New: Shroud of Turin carbon dating proved erroneous ( performed on non-original cloth sample)

PRESS RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud of Turin wrong

COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the C-14 sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to the theory that the threads were spliced together during a repair. LANL’s work confirms the research published in Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual C-14 samples and concluded the sample was not part of the original cloth possibly due to the area having been repaired. This hypothesis was presented by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and Marino proposed that a 16th Century patch of cotton/linen material was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the region ultimately used for dating. The intermixed threads combined to give the dates found by the labs ranging between 1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino contend that this expert repair was necessary to disguise an unauthorized relic taken from the corner of the cloth. A paper presented today at the conference by Benford and Marino, and to be published in the July/August issue of the international journal Chemistry Today, provided additional corroborating evidence for the repair theory.

You are merely a troll.

I won't go that far... but it is a possibility. However, I have not surrendered. I'm just fed up with his insults, ad hominem attacks on honorable people I knew, his non-responses to direct questions, his re-iterations of demonstrably false assertions, his assumption of venal motives in Shroud researchers, and his ignoring requests for proof of hid assertions, especially of his slanders and libels. He claims much but merely makes assertions without being willing to submit his sources. Most likely that is because they all come from biases skeptical inquirer type sources.

I am not addressing this to him, nor will I use his name in this post, so I will not be breaking FR protocols.

Let's review his statements of "fact" from this thread and debate them; my refutations are in red:

I have spent more than a month reading Everything on the shroud. (Stress mine - He refutes himself later in the thread: "I have read 13 books and untold articles on the shroud in the last month or so and can find no mention of it." Unless he is a speed reader, it is probably pretty close to impossible to read "everything" about the shroud in only one month.)

These goobers at Los Alamos are not representing Los Alamos, they are part of STURP. (ad hominem - again, the italics are mine.)

Three separate labs carbon dated the shroud to no earlier than 1290. (False: the Arizona lab reported the sample closest to the center of the Shroud at 1262 AD, plus or minus 31 years. Shows how much he "knows" the facts... but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He is mistaken. He made an error. He was wrong.)

STURP's whole history has been to try and undermine the science and history that shows the shroud to be a fake. (Ad hominem and Patently false. Also, the authenticity of the Shroud is currently undetermined. It will never be able to proved to be the Shroud of Jesus Christ.)

The Raes sample was NOT adjacent to the samples tested, but the Vatican DOES have the piece that was next to it. (False. His own source material cites the samples as being taken directly adjacent to the Raes Sample.)

Photographs of the samples analyzed show them to be 3:1 weave like the rest of the shroud and NO THREADS ARE MISSING. (Irrelevant and cannot be determined by such examination. Threads may have been removed from the edges where they would not show as missing.)

The Thermochemica Acta article referenced has been thoroughly refuted. (Assertion without proof. He has not provided any evidence this is true. He has made the claim, he must provide the evidence that qualified experts in the science reported have published peer-reviewed articles refuting Rogers findings, or provide citations of the peer-review of Rogers work that "refuted" his work.)

If the Vatican wants additional testing done, they have a sample in hand that could be used without disturbing the shroud, but they won't do it because they know it will verify that it is a fake. (Assertion without proof alleging malfeasance upon a large group of people.)

I am much smarter than you and my one month is worth more than your 15 years. I will prove it. (Ad hominem and insults)

There is no such thing. The goofballs who suggested it referred directly to "French Re-Weaving". I had a suit done in the 80's. It uses a matching peice of excess cloth from a hem that is then spliced in to match. In other words, if Benford and Marino were right, the patch would have had the same date as the original because it would have been original cloth. (False Statement from Authority, ad hominem, and misrepresentation of facts and of the Benford-Marino hypothesis. "French Invisible Reweaving" is a technique that does exist. Strawman: He presents as evidence another technique that is not the same.)

Also, the character on the shroud conveniently has his hands over his winkie as if anticipating that the "shroud" might be shown in church. (This is false although the refutation as not been published. The image on the Shroud, under enhancement, does actually very faintly include the male sexual organs - per personal conversation with Barrie Schwortz circa 2004)

This was common in medieval painting, but Jews were buried with their hands crossed on their chests. (Also false. The few intact 1st Century Jewish burials that have been found have been found with the arm bones lying at the sides where they fell after the binding around the wrists rotted away. None (so far) have been found with the arms crossed over the chest.)

Several of the “scientists” were from Los Alamos. (The use of quotation marks is intended as denigration. The scientists from Los Alamos had doctorates and more in their fields of scientific expertise.)

They took away McCrone’s samples and tried to ruin him. (True, they retrieved the samples McCrone refused to return, but there is no evidence anyone attempted to "ruin him." )

STURP used less sensitive tests for blood, and shazzam, they found it! (False - The tests were done later by experts in blood research. More on this later...)

In 1988, the Vatican had samples taken by experts under their supervision. (Implication that the experts have greater expertise than Rogers although their fields are entirely different. Or that the Vatican's experts cannot be mistaken. The expert, Riggi, unfortunately ignored the established protocols and cut the sample from the worst possible place.)

Although there is no evidence except his word, he supposedly took a warp and weft thread from the samples that were used for dating (this was suspiciously convenient since the samples were destroyed in the testing). (Implication of wrong doing and fraud. Ad Hominem)

The sampling had been very closely scrutinized and no one confirms the existence of these threads and microphotographs of the samples do not show any missing threads. (irrelevant)

Rogers wrote a paper that slipped through the peer review process (It was fully peer-reviewed as were the several dozens previous articles published by Rogers.)

Rogers’ paper was nonsense covered in pseudoscience. (False assertion without proof. It was thoroughly peer-reviewed. Any such "pseudoscience" would have been critiqued. Read Rogers' so-called pseudo-science article here.)

Interestingly, he stole from McCrone in it making claims he had ridiculed earlier. (False, ad hominem, and libelous claim without proof. In fact, the data about the Thermal conductivity of Linen that he claims was stolen from McCrone is easily found by a Google Search. )

The STURP true believers have lied, stolen, and violated Vatican rules to keep the myth alive. (false, ad hominem, and libelous claims without proof.)

It has been demonstrated that "melange" wouldn't have produced the date that was arrived at. (False. Easily calculated.)

Rogers claimed that the whole sample was from the 14th century and was a later invisible patch. (False. Strawman. Misrepresentation of Rogers claims.)

He claimed that Gonella gave him threads from the middle of the samples tested. This is a lie. No threads were missing from the samples. (False. There is no inventory of all the threads on the specific samples. There is one of the samples threads that have been taken, their source area, description, analysis, etc. Cataloguing is what science does best. The idea that there must be an obvious "missing" thread for Rogers statement to be true is ludicrous.)

No threads were missing from the samples. There is no provenance for the alleged threads. No one saw Gonella take them. (See above. The requirement for an evidence chain of custody is not a requirement in science... only in criminal investigations. He has attempted to redraft the discussion into a criminal act in numerous posts: ad hominem)

The samples tested in 1988 were not adjacent to the Raes sample. The Ricci sample was and the Vatican still has it. (Simply false. By the way, is it Ricci or Riggi? Both have taken samples from the Shroud. Which sample is he picking at nits about? He is confabulating. A single sample cut for the purpose of C14 testing, that was later cut into several segments and distributed or retained, does not change the position from where it was cut on the Shroud relative to the Raes Samples.)

They could not have sampled anything adjacent to the samples actually c-14 tested. (No one claimed new samples were taken. Strawman. see above)

2. Rogers did not have any part of the c-14 sample to test. It was all destroyed in the c-14 testing. (Rogers acquired threads from the retained sample of the singular C14 cutting—the part that was NOT destroyed in testing.)

3. The Raes sample that he allegedly had illegally was not adjacent to the c-14 test area. It was adjacent to the Ricci sample that the Vatican still has. (More ad hominem)

The Rogers Article in Acta was a joke. It was destroyed. (No foundation or proof for assertion. No citation of scientific articles "destroying" Rogers Thermochemica Acta article.)

Rogers’ vamnillin theory of dating has beed discredited. (No citation or proof of this assertion other than his unsupported claim.)

He claimed that the thermal resistance of linen (this is one part stolen from McCrone) would have meant that some vanillin would have been found somewhere on the shroud, but he claims that there was NO vanillin ANYWHERE on the shroud! (False, misrepresentation. The claim was that no vanillin was found on samples taken from elsewhere on the shroud. Here is what Rogers actually said in the article:

The major problem in estimating the age of the shroud is the fact that the rate law is exponential; i.e., the maximum diurnal temperature is much more important than is the lowest storage temperature. However, some reasonable storage temperatures can be considered to give a range of predicted ages. If the shroud had been stored at a constant 25◦C, it would have taken about 1319 years to lose a conservative 95% of its vanillin. At 23◦C, it would have taken about 1845 years. At 20◦C, it would take about 3095 years.

If the shroud had been produced between a.d. 1260 and 1390, as indicated by the radiocarbon analyses, lignin should be easy to detect. A linen produced in a.d. 1260 would have retained about 37% of its vanillin in 1978. The Raes threads, the Holland cloth, and all other medieval linens gave the test for vanillin wherever lignin could be observed on growth nodes. The disappearance of all traces of vanillin from the lignin in the shroud indicates a much older age than the radiocarbon laboratories reported.

The fire of 1532 could not have greatly affected the vanillin content of lignin in all parts of the shroud equally. The thermal conductivity of linen is very low, (formula not reproduced); therefore, the unscorched parts of the folded cloth could not have become very hot. The temperature gradient through the cloth in the reliquary should have been very steep, and the cloth’s center would not have heated at all in the time available. The rapid change in color from black to white at the margins of the scorches illustrates this fact.

Any heating at the time of the fire would decrease the amount of vanillin in the lignin as a function of the temperature and time heated; however, different amounts of vanillin would have been lost in different areas. No samples from any location on the shroud gave the vanillin test.

Because the shroud and other very old linens do not give the vanillin test, the cloth must be quite old. It is thus very unlikely that the linen was produced during medieval times.

. . .

The fact that vanillin can not be detected in the lignin on shroud fibers, Dead Sea scrolls linen, and other very old linens indicates that the shroud is quite old. A determination of the kinetics of vanillin loss suggests that the shroud is between 1300- and 3000-years old. Even allowing for errors in the measurements and assumptions about storage conditions, the cloth is unlikely to be as young as 840 years.)

No such threads are known to exist AND photomicrographs of the samples show no threads missing. (Besides being both false and irrelevant, both Gonella and Rogers report the existence of "such threads." Again, the hint is that something illegal or unethical has occurred. That makes it ad hominem.)

Nickles was the author of a book. He had a team of experts supporting him. (Nope. Amateurs working in disciplines outside of their fields of expertise. Joe Nickell has a degree in English Literature and is not a scientist.)

The Riggi sample was examined after the c-14 tests. A "bioplastic film" was allegedly found, but there was NO mention of cotton or reweaving. (They were not looking for reweaving or for cotton. They were looking for contaminants—things that don't belong adhering to the fibers—the reweaving was found only when someone started looking for anomalies.)

The Vatican, seeing the risk of having this sample in the public domain scarfed it up and hid it away. (Again, unsupported hints of malfeasance and complicity in a criminal activity. ad hominem)

Gonella and Rogers colluded to make it so. (Ad hominem and reprehensible.)

As to your alleged expertise on the subject, you are an apologist for the proathenticity group. You believe whatever they say without question or objectivity. (False. Just because I disagree with him does not make me unquestioning or lacking in objectivity. Ad hominem)

You are simply wrong when you say that te Raes sample contacted ANY of the c-14 test area. (False—see above)

No. The alleged threads that Rogers used ARE NOT the same as the sample used by Dr. Garza-Valdes. Valdez used the Riggi sample. (repeating what I already told him, pretending to correct a false statement, is a form of ad hominem.)

There is NO record of these threads ever existing prior to Rogers' article and NO chain of custody. (already dealt with)

Photpmicrographs show whole pieces without missing threads. (Threads can be removed from the edges of "whole pieces" without being obvious. The whole piece is still the whole piece.)

Unfortunately for Rogers, he did what pseudo-scientists frequently do--He overreached by saying that the shroud is between 1300 and 3000 years old. (see above. Misrepresentation of Rogers' actual claims. Also libel and ad hominem attack on a respected scientist now deceased.)

His tests actually have a range of 1300 to whenever flax evolved-- tens of thousands of years. Real peer review would have caught such an obvious mistake. (False. There is an upper limit to the range the Vanillin tests can detect: once vanillin content reaches zero, it is useless. 3000 years was an upper limit of age that could possibly be determined by the vanillin content IF the object had been kept at an average temperature of 20ºC and more than 95% of the original vanillin had been lost. Age beyond that is unknowable. Rogers detailed the temperature assumptions he used (and their limits) in the body of the article. However, Rogers used the test to determine whether the Shroud could be as young as 840 years. He stated only that the vanillin content of the samples from the main body of the shroud "suggested" that the Shroud was from 1300 YO (if average storage temperature was 25ºC) to 3000 YO (if the average storage temperature was 20ºC) That is neither pseudo-science or overreaching.)

The Italian team actually used highly sensitive tests specifically for blood. They were actually MORE sensitive for old blood because it is more concentrated. (False. The Italian team used standard tests for fairly recent blood. The next sentence is total idiocy. Old blood is degraded and denatured and has broken down to components and derivative compounds.)

Adler et al didn't use tests specific for blood, but for components of blood. (False, The Italian Team's forensic serologists (specialists in blood analysis in criminalistics) and McCrone (a microscopist), not being specialists in very old blood, attempted and failed to get the 'blood' samples into solution using standard solvents: acetic acid, oxygenated water, or glycerin of potassium. Although they failed to get the blood into solution, they went ahead and performed the presumptive phenolphthalein and benzidine tests on the old, dried, non-solubilized denatured blood—and as a result concluded that the blood was not real. However, blood experts Heller and Adler have both stated that it is extremely difficult to get very old, denatured blood into solution. "If it's not in solution, you can't obtain a positive test."

Not only did Heller and Adler, once they got the blood to solubilize, successfully perform the presumptive tests for blood that McCrone and the 1973 Italian team attempted, they went even further and used many more sophisticated tests that were beyond the ability of the non-specialists McCrone or even the members of the Italian team. These tests include:

detection of higher-than-elsewhere levels of iron in 'blood' areas via X-ray fluorescence,

indicative spectra obtained by microspectrophotometry,

generation with chemicals and ultraviolet light of characteristic porphyrin fluorescence,

positive tests for hemochromagen using hydrazine,

positive tests for cyanmethemoglobin using a neutralized cyanide solution,

positive test for the bile pigment bilirubin, positive tests for protein,

positive test of proteolytic enzymes on "blood" material, leaving no residues,

positive tests of the reflection spectra indicative of bilirubin's and blood's presence,

positive chemical detection of the specific protein albumin,

presence of serum halos around various 'blood' marks when viewed under ultraviolet light,

positive immunilogical determination that the 'blood' is of primate origin.)

Nickell et al have shown that these tests show positives for the kind of paint Rogers admitted were on the shroud. (False. They merely claim that. They are not experts in the fields they are critiquing. Their work is not peer-reviewed... heck, it's not even reviewed. They are amateurs. Nickell's primary science advisor is a geologist, hardly someone who is competent in bio-chemistry, much less the very difficult area of blood, porphyrins, or hemoglobin. Rogers also comments, as have other researchers, that whatever pigments (Paint) that is on the Shroud is environmental and not in sufficient quantities to rise to visibility and is randomly distributed with no correlation to any image or non-image areas.)

Argue the facts dimbulb. (ad hominem attack on a fellow freeper.)

The FR "expert" on the shroud didn't know the facts. (I agree I don't know his peculiarly twisted facts gleaned from skeptical amateurs' books and websites. I also will admit I don't keep up on the ancillary personalities involved with the Italian Shroud community.)

His links on this entire thread, to back up his claims, follow:

This link does tend to impeach Benford and Marino... but their role is merely that they made an observation and proposed a hypothesis. They are not involved in the proof of what they proposed. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

This one actually provides statistical proof of Rogers' and Villareal's conclusions about the C14 sample. He thinks it works to prove his false thesis that the C14 samples are not taken from the same area as the Raes sample.

All in all, his posts are an excellent example of the anti-Christian, Atheist, skeptic approach to argument... obfuscate, misrepresent, denigrate, ridicule, and slur those involved who disagree with you. He says he likes to debate. He just doesn't do it very well.

Any comments any of you'd care to add? Should be interesting. Keep it civil, please.

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