Slashdot Mirror
Carbon Dating & The Shroud of Turin
BlackTyranny writes "The Shroud of Turin, carbon dated in 1978 by a team of scientists, may be far older than originally thought. Raymond N. Rogers, a retired chemist from the University of California-operated Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, part of the original team, used samples given to him in 2003 from the Cardinal of Turin's scientific advisor. Roger's contends that the carbon dating might be faulty because "the people who cut the sample didn't do a very good job of characterizing the samples," that is, taking samples from many areas of the cloth." I think the shroud 'Patch' may be made of the big foot suit. ;)
Yeah, most of my dating is faulty also. Oh, carbon, you say. Nevermind.
The carbon dating was done in 1988, not in 1978. The article is wrong.
... Raymond N. Rogers has been a long time believer of the authenticity of the shroud. A Google on his name will show a long involvement. It is doubtful he will ever have findings that will be contrary to his own beliefs. This does not mean he is wrong nor a fraud. It would just be more believable if the findings were from an unbiased third party.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
...and there really isn't any proof on it having been the one that some guy 2000 years ago was in.
relics were a big business, and still are.
there were literally tons of wood that was supposedly from the cross that jesus was supposedly nailed to.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
All you have to do is look at the face image on the shroud. It is a completely orthogonal image. If the shroud was wrapped in any way around a person's face, there is no way that the image could have been generated.
Hey kids, you can try this at home. Just wet your face and lightly wrap a paper towel around it for a second and then see if you recognize yourself in the image.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
Summary completely misses the point of the article that the new analysis was carried out on vanillin content of the fibres rather than carbon isotopes.
For those (like myself) who are secular, I wish to point out the single greatest problem in the religious view of the Shroud. The clerics simply assume that the shroud belongs to Jesus (assuming that he existed at all) and then direct their scientists to prove that the shroud belonged to Jesus. This type of reasoning is "Assume the conclusion to be true. Then prove the conclusion." I thought that scientific inquiry is "We don't know what to expect. Let's probe and collect the scientifically provable facts. Then, we draw a conclusion from the facts."
Somehow I think bearing the Son of Man in your womb is a little different than coveting your neighbor.
Christians hate unmarried mothers and adultery and women who have children with men who aren't their husbands otherwise
Christians aren't supposed to hate anyone, but rather hate the sin. We're all sinners in this world. Becoming a Christian doesn't make one sinless - but hopefully makes them sin less. I'm sorry if your view of Christianity has been skewed by those who don't hold to true beliefs.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
Leviticus 19:19
King James Bible: Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed. Neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
Good News Bible: Obey my orders. Do not crossbreed your cattle. Do not plant two kinds of seed in the same field. Do not wear clothing made from two kinds of fiber.
Scientific method:
1. Characterization
2. Hypothesis (a theoretical, hypothetical explanation)
3. Prediction (logical deduction from the hypothesis)
4. Experiment (test of all of the above)
5. Conclusion (an objective conclusion based on #4)
Dr. Raymond Rogers's Method
1. Conclusion (It was Jesus's burial shroud)
2. Characterization (What's that?)
3. Hypothesis (Huh?)
4. Prediction (We all know it was Jesus's)
5. Experiment (Hmmm, let's pick a method that will ballpark the age better. 100,000 BC to 2005 CE GOOD! Hey, it's all good.)
Um, aren't you chastising Cmdr Taco's belief that he has a right to chastise Christian's beliefs?
Uh, no. Taco is allowed to believe he has the right to chastise Christians' beliefs, he's just not allowed to actually do it.
Of course, mainly it's just gauche. It's like a Jewish friend of mine who went out of her way to help a person who was having a spot of trouble at work. The person told my friend that it was "awfully Christian of her." Of course, my friend knew what she meant was something like "Your actions are in accord with ideals that I was taught by Christianity, and which are held by other religions such as Judaism." But it's rather like a segregationist telling W.E.B. DuBois that it was "awfully white of him."
The downside of the death of the idea of propiety is that it has stripped our culture of language and tools to describe situations like this. There is a great gaping whole on the continuum that starts at "OK" and runs through "morally wrong", "should be illegal" ending up at "downright evil". Between "OK" and "morally wrong", there is a whole range of qualities, including: gauche, impolite, rude, and offensive.
Mocking somebody's beliefs, depending on the context, falls somewhere in this range.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, I don't see it as a waste of money, if this is important to people.
Science is not a set of conclusions, it is a set of procedures. As such if the original tests were worth doing, then questioning the results of the original test are potentially worth doing. If the original tests are not be questioned in principle then the conclusions of those test can't be regarded as scientific, can they?
From a purely scientific standpoint, the scientific value of retesting this artifact lies in the basis for doubting the original conclusions. Naturally, if the basis for doubting that is religious faith, then there is no scientific value in doing so. But if there are technical reasons to believe that the original procedure was incorrect, then there is certainly merit in reexamining the conclusions.
By way of analogy, there is no scientific merit in reexaming work done to trace the antiquity of our mitochondrial DNA heritage based on an extrapolation of the world's age in the Bible. But, doing so on the basis that the original work may have overestimated the rate of mutation is a totally different kettle of loaves and fishes.
Naturally, the fact that this process would be of great interest to Young Earthers is, or at least should be, irrelevant.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Faith and science are two totally different and incompatible methods of acquiring knowledge.
Faith is not a method of aquiring knowledge, it's a method of retaining a belief.
AccountKiller
First, let me say that I am a Christian, and I hold my faith to be a guiding and supporting influence in my life. As to the authenticity of Shroud of Turin, I personaly have doubts about its authenticity, but I refuse to pass final judgment on the matter as I doubt we will ever have all the facts. In the final analysis however no proof, scientific or other wise will matter.
"For those who do not believe no proof is sufficient. For those who do believe no proof is necessary." -- Unknown source
"I'm making perfect sense, you're just not keeping up."
I'd remind the readers that science is fallible.
Of course. But you sound like you're using the fallibility of science to justify what you already believe. In other words "it MUST be the real Jesus shrowd, not that I have any evidence it is.. but eventually science will show the counter-evidence is wrong because.. well it MUST be". That's not how science works. Sure, it's possible the science is faulty.. but you don't just assume it is because the evidence doesn't back up your own, unsubstatiated beliefs. That's just patently dishonest.
In science you take all the evidence and make a conclusion based on that with the understanding that it's not the final word on the matter. In other words, you don't get to use science only when it backs up what you want to believe, but claim faulty science when it doesn't.
AccountKiller
The National Geographic channel last night aired an hour-long investigation into the mystery of the shroud of turin. NG was made the argument that Leonardo Da Vinci created the shroud. Anyone who's interested should check it out.
NG claimed that Da Vinci had family ties to the church that housed the shroud, thus creating a link between how the shroud could have been obtained by the church.
NG made other intereresting links and arguments.
I found it particuarly amusing that the image on the shroud is extremely similar to Da Vinci's own self portrait. It seems well within Leonardo's personality to pull such a prank that has lasted for centuries.
As for the actual age of the shroud, as long as it was *before* Leonardo's time, he could have obtained the material. If his goal was to trick the people of his time with the shroud he probably would have sought an older-looking one anyway.
From nationalgeographic.com: Behind the Mysteries Week: "Da Vinci and the Mystery of the Shroud" at 8P et/pt Jesus's image, believers say, was burned into the Shroud of Turin by the intense heat of resurrection. But is it genuine? Or was it created by someone with extraordinary skills, like the great Leonardo Da Vinci?
First, the British Museum did no dating. They simply coordinated the results from three labs in the US, UK and Switzerland.
Second, this 'bioplastic coating' was simply a hypothesis from Stephen Mattingly of the University of Texas. STURPS Joan L. Rogers took authentic Shroud fibers, which she laboriously extracted from the STURP sampling tapes by washing them free of adhesive with xylene (not a solvent for any "bioplastic polymers"), to Metuchen, NJ, for laser-microprobe Raman analysis. The analysis is extremely sensitive, but nothing was observed that would indicate a "bioplastic polymer."
Third, even at the time, scientists in the dating lab in the UK were skeptical: P.H South, while examining threads from the sample on behalf of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory found indications of cotton. To him it seemed like material intrusion. In an article entitled "Rogue Fibers Found in Shroud," published in Textile Horizons in 1988, South write of his discovery of "a fine dark yellow strand [of cotton] possibly of Egyptian origin, and quite old . . . it may have been used for repairs at some time in the past, or simply bound in when the linen fabric was woven."
I well remember that, at the time, no one (except the odd spin doctor) thought these results conclusive and asked for more material. This was denied.
Did he inhale?
It's a pity that this sort of uninteresting pseudo-science keeps cropping up on
I'm not a scientist, but surely there are more interesting things going in the world than this?
I couldn't agree more. And I'm pretty confident that Jesus would also agree wholeheartedly if he were alive today. I suspect he'd be dumbfounded as to why God's children still seem to be mesmerised by idols and symbols when they should really be focussing on all the death, torture, war and oppression in the world. We'll spend money on investigating a dirty old piece of cloth but we're not prepared to stop all the prejudices and greed-fuelled, self-interested warmongers in the world. I'm not a Christian btw (far from it in fact) - but I have zero time for anyone claiming to be a Christian that actually has no idea what Jesus Christ's own ideals were.
Please excuse the rant but really - even Jesus himself would mod this story down.
Actually, the Catholic church does not hold the shroud to be authentic, and church officials have made no comment on the new anaysis reported in this article. This new analysis was not performed by "the church", but rather by an independent researcher.
- The very people who maintain the Shroud as a holy artifact
- Who by definition believe in its authenticity
- Who have every reason to want it to be proven authentic
- Who control access to it, and
- Who only permitted research on it after a long and difficult negotiation with the scientists involved,
didn't allow anyone to have the proper things to test?Isn't it easier just to believe that the claims of authenticity are false, and that people are clinging to it because of what they want to be true?
Rogers looks like someone who will believe regardless of the evidence, and is thus someone whose "scientific" results are not trustworthy. The McPaper article quotes Rogers saying " the blood spots on it are real blood", when the actual material of the "blood stains" has been proven to be red ochre. Am I also being asked to believe that Jesus bled red ochre?
Refusing to accept the reality that the "artifact" is a 14th-century creation says nothing about the dating process, and everything about your prejudices. It's not what its keepers think it is. Get over it.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
______________________________________
The Sunday Times [28 November 2004]
Andrew Sullivan: Where the Bible bashers are sinful and the liberals pure
. . .
Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways they were the two states competing in the last election. One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for John Kerry over George W Bush 62% to 37%; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61% to 38%.
Ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in fact Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas, which until recently made private gay sex a crime, has a divorce rate of 4.1.
A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. Every one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate is roughly 50% higher than the national average.
Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt and many do not have the maturity to know what they are getting into. There is some correlation, too, between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging behind a highly educated state such as Massachusetts.
The irony still holds, however. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that socially troubled communities cling to absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.
Doesn't being born again help to bring down divorce rates? Jesus was clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not; 29% of Baptists have been divorced, compared with 21% of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23% of married born agains have been divorced twice or more.
Teenage births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state such as Texas where the religious right is strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, teen births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%. In liberal, secular Massachusetts they are 7.4%, less than half. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas the proportion of people unmarried is 32.4%; in Massachusetts it is 26.8%. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts has a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.
Take abortion. America is one of the few western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It is a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics. Compare it with a country such as Holland, perhaps the epitome of social liberalism. Which country has the highest rate of abortion? It is not even close. America has a rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?
. . .
More at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-13782 27,00.html
Lest there be any misunderstanding: I'm not Catholic, and have never venerated a relic of any sort, whether Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu or even a SETI moonrock!
1. "The clerics simply assume that the shroud belongs to Jesus (assuming that he existed at all) and then direct their scientists to prove that the shroud belonged to Jesus."
While there may well be a case where this occurred, the Catholic church does not now, nor has it ever in the past, recognized or authenticated the Shroud as an official relic. It's been the subject of some intense disputes with in the RC church, to the point that Pope Clement VII ordered that in the case of all future exhibitions, a priest present should "declare in a loud voice that it was not the real shroud of Christ." In fact, the theory that Shroud was only a painting -- whether forgery or 'representation' -- was advanced WITHIN the Catholic church over 600 years ago!
As an apparent result of these and other dispures, the Shroud seems to have been treated more as an embarrassment, than a relic the church wished to display or advertise.
See the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) article for details: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13762a.htm
2. "It is doubtful he (Rogers) will ever have findings that will be contrary to his own beliefs."
Raymond Rogers, who authored the study, published in "Thermochimica Acta", that has generated all the hubbabaloo does NOT now claim that he, or anyone else has proved that the Shroud of Turin is the Shroud of Christ. To the contrary, he's been quoted as saying that "It's a shroud from the right time, but you're never going to find out (through science) if it was used on a person named Jesus".
http://tinyurl.com/68jfl (www.smh.com.au)
ABSTRACT OF THE ROGERS ARTICLE:
In 1988, radiocarbon laboratories at Arizona, Cambridge, and Zurich determined the age of a sample from the Shroud of Turin. They reported that the date of the cloth's production lay between A.D. 1260 and 1390 with 95% confidence. This came as a surprise in view of the technology used to produce the cloth, its chemical composition, and the lack of vanillin in its lignin. The results prompted questions about the validity of the sample.
Preliminary estimates of the kinetics constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin indicate a much older age for the cloth than the radiocarbon analyses. The radiocarbon sampling area is uniquely coated with a yellow-brown plant gum containing dye lakes. Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud.
"Thermochimica Acta", Volume 425, Issues 1-2
http://tinyurl.com/4vy6r (www.sciencedirect.com)
3.Results of comprehensive STURP study of the Shroud, the consortium of scientists who physically examined the Shroud in 1978, was NOT sponsored or encouraged by the Catholic church, did NOT include many Catholics, and did NOT conclude that the Shroud of Turin was the Shroud of Christ. Raymond Rogers, who was a member of that team, was quoted at that time, when asked that question at a public press conference, as saying, "We do not have test for Jesus Christ. So, we can't hypothesize or test for that question."
"Report on the Shroud of Turin", Heller, 1983
used copies from Amazon - http://tinyurl.com/46fln
4. "So at best you can show that it was the death shroud of someone who died 2000 years ago via a mo
Of course, it is quite possible that in Massachusetts many more people have sexual relationships without being married, so in the end it may turn out that are actually more people staying with their initial partner in Texas then there are in Massachusetts. Here in the Netherlands there has been a time when it was not done to get married. You simply lived together. The law even came up with special rules for people who did not want to marry out of rebellion against the concept to marriage being a life long bond. Nowadays many people live together several years before they get married. So divorce rates being lower does not say a damn thing about the number of people that break up after having sexual relationship with someone else.