Saturday, September 3, 2016

How my radiocarbon dating hacker theory started

Copyright ©, Stephen E. Jones[1]

I thought this would be simple but it has become unexpectedly complex, so I will hold off posting any more on how my radiocarbon dating hacker theory started until Joe Marino's paragraph on my hacking theory (see below) is published in the next Shroud.com update.

Update: As I posted in my September Shroud of Turin News "Editorial":
"`...How my radiocarbon dating hacker theory started,' I discovered was more complex that I originally thought. I am now thinking of including it in the final part #11 of my current hacker series."

This is the first installment of "How my radiocarbon dating hacker theory started."

[Above (enlarge): Schematic of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating system at the University of Arizona in 2005. Note the "Control Console" bottom left next to the photo of a computer. This is from my post of 22 February 2014, "Were the radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker? (3)," which was not long after I had first realised that it is the computer which actually reports a sample's AMS radiocarbon date!]

Introduction. As I recently mentioned, Joe Marino sent me draft of part 3 of his "The Politics of the Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud" (see part 1 and part 2), which should be published in Shroud.com's forthcoming mid-September update.

In that part 3 there will be a paragraph about my hacking theory, including a link to the beginning of my current hacker series, "The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking." However in that paragraph Joe had wrongly assumed that my hacking theory started with the quote of Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory physicist Timothy W. Linick (1946-89) in anti-authenticist David Sox's 1998 book :

"Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist, said: `If we show the material to be medieval that would definitely mean that it is not authentic. If we date it back 2000 years, of course, that still leaves room for argument. It would be the right age - but is it the real thing?'"[2]

To be continued in the second installment of this post.

Notes
1. This post is copyright. Permission is granted to quote from any part of this post (but not the whole post), provided it includes a reference citing my name, its subject heading, its date, and a hyperlink back to this post. [return]
2. Sox, H.D., 1988, "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, p.147. [return]

Posted: 3 September 2016. Updated: 27 July 2017.

No comments: