Miracle of the Shroud II: The Second Coming

[Craig4]

A minimum random sample of 200.

If you suggested this to an archeologist they would laugh. You don't need to because we know the constant rate of decay.

 

[Craig4]

No. The aim is to provide an indisputable age for the cloth.

I am not a Catholic and I do not venerate Holy Relics, so your assumption is mistaken.

Now I know you aren't a scientist.

 

[Giordano]

No. The aim is to provide an indisputable age for the cloth.

Why would I care if it is already clearly not the burial cloth of Christ? Why would you care under those circumstances?

 

[Vixen]

This is a lie. The truth of the matter has been established, via processes that exceed all standard expectations for data accuracy and sample handling.

What YOU want is to establish thresholds for acceptance that are irrationally high, so as to preclude ever achieving an answer.

You may use a laid-back tone, but the message is not. You are accusing the radiocarbon dating community as a whole of gross incompetance and negligence, based on your complete lack of understanding of the field. At minimum, this is not laid-back.

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

 

[Dinwar]

No. The aim is to provide an indisputable age for the cloth.

No. We have that already. Your aim is to prevent achieving any answer by establishing an unreachable threshold for acceptance of any conclusion, in violation of every applicable standard of practice.

 

[abaddon]

No. The aim is to provide an indisputable age for the cloth.

I am not a Catholic and I do not venerate Holy Relics, so your assumption is mistaken.

And I'm an atheist so you could shred the aforementioned rag for all I care. It would be a regrettable loss to the world of art but no more than that. An indisputable age has already been determined. What more do you seek? That your arbitrary standard should be applied, leading to the substantial destruction of the artefact in question?

 

[Dinwar]

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

The accusation of incompetance and negligence are necessary conclusions of your statement. That you do not see this is proof of your lack of familiarity with scientific reasoning.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

I have answered that question from the standpoint of sampling procedures and standard practices of archaeology. Giordano answered it from the standpoint of statistical analysis. Many have answered it from the standpoint of critical analysis of your...I hesitate to use the word....reasons.

 

[abaddon]

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

Not a problem. Try convincing the Vatican to do so. They will give you the big Foxtrot Oscar.

 

[Giordano]

It still requires an interpretation of the results. If each of the three samples throws out a different estimated age, skill is needed to age it perfectly.

What if each of the three samples repeatedly gave much the same estimated date? As the Nature study did?

 

[Vixen]

Then you will be happy to know that the truth has been established. It's an artifact from the Middle Ages. The radiocarbon dating, the artistic analysis, and the historical provenance all converge.

The > 1.5m people who visited Turin to see the shroud do not seem to be convinced.

What better antidote to idolatory than to convince them?

 

[Craig4]

Regardless of whether it's sacred or not, it IS an artifact, and as standard practice we should be very careful with destructive testing of those. One reason is, we need to preserve the artifact for future testing methods. They may not be useful with the shroud, but with many artifacts (and fossils) developments in the future can allow us to understand more about the remains, but only if they are available for such testing. Wanton destruction of the artifact--which is all this would be--precludes any possible advancement of knowledge by destroying the material such knowledge would be gained from.

This is why most artifacts aren't radiocarbon dated at all--the default position is "No testing", and there is a tremendous amount of resistance to overcome (properly so!) before one can obtain any destructive testing results.

I'm not suggesting just burning the damn thing. It is past human physical culture after all. It is also the RCC's to do with as they wish. When I look at the scale off loss of our collective heritage, losing the Shroud to testing is but a minor blow.

 

[Giordano]

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

As asked before: do you really think that "they" will accept it after the retest? Who exactly are the people you seek to convince anyway? Do we have to get every one of the 7 billion people on the planet to agree, or can we stop before this point?

 

[Vixen]

Although in this case you're setting out to discover the height of one person in London, and asking two hundred people to measure him/her.

No. I explained if you want to find out the average height of a population you need a reasonably large sample, minimum random 200. We know height is a normal distribution, so we can tell if our sampling is accurate by how well it correlates to the Gaussian curve.

 

[Dinwar]

I'm not suggesting just burning the damn thing. It is past human physical culture after all. It is also the RCC's to do with as they wish. When I look at the scale off loss of our collective heritage, losing the Shroud to testing is but a minor blow.

I agree; I'm merely providing some background into how the thought process works when someone proposes destructive testing of an artifact.

The > 1.5m people who visited Turin to see the shroud do not seem to be convinced.

What better antidote to idolatory than to convince them?

Fair enough--please establish that 200 samples--effectively destroying the shroud--would convince them. The fact that every expert who's read the Nature paper currently available accepts the results didn't do it; please prove that YOUR method would.

 

[abaddon]

The > 1.5m people who visited Turin to see the shroud do not seem to be convinced.

What better antidote to idolatory than to convince them?

You have a strange view of the world if you think for a single second that 1.5m people out of 7,000m people represent anything more than a crank subset.

 

[Craig4]

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

Why? People who plan future space missions don't care that there are those who think we never went to the moon. There's typology, documents and carbon dating all pointing to the same thing. If people can't accept that they won't accept anything.

 

[abaddon]

No. I explained if you want to find out the average height of a population you need a reasonably large sample, minimum random 200. We know height is a normal distribution, so we can tell if our sampling is accurate by how well it correlates to the Gaussian curve.

Fine. Shroud of Turin. Population:1

Now what?

 

[Aepervius]

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

With your repeated instance that one need 200 sampling and 3 is not enough, contrary to what some scientific in the domain tell you, and your repeated instance to use a debunked source unpublished in scientific literature.... You just did that.

One does not need to explicitely write stuff, when one can simply imply utter incompetence.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

Again, testing is in the hand of believer. Everybody else accepted the results and do not see the necessity of further hassle to test as it is as much as extracting teeth from somebody without anesthesia : the believer & owner refuse pretty much more test. it is not as if we DO NOT want the test, it is that the burden is now on other to extract those teeth. Good onto them. And frankly any believer will not accept any result no matter how many you do.

We are speaking of the same people which came up with stupid explanation like micro black hole hovering above the christ body and imprinting the cloth.

 

[Vixen]

The argument has been made that there was an invisible patch in that area. The fact that an argument can be made IN NO WAY establishes that it is valid.

Scorching does not affect C14 dating; that's why we can date charcoal.

Chemical alteration cannot affect C14 dating; the carbon 14 atoms remain carbon 14.

Contamination sufficient to produce your desired results (and you DO have obviously desired results) would constitute more than the actual sample. We did the math. Anything less, and the C14 dating would still prove it's not authentic. Plus, there were cleaning techniques used as part of the sample prep that would remove any such contamination.

You still have given no substantive reason to re-sample.

You clearly don't undestand WHY I reject your nonsensical and obviously dishonest proposal, that's for sure.

I base my assessment of the validity of the testing on the quality of the testing itself (orders of magnitude more dups than required, for one thing!), and an understanding of standard sampling practices. Additional sampling would provide NO additional data, and WOULD destroy a huge portion of the cloth. There is NO reason to continue sampling; the results are valid, they clearly present a Medieval date, they have been duplicated more than ANY C14 sample I have ever encountered, and there is NO reason to suspect that the sample area was not representative.

Until you disprove at least one of those reasons, I remain firm in my rejection of re-sampling.

Attacking me personally--and you DID attack me--does not change the basic facts, which you have failed to even attempt to address.

Bit puzzled about this. Please cite where and when.

 

[Dinwar]

No. I explained if you want to find out the average height of a population you need a reasonably large sample, minimum random 200. We know height is a normal distribution, so we can tell if our sampling is accurate by how well it correlates to the Gaussian curve.

First, a Gaussian curve is the wrong distribution to compare it against. Typical mistake from someone who knows just enough about statistics to think they know everything.

Second, we're not asking the age of a population of artifacts, but of ONE artifact. The "measure the same guy 200 times" is a better comparison. Though to make it real, you'd have to stab the guy each time you measure him--200 samples will destroy the shroud.