Dr. John and Rebecca Jackson (Photo credit: The Tablet, newspaper for the Diocese of Brooklyn)
Posted on 08/19/2008 9:54:14 AM PDT by NYer
.- The Shroud of Turin Center in Colorado Springs is preparing linen samples similar to the materials used in the Shroud of Turin in an attempt to determine whether or not the carbon dating tests of the shroud could have been skewed by contamination from atmospheric carbon monoxide.
The Shroud of Turin is considered by some to bear an image of the face of Jesus Christ. Made of herring bone linen, the shroud has dimensions of about 4 feet by 14 feet. It bears faint brown discolorations forming the negative image of a man. Its positive image, revealed by modern photography, shows the outline of a bearded man.
Skeptics contend that the shroud is a medieval forgery.
At a conference sponsored by the Shroud Science Group at Ohio State University this weekend, the Los Alamos National Laboratory presented findings that the 1988 test results were flawed because the tested linen samples may have been from material added to the shroud during medieval repairs, the Los Angeles Times says.
A researcher at Oxford University has said he will re-examine the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin to determine whether a previous test which dated the Shroud to the 13th and 14th centuries is accurate.
Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, in a statement on his website said “There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed.”
“Only by doing this will people be able to arrive at a coherent history of the shroud which takes into account and explains all of the available scientific and historical information," he continued.
Though Ramsey has agreed to collaborate with shroud researchers, he said he does not believe contamination would have had much effect.
The reexamination of the radiocarbon dating of the shroud has been advocated by John Jackson, a physics lecturer at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Jackson, who with his wife Rebecca runs the Colorado Springs-based Shroud of Turin Center, hypothesizes that the previous carbon dating test results were skewed by elevated levels of carbon monoxide.
While he does not accept the Los Alamos researchers’ contention that some materials in the shroud were added later, John Jackson suggests that atmospheric carbon monoxide could have contaminated the shroud during its long history.
John and Rebecca Jackson say that some evidence, such as the characteristics of the cloth and the details of the image, suggest a much older origin of the shroud. At present John is preparing linen samples to be tested for carbon monoxide contamination, which could be compared to the shroud to prove or disprove his hypothesis.
"If we get to the point where we believe we have a viable hypothesis that works in the lab, then we have scientific grounds to go to Turin and say, 'Here's what we think has happened to the shroud. These are the effects we need to look for. Can we please have access?'" said Jackson, the Los Angeles Times reports.
John Jackson, 62, is a devout Catholic and a former professor at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. He has been interested in the shroud since he first saw its famous image at the age of 13.
“If you love Christ, why wouldn't you want to explore the possibility that you have an artifact of his material existence on Earth?" he said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
He added that his faith isn't incompatible with his scientific training: "How I think about the shroud comes from the shroud. It's not, 'Gee, I'm a Christian, so I'll force it to be what I want it to be.' That's not scientific logic.”
John’s wife Rebecca, 60, is a convert to Christianity from an Orthodox Jewish background. She moved to Colorado Springs from Brooklyn, New York after enlisting in the army. In 1990, while watching a documentary on the shroud, she began to think the face in the shroud’s image looked like that of her grandfather.
She met John while pursuing her interest in the shroud.
Speaking to CNA in a Monday phone interview, John Jackson explained that the hypothesis of carbon monoxide contamination in the shroud has “serious potential” for upsetting the previous radiocarbon dating of the shroud, but first it must be determined if the hypothesis has scientific merit.
He emphasized that the samples he is preparing are not from shroud but rather are “control linen samples” exposed to conditions similar to those the shroud is believed to have experienced. This preparation process, he said, is going to take a “considerable amount of time” because there are many parameters to the hypothesis.
“We have to be able to address these various parameters and we have, at the moment, only one reaction chamber to be able to do all these different experiments. Any one experiment takes a considerable amount of time to perform.”
Jackson said the research preparations could move more quickly, but he noted their progress is relative to the donations the Shroud Center receives.
“It’s going to take months to several years, I would say,” he told CNA.
If it is shown that gaseous contamination can affect the carbon dating of the shroud, Jackson said, the research would have implications for the radiocarbon community in general.
“It’s important that we bring the radiocarbon community into this project through Oxford so we are not leaving it just to us to say that the radiocarbon dating of shroud was in error, if indeed it is, so that they can be partners in that.”
“I believe they’re genuinely interested in getting an accurate date of the shroud,” he said.
Jackson claimed other linen samples subjected to radiocarbon dating have given misdates as well.
Further, he repeated that historical and archaeological studies of the shroud suggest an earlier date, mentioning its Jewish style of weaving and burial procedure
“The radiocarbon date looks to us like an outlier.”
“I’m very pleased to see the very wide interest in the shroud,” he told CNA, noting the recent Los Angeles Times article on the shroud was listed as the most viewed and most e-mailed article on the paper’s website.
“It would be meaningful to the world if it is authentic, it would be the premier archaeological artifact that could take us into the tomb of Christ, scientifically,” he concluded. “Not to replace faith, but to help us go into the tomb even before Peter and John. That is a really exciting possibility nearly 2,000 years later.”
An excellent summation!
I have stared at that face in the Shroud of Turin and for me I just think it is Jesus Christ, something in the eyes that gives me a sense of Peace and Divine just my opinion....
Someone please tell this guy that radiocarbon dating doesn’t work, and point him to the evidence, which is 180 degrees opposite from the scientifically-unsupported mantra set of evolution.
“We are the creator.” — Star Trek The Motion Picture 1978
Geneticists stated that these plants no longer existed as they had mutated to the current plants in Palestine. Isn't that additional proof of the age of the Shroud?
Additional evidence? Yes, assuming your statement is true; but only if you believe the evidence of Molecular Evolution (which is quite convincing).
And if they weren't so dead set to disprove religion this would be a no brainer for them.
The mitochondrial DNA stdies have traced humanity’s travels over the last 200,000 years. Our ancestrial Gradma Eve lived about 150,000 years in the Horn of Africa. Therefore we’re all African whatevers and cousins!!
Sorry, radiocarbon dating does indeed work.
About the only folks to say it doesn't work are young earthers trying to bolster their religious beliefs, but they have produced no credible evidence against the radiocarbon method. Much of their writings on radiocarbon dating, as seen on the various creationist websites, is horribly wrong. They should seek to understand science before they dispute it.
See my FR home page for some good links on radiocarbon dating.
Are you accusing the folks who run the radiocarbon laboratories of deliberately producing false dates? (Hmmmmm, sounds like libel.)
How would they know what age to assign to those "false dates?" Most samples are sent in anonymously, so the labs don't know what the significance of any particular date might be. How would they know which way to fudge?
Then you will enjoy visiting the web site listed below. From that site:
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Are you suggesting that Scientists SHOULD engage in fraud to authenticate the Shroud, or are you suggesting that they ARE engaged in fraud in failing to authenticate it?
Most Scientists in the U.S.A. are people of faith, why would they have as an objective the ‘disproof’ of religion? Do you think revealing the age of the Shroud to a Medieval time period would in any way make people question their faith?
You are probably referring to this.
We are all indeed of African descent according to the evidence. No matter what your belief as to human origins it is an inescapable conclusion that since that time human populations have EVOLVED to suite their environment in terms of skin color, hair type, and a host of other traits.
bump
I still don't understand why Dr. Jackson refuses to accept Ray Rogers peer reviewed and duplicated research—by a different researcher using a different approach—that proved the sample tested by Oxford and the other two labs was not representative of the overall Shroud's materials. The labs did excellent work on what they tested... but what they tested was a mixture of original shroud material and additional new material added in the 16th Century which invalidates the testing of the three labs. Error in, error out.
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I agree.
I somewhat disagree with Christopher Ramsey about whether contamination can skew the tested date. He needs to specify which type of contamination and what percentage he's referring to. I think he is referring to Dr. Jackson's theory that atmospheric Carbon Monoxide could replace the Carbon in the molecules of Linen in tested materials. On the other hand, contaminating a sample of 1st Century material with 40%-60% 16th Century material can certainly make a significant skewing of the test results. In this case, that much contamination can result in a 1200 to 1400 year upward shift in the test results dating. This is easily calculated.
For Dr. Jackson's theory to be correct, then a fairly high percentage of the Carbon in the Shroud sample would have to have been chemically exchanged with atmospheric Carbon—again, about 50%.
There may be some evidence for this Carbonnew for Carbonold exchange that Jackson is suggesting. There has been a systemic problem with dating ancient linens. Frequently, the linen wrappings of mummies has been dated to a couple of thousand years younger than the dating of the body it wraps. To explain this discrepancy, some egyptologists have postulated that later generations of priests would open a tomb and re-wrap the mummies in new wrappings—even those of lower-class citizens—in some un-documented re-burial ritual.
Atmospheric carbon monoxide should be pretty much the same as atmospheric carbon dioxide in terms of C12/C14 ratios. I am not sure why he is differentiating between the two, as it is the C rather than the O or O2 that is the important factor in C14 dating.
And it is a rare radiocarbon sample that is not exposed to the atmosphere, but we don't see these "contamination" problems in all other materials.
I think we may have more a case of apologetics than science at work among some of the participants.
There were some awfully gleeful expressions and laughter when they made the announcement of the results of the 1988 C14 tests on the Shroud.
However, the radiocarbon labs did excellent work on what they were given to test. The accuracy of their results actually pointed to the problems with the sampling protocol in that the results varied so much even within sub-samples that it should have raised a huge red flag. The variation was so great that the statistical differences between the results from the two samples given to the University of Arizona Lab showed that the two sub-samples could not have been from the same sample population even though they were cut from the same master sample and were only 4-5 cm distant from each other in their original locations on the Shroud! How could there be more than 10% variation in dating of supposedly homogenous materials in such close juxtaposition to each other.
. . . according to Remi Van Haelst, a retired industrial chemist in Belgium, the results failed to meet minimum statistical standards (chi-squared tests). Why the wide variance in the dates? Was it because of testing errors? Or was it because the sample was not sufficiently homogeneous? The latter seems very likely now, and the statistical anomaly indicates something very suspicious about the samples. . . .If the labs failed in any way, it was that they did not bother to chemically test the samples to assure themselves that what they were testing was homogenous within each sample AND that it was homogenous with and properly represented the object being tested. Had they done so, it would have been obvious that the sample WAS NOT representative and therefore invalid.Bryan Walsh, a statistician, examined Van Haelst’s analysis and further studied the measurements. He concluded that the divided samples used in multiple tests contained different levels of the C14 isotope. The overall cut sample was non-homogeneous and thus of questionable validity. Walsh found a significant relationship between the measured age of various sub-samples and their distance from the edge of the cloth.
The other area in which the Arizona lab failed was, when they found that their results were too greatly separated in age, they averaged the results to eliminate the outlying tests. There is some evidence this was done at the instruction of the British Museum's controlling authority, as they certainly used inappropriate statistical tests to certify the results.
This may indicate some awareness on the part of both the British Museum and the University of Arizona that the results were anomalous and that they took steps to hide the problems with the sub-sample dating. If that is the case, then they are at least guilty of "cooking the books," so to speak, to make their case stronger. However, to do so, they overlooked another red flag that should have made them question their conclusions.
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