several claims, actually:
- The claim that you, Bill, have no evidence to support your claim that “The breakdown in polymers is way beyond what you would expect from the medieval hypothesis given a chain of custody that is at relatively low temperatures.”
- The claim that the WAXS paper is one no serious journal would consider publishing.
- The claim that, generously speaking, what’s claimed in claim 2 is true because of the paper’s serious flaws.
- The claim that there is a possibility, that the paper as is amounts to outright academic misconduct.
Faizal no doubt can take care of defending, if he so pleases, any of them. But, in the meantime, note, that none of these claims are best challenged with righteous indignation.
- You think you do have evidence of your claim? Then present it. Just what is the expected polymer breakdown, how did you arrive at that estimate (i.e. show us the math[1] and the input data), and at the verdict that said estimate is far enough beyond the data as we have it to dismiss that hypothesis.
- You think a serious journal would consider publishing that paper? Then why did it not? Did the authors try submitting it to one? How many did they get rejected from before arriving at MDPI’s Heritage? Which journals actually considered publishing it, i.e. had the editor even take a look at it? Which ones decided to distribute to the authors’ peers for review? Did Heritage even do that?
- If the article’s own flaws were not the reason no serious journal published it, what was? Did the referees recommend against publishing it for reasons outside of the article’s merits? What serious journal’s editor was swayed by arguments so poor, and what business have they being the editor of a serious academic journal? Did the editor themselves reject it for non-merit reasons? Same question about their position in that case. Was the article never submitted to a serious journal? Why not? Any author would have had every reason to do that, if they felt their article had merit.
fat chance… ↩︎
3 Likes
But if the shroud is genuine, the C14 date must be so inaccurate that it’s out by a factor of 3 - which would be extraordinary.
It comes down to which extraordinary result is accepted and rejected.
Personally, I’ll retain the result that has been supported by thousands of other measurements and calibrated to 50,000 years against unrelated annual events, is unaffected by variations in temperature and humidity, and has a known mechanism and measured variability; and reject the result that not only is affected by temperature and humidity, but also by physical handling of the material, which is being pushed by a bunch of dishonest cranks, has not been successfully used to date anything at all, and doesn’t even provide a date.
6 Likes
Hi Roy
You lose me when you accuse people who show different results than you want to see of being Cranks.
Hi Faizal
While some of these criticisms maybe valid they do not account for the magnitude of the measurement results from expectation. No one is addressing the problem this data, given the magnitude of the difference in measurement, poses for the medieval forgery hypothesis. Accusing a group of PHD researchers of fraud is not credible IMO and amounts to a conspiracy theory based on a bald assertion.
None of this proves the Shroud is real at this point but it certainly generates enough data to investigate possible errors in the Carbon dating method due to the condition of the sample.