That’s not the same objection. And by “unique physical event”, he means an event whose effects can’t be known and can’t be studied, as any observations whatsoever would be compatible with an unknown event unconstrained by anything we know of physics. This is cargo cult science.
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I presume these people don’t take the same approach to other questions in their lives. If they can’t find their car keys, do they suspect the keys were vaporized in a highly localized nuclear explosion? I doubt it. But on what epistemic basis do they decide when “unique physical events” will or will not occur?
The event can be studied without knowing the ultimate cause. As he said Physics cannot explain the cause of the Big Bang but it can try understand its effects. Physics cannot explain the cause of the resurrection but Rucker, Phillips, Fanti and others are trying to understands some of the effects (image plus molecular changes) if the Shroud is indeed authentic.
And they do so by using physics. Not by making any stupid crap up and pretending it’s true.
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Wait, so let me get this straight…
Assuming the Shroud is authentic, then by the fact that it shows an age some twelve or thirteen centuries too young we can deduce that physics-defying magic is what happens when resurrections occur. And knowing that physics-defying magic is what happens when resurrections occur, we can deduce that the Shroud could, for all we know, be authentic.
Question, though: How do we know that other remnants were definitely not ever in the vicinity of a resurrection? For all we know, all carbon dating could be way off… But not in favour of the young-earthers, for a change. No, things could be milennia older than previously thought, too. After all, we assumed that magic can make things look much younger than they really are.
I wonder also: Do you reckon the authenticity of the Shroud could be arrived at without assuming it on the outset? Because it seems to me like we are concluding that magic can skew the date because the shroud is authentic, and the shroud is authentic, because only magic could skew the date. But could we actually deduce either claim if neither of them were presupposed?
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False. We can all agree that the most parsimonious explanation is that the shroud was made hundreds of years after a minority of Christians claims it was. You don’t get to claim that something is parsimonious without evidence.
Then it is not at all parsimonious.
No, scientifically, the data do not say anything either way about the hypothesis that variance is a function of distance from the center. Scientifically, even “consistent with” implicitly includes statistical significance. That remains an untested hypothesis.
Real scientists test hypotheses to disprove them.
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Stricken, in its entirety, as non-responsive to my point. That Phillips also speculated this, without offering an explanation for the presence of neutrons, only makes it worse not better.
(It should also be noted that Phillips only makes this claim in a ‘Letter to the Editor’, not in peer-reviewed research.)
So my (expanded) point now becomes:
Neither you nor Rucker [nor Phillips] can explain why a neutron burst is expected in this scenario – it is simply a blatant ad hoc addition to attempt to try and confect some scenario that would discredit the carbon dating.
- Because we have no evidence that it would.
- Because most radiation-related effects diminish over time.
Given that this is sufficiently obscure a point that I would be unlikely to readily find more reliable information on it, I asked ChatGPT, with the following results:
4. Duration of the Effect:
The fluorescence effect induced by neutron radiation is typically short-lived. This is because:
- Decay of activated isotopes: Any isotopes produced in the linen by neutron activation will decay over time, which will diminish the fluorescence. The half-lives of these isotopes can range from microseconds to minutes to hours, depending on the specific element and the energy of the neutrons.
- De-excitation of molecules: If fluorescence is caused by molecular excitation (rather than nuclear processes), the fluorescence would typically last only as long as the molecules remain in the excited state before returning to their ground state, which is usually a very short period (nanoseconds to microseconds).
After exposure to neutron radiation, once the radioactive decay has completed or the excited states of molecules have dissipated, the fluorescence would cease. The duration of fluorescence can therefore last from seconds to minutes, depending on the intensity and type of neutron radiation as well as the specific materials involved.
Thus, we have no reason to believe that the effect would persist for 2000 years.
You are lying by omission. My full point was:
The data is sufficiently limited – both in number of samples and distribution across the shroud – that just about any claim would be “not inconsistent” with it. … This renders such claims not even remotely probative.
As @Mercer also points out above, its lack of statistical significance means it provides no confirmation for Rucker’s hypothesis.
No. Scientific hypotheses are expected to be parsimonious and consilient with existing knowledge. This ‘hypothesis’ is neither.
A more scientific hypothesis would be to postulate bacteria as an explanation:
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Bacteria (unlike neutron bursts) are known to inhabit dead bodies.
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Bacterial colonies (unlike neutron bursts) are known to persist over long periods of time, given their minimal needs are met.
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Bacteria are known to fluoresce.
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Bacterial contamination (combined with heterogeneous cleaning methods) could result in the small divergence observed in the third sample.
(And, I’m sure, there are many other alternate hypotheses less far-fetched than Rucker’s.)
The neutron hypothesis is, in medical parlance, a “zebra”:
When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra
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This paper does not seem to be a “test” so much as a further supporting hypothesis.
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As @John_Harshman points out, this new hypothesis is as equally far-fetched (“insane”) as Rucker’s.
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Its hypothesis is explicitly “incomplete and needs further development”.
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It is published in World Scientific News, which is on a number of predatory journal lists (e.g. here), so is of highly questionable reliability.
As such, it is of no probative value in supporting Rucker’s ‘hypothesis’.
Their web site is unintentionally amusing. Main title, for instance:
“World Scientific News
An Interdycyplinsary Journal”
Also, this:
“Beginning from 2017, all scientific papers to be published in the international journal World Scientific News have to contain citations of articles coming from well-known prestigious international scientific journals (only).”
Thus, presumably, no citations of World Scientific News would be allowed in World Scientific News.
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Hey, this is interesting: first proposal of the neutron hypothesis and its first reply, still relevant today:
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SSDD. Same MO as Scientific Creationism.
I had tracked down that “first proposal” but hadn’t noticed the reply. This is telling:
However, for the reasons given below, the likelihood that they influenced the date in the way proposed is in my view so exceedingly remote that it beggars scientific credulity.
I see that they also agree with me (and others on this thread) on the lack of an explanation for the neutron burst:
(1) No plausible physical mechanism has been proposed to explain how the resurrection was accompanied by a significant neutron flux.
Their second point also mirrors something I’d been thinking, but hadn’t articulated yet:
(2) Assuming a ‘scientific’ (but not yet articulated) explanation for the neutron flux, it is an amazing coincidence that the neutron dose should be so exactly appropriate to give the most likely date on historical grounds. (Arguably a total of 10" neutrons (the number in a human body) would be available. Using Phillips’ figures, this would be sufficient to impart a date of 100,000 years into the future. To produce a date within 100 years of the first recorded history of the shroud implies that the dose has been ‘fine-tuned’ to better than one part in a hundred million.)
Not only that, it had to be fine-tuned so as to predict which part of the shroud the test sample would come from. Given that, in the model, anything from much closer to the center of the shroud would have a measured date far in the future, the coincidence is amazing.
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