So you're saying that Brown was not a respected and accomplished physicist?! Let's just review Brown's qualifications, shall we?
I made no such claim, of course. But it seems prudent to clarify the dismissive "yes, yes." You pursue a tedious, somewhat disingenuous approach, which is what sometimes merits dismissal if only for its tedium. You present the work of people you purport to be eminent, and therefore that their work on the shroud—which you insinuate follows from their eminence in other fields—should be taken with equal rigor. And regardless of the nature of the response, you say you will only accept scholarly citations in response. But when presentation is rebutted either briefly or thoroughly, you gallop on to the next copypasted claim with little if any rejoinder.
The problems with your approach are legion. Expecting there to be a pat scholarly response to every purported scholarly claim you present is naive. If some scholar says, "It is thus!" the rebuttal need not be some equally eminent scholar saying, "No, it is not thus." That you offer links to their material ordinarily presumes that your reader is expected to digest its meaning and therefore that he is competent to do so. When you dismiss your readers' subsequent commentary with the proposition that he isn't qualified to offer it, you tip you hand. It's more likely you're simply hurling these presentations as opaque rhetorical projectiles, demanding that your critics respond only in kind under a presumption that what your critics hurl back must be equally opaque to you, and also to them.
Sometimes there are problems with what
you claim about your sources. You've misrepresented enough of your sources—either their qualifications or content—to render you untrustworthy. Hence you don't have the right to expect them to be taken on their face. Sometimes there are problems with what the sources insinuate about themselves. Many are unquestionably qualified in
something. Many are or were unquestionably qualified in a related field, but disclaim that their shroud research has anything to do with that. Indeed, much of it is self-published and therefore not subject to the ordinary controls in rigor that prevailed in their professional pursuits. Sometimes the material itself has some merit, but seems to carefully skirt any controversial argumentation in order to achieve marginal acceptance in the mainstream.
Your overall motto seems to be that very smart people believe the shroud is authentic and are willing to offer their smart-guy skills to prove it. But people believe all kinds of things for different reasons. I don't criticize that per se, but it's a bit deceptive when they say that their belief in a religious claim is based on or supported by their science. We look at the science, and we see how assumptive it is, how outside mainstream controls, and in some cases just how very poor it is, and we start to entertain the proposititon that their scientific pursuits are being informed by belief and not the other way around. If you want to argue that good science proves the shroud is real, you have to show good science and not just side-hustle work from people who once were, or who once aspired to be, good scientists.
The Gish-gallopy nature of your posts suggests you rely on trying to stay ahead of the discussion, always keeping your critics in some kind of defensive posture. This is not generally an intellectually honest approach. When it takes practically pulling teeth to get you to examine a claim in detail, it's appropriate to wonder why you're making these arguments. It apparently isn't to study the material as best we can and arrive at a reasoned conclusion. You seem to be more about performing than studying.
I'm not questioning Brown's qualifications. They're easily verified. But what does that have to do with the paper you pointed us to? It's a straightforward microscopic examination of material taken from the shroud, but not from the area sampled for radiocarbon dating. He shows a micrograph of one strand of cotton. But the paper neglects to provide or defend a hypothesis for how that supposedly affected the radiocarbon dating of a different part of the shroud that was controlled for such contamination. Brown's findings here are likely true, but unremarkable. We know the shroud is or may be contaminated with other kinds of textiles. Brown shows us electron microscopy cross sections of fibers that he says are coated with a pigment. He opines that it arose from someone attempting to dye new fabric to match old fabric. If that same material had been present in the radiocarbon sample, he could argue that it may have skewed the findings. But he presents no evidence that the material he observes was also in the part used for dating, nor how it would have survived the cleaning process if it had been.
It's a self-published paper, but here the lack of peer review or scholarly attention is moot. It's a straightforward presentation of mostly irrelevant observations with some unremarkable opinions and hypotheses presented. There is no need to challenge the microscopy or Brown's expertise in obtaining it. There is no need to address Brown's hypotheses because he doesn't attempt (and therefore probably didn't intend) to defend them with evidence. If you intended this as some kind of projectile, it turns out that if we look at it it's mostly a soap bubble.
www.thearchaeologist.org
