Miracle of the Shroud / Blood on the shroud

[IanS]

Thanks, IanS!
I suppose we could also keep in mind the debris Mme. Flury-Lemburg commented had accumulated over the ages between the TS and the Holland cloth backing. Obvioiusly not enough to affect he dating in any way, but could account for the odd fibres.
Still, the cotton gloves used by the STURP investigators are enough to account for the cotton fibres found on the sticky tapes.

Yes. The shroud was far from being the first ancient artefact which those C14 labs had dated. They were all very experienced in what sort of debris and contamination to look for. And they all had extensive procedures to clean the samples and to remove any foreign debris of that sort.

It's not so clear whether Gilbert Raes or STURP had the same precautions. But certainly, the C14 labs were well aware of the need to examine, clean and prepare their samples before dating. Again, that’s all explained at length in Harry Gove’s book.

 

[catsmate]

A fair question.

They didn't accept it at face value. I was (and am--I spent today leading a sampling effort, in fact) require to extensively document my work, in a bound field notebook in indellible ink (black or blue). I submitted the samples under an unbroken chain of custody(COC). There were also others who were also documenting the proceedings, including a photo survey of the trenches we took the samples from. They're not exactly accepting my word at face value; technically, they're accepting the COC (in fact, that's legally what they're doing).

If it's proven that my samples--ANY samples, from the first ones I ever touched to the ones I shipped before coming home this evening--were fraudulant, my career is OVER and I'm probably going to spend time in jail. The mere accusation of inaccuracy can be enough to get me fired. There are EXTREME consequences to this sort of thing, and field geologists take equivalently extreme care with our sampling. The samples I took today--standard dirt samples--were documented in four places, with copies sent to several people. And this is minor stuff, just fact-checking.

Also, as IanS said, I'm not exactly working with world-famous relics here. I was sampling bits of charcoal (almost certainly natural) in a trench in the middle of nowhere. Those C14 samples were minor samples, and required minor documentation. The more serious the sample, the more documentation required. Sampling a world-famous relic is a pretty major sample. Furthermore, I've established myself as someone capable of taking these samples, and competant at standard sampling procedures (EPA Region 9 and standard paleontological sampling, to be specific), via training under recognized experts. And again, there's the chains of custody--they are unbroken, and included in the reports that discuss the lab results (one appendix is always the lab results, and within that is the COC for those samples).

THAT is the major issue: the chain of custody. My samples are valid because, in major part, that chain is documented and unbroken. The chain of custody for the sticky-tape fibers, however, is not--meaning that no one can prove the fibers tested were actually fibers from the shroud. We could, if they were available, do trace-chemical analysis on them to prove it, but this has not been done to my knowledge, so the chain remains broken. The samples, simply put, are inadmissible because we don't know where they're from.

If Rogers produces an unbroken chain of custody, this objection disapears. Until then, we simply cannot know where the samples came from. He SAYS they're from the shroud, but in science it's not enough to say something. You need to prove it.

I want to emphasize that I'm merely giving this to provide the information; it's been an agravating day, so my tone is probably not the best. Please don't read any anger into this--I'm happy to answer the question.

An excellent summary. Jabba was asked, almost exactly a year ago, to provide such a chain of custody for the supposed shroud fibres examined by Rogers. He has never done so. In fact he attempted to evade the question:

- I believe that Rogers probably had the material from Gonella that he claimed to have. If you guys can accept that that is a reasonable position to take, I can move on to other issues...

He then launched off on a tangent about the d'Arcis memorandum.

Of course even a proper chain of custody doesn't validate Rogers' testings and their awful methodology, establish the existence of a magic match or impugn the radiocarbon dating.

1. The area sampled for radiocarbon dating was the area previously sampled for other tests, without any sign of patching.
2. The area sampled was examined by the Vatican science advisors and textile experts, in 1973, 1988 and 2002, and pronounced free of patching. This process used microscopy, non-visible spectrum illumination and micro-photography

The truth is that there is no patch and no darn.

1. The radiocarbon analysis labs each examined their samples in detail, including micro-photography, and found no evidence of anomalous fibres.
2. Many of the approximately 6,000 micro-photographs of the shroud show the sampled area in great detail, all without showing any signs of magic patching.

So they tested traction and chemical composition, found some similarity to other clothing around 1 AD , and voila ! 14C be damned, the type of weaving technic not being found in other contemporain shroud be damned. All other evidence be damned.

As a method of dating I cannot think of anything much worst. Ignoring 14C testing and using seemingly random unproved method of dating seems to be a tradition in italian sindone universities.

Their work doesn't seem to have been submitted for peer review, or indeed any external confirmation. This puts it in the same class as Rogers' alleged testing.

 

[Jabba]

Carbon Dating/Control Samples

- I guess that no one else on this thread has Gove's book?
- Whatever, I'll get the Gove quotes I alluded to and whatever other quotes that I can get in a relative hurry...
--- Jabba

 

[Slowvehicle]

- I guess that no one else on this thread has Gove's book?
- Whatever, I'll get the Gove quotes I alluded to and whatever other quotes that I can get in a relative hurry...
--- Jabba

Rich:

Please deal with the statement you made, that "everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective".

I am of the supportable opinion that this statement, in addition to being insulting, is demonstrably false.

Please to either support your claim, or withdraw it and apologize.

 

[Jabba]

Carbon Dating/Control Samples

Rich:

Please deal with the statement you made, that "everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective".

I am of the supportable opinion that this statement, in addition to being insulting, is demonstrably false.

Please to either support your claim, or withdraw it and apologize.

Slowvehicle,

- I don't understand your request. If someone has Gove's book, they can see immediately what I'm talking about -- and, I should be able to get the quotes themselves, but I need to relearn the scanning technique for my latest printer first.

- Meanwhile,
- From the Nature article, itself:
The laboratories were not told which container held the shroud sample. Because the distinctive three-to-one herringbone twill weave of the shroud could not be matched in the controls, however, it was possible for a laboratory to identify the shroud sample. If the samples had been unravelled or shredded rather than being given to the laboratories as whole pieces of cloth, then it would have been much more difficult, but not impossible, to distinguish the shroud sample from the controls. (With unravelled or shredded samples, pretreatment cleaning would have been more difficult and wasteful.) Because the shroud had been exposed to a wide range of potential sources of contamination and because of the uniqueness of the samples available, it was decided to abandon blind-test procedures in the interests of effective sample pretreatment. But the three laboratories undertook not to compare results until after they had been transmitted to the British Museum. Also, at two laboratories (Oxford and Zurich), after combustion to gas, the samples were recoded so that the staff making the measurements did not know the identity of the samples.
- That last sentence sounds like it discounts the preceding sentences... Someone in our thread should know what that last sentence means?

- From http://www.shroud-enigma.com/resources/Radiocarbon-ENG.pdf
A reader87 of Nature will ask Tite explanations: he replies that it happened to
follow the blind procedure, even if this aspect was “quite illogical, because in that moment we
knew that because of the unusual weaving of the Shroud, the blind test was not feasible
without unravelling the samples”88
88. M. TITE, More on the Shroud. Tite replies, in Nature 346, 6280 (1990), p. 100.

- I'll be back.

--- Jabba

 

[John Jones]

Slowvehicle,

- I don't understand your request. If someone has Gove's book, they can see immediately what I'm talking about -- and, I should be able to get the quotes themselves, but I need to relearn the scanning technique for my latest printer first.

- Meanwhile,
- From the Nature article, itself:
The laboratories were not told which container held the shroud sample. Because the distinctive three-to-one herringbone twill weave of the shroud could not be matched in the controls, however, it was possible for a laboratory to identify the shroud sample. If the samples had been unravelled or shredded rather than being given to the laboratories as whole pieces of cloth, then it would have been much more difficult, but not impossible, to distinguish the shroud sample from the controls. (With unravelled or shredded samples, pretreatment cleaning would have been more difficult and wasteful.) Because the shroud had been exposed to a wide range of potential sources of contamination and because of the uniqueness of the samples available, it was decided to abandon blind-test procedures in the interests of effective sample pretreatment. But the three laboratories undertook not to compare results until after they had been transmitted to the British Museum. Also, at two laboratories (Oxford and Zurich), after combustion to gas, the samples were recoded so that the staff making the measurements did not know the identity of the samples.
- That last sentence sounds like it discounts the preceding sentences... Someone in our thread should know what that last sentence means?

- From http://www.shroud-enigma.com/resources/Radiocarbon-ENG.pdf
A reader87 of Nature will ask Tite explanations: he replies that it happened to
follow the blind procedure, even if this aspect was “quite illogical, because in that moment we
knew that because of the unusual weaving of the Shroud, the blind test was not feasible
without unravelling the samples”88
88. M. TITE, More on the Shroud. Tite replies, in Nature 346, 6280 (1990), p. 100.

- I'll be back.

--- Jabba

That does not invalidate the controls - you just don't understand the protocols followed in a laboratory. Even if they could determine which of the samples were the controls, that wouldn't allow them to correctly determine the age of those controls.

In the future, I resquest you be a little more circumspect before you make any more remarks that effectively trash the work done by these scientists.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Slowvehicle,

- I don't understand your request. If someone has Gove's book, they can see immediately what I'm talking about -- and, I should be able to get the quotes themselves, but I need to relearn the scanning technique for my latest printer first.

- Meanwhile,
- From the Nature article, itself:
The laboratories were not told which container held the shroud sample. Because the distinctive three-to-one herringbone twill weave of the shroud could not be matched in the controls, however, it was possible for a laboratory to identify the shroud sample. If the samples had been unravelled or shredded rather than being given to the laboratories as whole pieces of cloth, then it would have been much more difficult, but not impossible, to distinguish the shroud sample from the controls. (With unravelled or shredded samples, pretreatment cleaning would have been more difficult and wasteful.) Because the shroud had been exposed to a wide range of potential sources of contamination and because of the uniqueness of the samples available, it was decided to abandon blind-test procedures in the interests of effective sample pretreatment. But the three laboratories undertook not to compare results until after they had been transmitted to the British Museum. Also, at two laboratories (Oxford and Zurich), after combustion to gas, the samples were recoded so that the staff making the measurements did not know the identity of the samples.
- That last sentence sounds like it discounts the preceding sentences... Someone in our thread should know what that last sentence means?

- From http://www.shroud-enigma.com/resources/Radiocarbon-ENG.pdf
A reader87 of Nature will ask Tite explanations: he replies that it happened to
follow the blind procedure, even if this aspect was “quite illogical, because in that moment we
knew that because of the unusual weaving of the Shroud, the blind test was not feasible
without unravelling the samples”88
88. M. TITE, More on the Shroud. Tite replies, in Nature 346, 6280 (1990), p. 100.

- I'll be back.

--- Jabba

Oh, Rich...

My "request" is that you offer support for your false statement, "everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective", or withdraw it and apologize.

What you have presented here is NOT an indication that "everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective"; instead, you have presented a description of the difficulties of blinding the test protocols (a description, BTW, provided by a man who is of the opinion that the cloth is much to young to be the True Shroud^TM).

Two things jump out:

First, it was difficult to blind the control, because no authentically first century triple-twill woven cloth could be found--the only authentically fist-century cloth to be had was distinctly different from the cloth of the medieval artifact.

Second, two of the labs blinded the samples after reducing them to gas--that is, the techs who combusted the samples knew which was which, but the techs who evaluated the gas produced (the process by which the ¹⁴C ratio, and thus the date, is determined), did not know which sample was the control.

None of which changes the fact that you have made an unjustified and unsupported accusation, to wit: "everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective".

I continue to insist that you support this calumny, or withdraw it and apologize.

If you mean that you find the control samples ineffective, say so--and demonstrate how your dissatisfaction in any way affects the ¹⁴C date.

If you are implying that the control samples allowed all three labs to commit fraud, say so--but be prepared to back it up.

In the meantime, just for the record, "everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective", is not a true statement, and you ought to retract it, and apologize.

 

[catsmate]

<snippage>

So your innuendo about the controls samples was just more irrelevant nonsense? Further demonstrating your utter lack of understanding of radiocarbon dating...........

 

[Akhenaten]

It seems like you've progressed, but progressed in a circle right back to your initial point.

- Not quite. While I do think that there was something "different" done to that area of the Shroud, I'm much less convinced (than I had been previously) that an actual "patch" of some size was involved.

wardenclyffe is being far too kind.

The fact is that your argument has progressed(?) from "invisible patching must have occurred" to "something happened".


Never having posted here would have been far less damaging not just to your own credibility but to the claims made by bleevers everywhere regarding the shroud's authenticity than the ever-more-ludicrous dross that you're putting forth.

Best reverse-Poe ever.

 

[Dinwar]

Jabba, labs always know what the control samples are. It's as simple as that. We try our best, but they ALWAYS know what the field dupes, standards, etc. are. You're talking about people who put a few thousand hours behind the machines, running every type of sample you can imagine--they know.

It's quite irrelevant to the results, however. The fact that they knew which were the test samples and which were the controls is only relevant if it impacts the results. If not, it's a funny little quirk about sampling and that's all.

Blind tests generally are not run. EPA Region 9 standards are 1 field duplicate (ideally blind, but not necessarily, at least in practice) for every 10 samples, and 1 matrix spike/matrix spike duplicate sample for every 20 samples where applicable. That means that 90%, minimum, of your samples aren't going to be blind. This isn't medicine, Jabba--the double-blind standard doesn't apply. It's nice when we can get it, but it's superfluous.

The real role of test samples in lab techniques like this is to ensure the machine is properly calibrated and operating properly. It's a check OF THE MACHINE, not of the actual sample or the researchers. As long as the standards and the test samples yield the correct date (by definition a known date), the samples were completely effective and appropriate. What can happen is that someone in the lab gives them unique designations, and the person doing the actual testing doesn't know (or the one evaluating the results; not always the same person); however, it's equally frequent for the same person to do the entire sample, from labeling to analysis, in which case blind samples are impossible.

Someone in our thread should know what that last sentence means?

How do you propose to criticize the sampling methods if you can't even understand the sampling methods? This proves, yet again, your incompetance in this field.

 

[pakeha]

This is fun

Ah, that IS a good one.
From your link
"...The tests were carried out using tiny fibres of material extracted from the Shroud by micro-analyst Giovanni Riggi di Numana who passed away in 2008 but had participated in the1988 research project and gave the material to Fanti through the cultural institute Fondazione 3M."

Not even Dan Brown...

 

[Blue Mountain]

I was going to follow-up my original post dealing with provenance and chain of custody with another asking how the lab might have handled the samples, specifically with regard to whether the people doing the testing could have deduced or known which sample was the actual shroud material and which samples were the controls.

Dinwar just showed us how awesome he is by answering my question before I even posted it!

I seems like everyone in the labs probably knew that they were dealing with the shroud dating, and probably figured out which sample was the shroud within moments of the containers being opened. But that did not bias their results. After all, they had nothing to gain by giving a false date to the Vatican and stood to lose their reputation had they done such a thing.

Using three labs was good, because all three were in agreement as to the dates of the three samples. It would have required active collusion on the part of the labs to have given falsified results.

 

[wollery]

Jabba, to illustrate what Dinwar said in the above post I'm going to explain what happens in astronomy when we want to measure the brightness of a star.

The detectors that are used in astronomy are very sensitive to light, but they're also fairly unstable over long periods of time, so their characteristics change. There are various types of detector, each with their own quirks, but I'll just tell you what happens with CCD detectors as they're the most common.

When you get to the telescope at the start of the evening you need to run a series of calibration exercises to check the detector's behaviour.
First there's the bias frame. This is performed by just reading out the data that's there with a 0 time exposure for the CCD. This is because every CCD has low levels of noise that exist without any exposure being taken.
Next is the dark frame. This is a short exposure either with the shutter closed. This measures the reaction of the CCD to ambient heat in the detector housing.
After that you take a flat field, which measures the CCD's reaction to general light. This can be taken in a number of ways, but requires an even, low level light source.
On a typical night a telescope operator will take about 10 of each type of the above readings.
Now we have the basic CCD calibration frames, we can start to look at the sky and take images of stars.
For every target star that we take an image of we need to have an image of at least one calibration star. A calibration star is a star that we already know the brightness of very accurately.
Once you've got all of your image and calibration frames you can process the data. This involves adjusting the brightness of every frame to give equivalent exposure times, and then subtracting the bias, dark and flat frames from the calibration star and target star image frames. Now you have two sets of data, one for the calibration star and one for the target star, with the quirks of the CCD detector removed. Next we have to take account of the brightness of the sky in each image, because this can change from one image to the next depending on all sorts of factors. Once that's done we can compare the brightness of the target star to that of the calibration star, and it is this difference that tells us how bright the target star is.

It sounds pretty complicated, and time consuming, but every professional telescope around the world follows these procedures, because they are by far and away the best method for ensuring accuracy.

But none of this, at any stage, is blinded in any way. We know before hand which frames are the bias, dark, flat and calibration images, so why bother if they aren't blinded?

The reason is that we don't use the other images for the purposes of blinding. They are used to measure the performance of the detector and ensure that the measurement we get for our target star is accurate.

And that's what the controls are for in 14C testing. The labs didn't know in advance what the dates were for the controls, but the dates were known, so if those dates had come out wrong we'd know there was a problem with either the testing procedure, or the machine that does the testing. The labs got the right dates for the control samples, so we know that the process and the machines were working properly, and from that we can conclude quite safely that the date for the shroud sample was accurate.

 

[Agatha]

I would like to give Dinwar and wollery a big round of applause, as their recent posts have helped me to understand controls outside of the familiar (to me) sense of blinding.

I think Jabba may be under the mistaken impression that the carbon dating was supposed to be done blind, and therefore the fact that the samples were distinguishable from the controls was a shortcoming of the carbon dating process. After Dinwar's and wollery's posts, it's clear that the controls were a check on the accuracy of the carbon dating process itself - as the controls were correctly dated, we can be confident that the sample from the shroud was correctly dated.

As two of the labs did do some of the calculations blind (as described by that last sentence of the Nature quote that Jabba suggests he doesn't understand), any hypothesised collusion between the three laboratories can be falsified, too.

Jabba, there is no patch, there was no problem with the dating and everybody except a few people who cling to delusions have accepted this. The shroud is a marvellous piece of mediaeval art; you should admire it for what it is instead of trying to make it into something which it is not.

 

[Aepervius]

I had a similar with control for FTIR test. We had a list of test and checks we used to make sure of the calibration. Make the long arm a certain distance, put a bit of liquid N2 , wait that the mirrors get cold, then fill the N2 tanks, wait 2 hours, then use a few lamps to calibrate the the peaks wavelength for a certain value, do the measurement value.

At anotehr lab we measured plasma temperature peak of an H2 plasma at a few thousand degree K.

None of this was random or blinded, but was essential to make sure the derive on the detector or whole instrument path/light was fine.

Jabba, you are speaking out of a position of ignorance. It is time you admit that the protocol and control taken for the shroud are not as flawed as you wish they would be.

 

[pakeha]

Wonderful posts, oh fellow forum members.
Thanks so much for sharing your collective knowledge!

 

[tsig]

Ah, that IS a good one.
From your link
"...The tests were carried out using tiny fibres of material extracted from the Shroud by micro-analyst Giovanni Riggi di Numana who passed away in 2008 but had participated in the1988 research project and gave the material to Fanti through the cultural institute Fondazione 3M."

Not even Dan Brown...

Holy Blood, Holy Shroud?

 

[pakeha]

Yes, I have a copy of it
And?

ETA
Ooops.
That Ribera de Duero is taking its toll.
We both know I meant Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
And also that your proposed title would work perfectly.
Does Dan lurk/post here?

 

[IanS]

- I guess that no one else on this thread has Gove's book?
- Whatever, I'll get the Gove quotes I alluded to and whatever other quotes that I can get in a relative hurry...
--- Jabba

You know very well that I have it, because it was me that drew your attention to it very early in this thread at a time before you even knew he'd written the book!

But there's nothing on pages 154, 156, 157 to support what you say about any scientific bias arising from “controls being ineffective“. You were offering that as support for your claim of scientific bias in the C14 dating, remember? You don’t remember? OK, here is where you first said it in reply to Pixel42 …

It is not only true that scientists are as likely to be biased as everybody else but scientists know it to be true, which is why they invented the scientific method to eliminate the effect of those biases.

I'm still waiting for you to explain how the scientists' biases could have led them to not properly test, and hence get the wrong date for, the shroud sample and yet properly test and get the right date for all the control samples when they didn't know which was which.

Pixel,
- I think that everyone involved accepts that the control samples were not effective.
--- Jabba

 

[IanS]

I seems like everyone in the labs probably knew that they were dealing with the shroud dating, and probably figured out which sample was the shroud within moments of the containers being opened. But that did not bias their results. After all, they had nothing to gain by giving a false date to the Vatican and stood to lose their reputation had they done such a thing.

The labs which did the C14 dating had been in constant meetings with the Vatican and Turin shroud representatives for no less than 10 years (!!) before the religious representatives finally agreed to the testing. So all the labs were very well aware that they were testing the shroud.

In those ten years of meetings, it was repeatedly pointed out by Flury-Lemberg and others that the weave of the shroud was so distinctive and unique, that it would have been impossible to find any other cloth sample that looked at all like the weave of the shroud.

None of which explains any supposed scientific bias however.

And as I noted above, each of the C14 labs had dated hundreds of other ancient artefacts both before and after dating the shroud. But I don't suppose any of those other datings have ever attracted claims of "scientific bias" against the authenticity of the various historic artefacts.