DBowling wrote:Again you are wrong on the basic facts.
1. I double checked and confirmed that Ray Rogers did send Fanti an 'Image fiber'.
Yes. just read that last word again, would you? Fibre. Quite so. Fibre. Not thread. Threads are made of fibres. A fibre can be linen or cotton or wool, but not a mixture. A thread can be a mixture. I do not believe Rogers ever had access to any threads.
so Rogers and the other STURP members did have access to samples from the main Shroud body.
The rather dubious story of who kept what is fraught with suspicion. Heller, I think, says that the main tape collection was held by Adler, whose widow returned it to the Vatican when he died. There is some doubt about whether this included both halves of the samples cut in two by McCrone, or how many of the 3 or 4 samples that were not given to McCrone but were given to Heller and Adler. There are, I think, several samples scattered around various people, who are now unable to do anything with them as they no longer have any authority or provenance, although Gerard Lucotte is examining a shred of tape allegedly unstuck from a blood stain on the brow by Riggi di Numana in 1978.
2. It is simply non-credible to assert that the STURP team was unable to determine whether or not the main body of the Shroud contained cotton. They determined that it did not.
No, they didn't. For a start, as I say, they only had access to fibres, and for a second, they do not discuss cotton at all in their conclusions. Indeed, in their 'Physics and Chemistry' paper, Rogers and Schwalbe refer to the cotton in the Raes sample without any suggestion that it was anomalous. Heller, in his book, McCrone and Baima Bollone all refer to cotton on the main body of the Shroud.
Roger's scientific analysis directly contradicts your personal unverified views on the shroud.
No. Rogers's conclusions directly contradict the findings of Giulio Fanti, in his analysis of a Raes thread, and Heller and Adler's findings with respect to starch. I have not studied any threads or fibres, and any contradiction I mention is based on the papers of those who have. It is convenient to attempt to compare a 'scientific analysis' and some 'personal unverified views', but that's just shooting the messenger. The discrepancy won't go away.
You are simply grasping at straws on this one.
One of us is...
Kurieou wrote: I do think attempts to replicate are helpful to shedding light on different features of the shroud image itself and just how unique it is.
You are possibly unique among authenticists, almost every one of whom begins almost every remark to me by shouting, in capital letters and accompanied by many exclamation marks, words to the effect that "It cannot be replicated, therefore it is authentic." Any other evidence always seems secondary to them. Once I have replicated it, of course, they will find some other evidence to fly at the mast-head, but for the time being, it's the lack of replication which dominates authenticist thinking.
Why does the corner of the shroud that the 1988 sample was cut from fluoresce differently if it is same material?
There is a photo on the internet that purports to be a UV-fluorescence photo of the radiocarbon corner of the Shroud. Its provenance is wholly unknown, and it is quite clearly not by the STuRP team, whose photos are all well documented in their research paper, and whose photos do not extend to the radiocarbon corner. I have asked Barrie Schwortz about this, and he is unable to account for it. In my opinion it is a heavily manipulated version of one corner of an ordinary light photo of the Shroud, and the difference in colour is due to fade-off in light intensity at the edges.
And the cotton... sorry, but I'm going with Rogers on this one, who was a materialist, skeptic and initially peeved that the C14 date was challenged by those he considered fanatical believers. On the other hand, while you are very much interested and knowledgeable with the shroud, I don't know much about your credentials or experience with the shroud. So, based upon authority alone, being non-authoritative myself, I ought to defer to a higher authority.
Fair enough. There are occasionally good reasons for an argumentum ad authoritatem, and that's one of them. As long as you don't think it's evidence, and see my response to DBowling above. Shooting the messenger does not remove the message.
I do know Rogers had access to the shroud as Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP).
Yes. So what did he do with his samples? Firstly, to the horror of John Heller, handed nearly all of them over to Walter McCrone, and secondly, when he got them back, to John Heller and Alan Adler. Rogers knew very well that his expertise lay in explosives, and that specialists in microscopy and haematology would be more authoritative than himself. Remarkably, apart from co-authoring the summary paper (Physics and Chemistry), he is not recorded as have carried out any research at all on any of the Shroud until his return to the fray after Benford and Marino proposed the patch hypothesis. No doubt any personal speculation of my own will be jeered at, but I personally think that he believed the diagnosis of forgery of Walter McCrone, who had been his friend for many years, but did not want to upset the convictions of his fellow researchers, especially Jackson and Jumper, who were convinced of the Shroud's authenticity.
If you added up all the iron oxide particles together that exist on the shroud, then you'd likely still need a microscope to see them.
Clearly not. McCrone's book is packed with photographs of Shroud sample slides clearly showing the iron oxide particles.
And then, oxide mainly exists in parts (water stained), not across the whole. The iron that is there, is consistent with natural effects. [...] "Thus we find three types of iron on the Shroud:
a) a cellulose bound chelated form
b) heme bound forms
c) iron oxide (Fe2O3)
The predominant form is the cellulose bound form. We have been able to identify Fe2O3 primarily in the water stain margins and charred blood areas indicating that it only constitutes a very small percentage of the total iron forms found on the Shroud."
All true, but remember these conclusions are based entirely on what was left of the fibres after they had been rinsed free of extraneous material in order to extract them from the sticky tape. Morris, Schwalbe and London conducted X-Ray Fluorescence studies on the Shroud itself in Turin, and found a clear correspondence between image intensity and iron content in a continuous series of sample sites.
Finally, the story of the alleged 1982 radiocarbon testing is too vague for any sensible comment. The provenance of the thread tested is wholly uncertain, as the STuRP team did not remove any threads, and it is extremely doubtful if radiocarbon testing could be carried out at all on that tiny mass in 1982. It is mainly used by authenticists to try to discredit radiocarbon dating generally, than to attempt any genuine appeal to authenticity. After all, if the Shroud dates to 200AD, then it's a fake. Some people vaguely hope that a margin of error of say, 200 years or so might just be able to be applied, but that's grasping at a very feeble straw indeed.
), yet we don't find anything else like the shroud anywhere. There is a point when all such failed replications (like your one failed mending test) must count as positive evidence.
photography wasn't invented in medieval times, yet even with such tests, it is a fully clear negative and not simply down to 4cm.