Monday, December 2, 2019

"News and Editorial," Shroud of Turin News, October 2019

Shroud of Turin News - October 2019
© Stephen E. Jones
[1]

[Previous: September 2019, part #1] [Next: November 2019, part #1]

This is the October 2019 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. I have listed below linked news article(s) about the Shroud in October as a service to readers, without necessarily endorsing any of them.


News:
• "Stephen Lukasik, physicist turned Pentagon research director, dies at 88," Washington Post, Obituaries, 8 October 2019, Harrison Smith ... Stephen Lukasik [Right (enlarge): "Portrait of Stephen J. Lukasik in 1990"[2]], a physicist who sought to apply advanced technology to national security, overseeing Defense Department research on computer networking, artificial intelligence and the detection of nuclear explosions before becoming a prescient expert on cybersecurity, died Oct. 3 at his home in Falls Church, Va. He was 88 ...":

"A man of wide-ranging interests, Dr. Lukasik amassed a collection of about 15,000 books on subjects including national security, shipwrecks, archaeology and geology, and participated in a 1988 effort to date the Shroud of Turin, venerated by millions of Christians as the burial cloth of Jesus. (Radiocarbon tests indicated the frayed length of linen was created in the Middle Ages, although Dr. Lukasik cast doubts on those findings.)"
See also (which do not mention the Shroud): "Stephen J. Lukasik," Wikipedia, 31 October 2019 & "Stephen Lukasik, 88, Who Pushed Tech in National Defense, Is Dead," The New York Times, 7 October 2019, Katie Hafner.

Lukasik was one of STURP's representatives at the 1986 Turin Workshop on radiocarbon dating the Shroud:

"Lukasik, S (Stephen): Vice President-Technology, Northrup Corporation, Los Angeles. He was in charge of experiments the STURP group hoped to carry out on the shroud. He attended the workshop on dating the Turin Shroud"[3].
But Lukasik is probably unknown to most Shroudies because STURP never carried out its 1988 experiments on the Shroud (`thanks' to the machinations of the anti-Christian Prof. Harry E. Gove (1922-2009) and the weakness of the Turin and Vatican church authorities):
"From 1986 to 1987, Gove lobbied against STURP harder than ever. During this time, the carbon dating laboratories' directors wrote letters to Chagas, and Chagas met personally with the Pope, echoing their complaints about STURP's planned tests. In the summer of 1987, Gove wrote a remarkable letter to Chagas, which contained a number of untrue and unsubstantiated comments that, of course, concerned STURP and even those in Turin. Gove himself stated:
`... I noted that the Shroud had been subjected to a number of scientific tests of dubious value carried out in ill-conceived ways by scientists of unknown reputation ... [false] I stated that almost every aspect of the STURP organization was distasteful ... This included their clear religious zeal, their questionable sources of support [false], their military mind set ...'[3]
... before he finished, he would even compare STURP to the Spanish Inquisition. This time he not only threatened that the carbon dating laboratories would withdraw without Chagas's continued support, he guaranteed their withdrawal `if STURP participates in the carbon dating enterprise in any way" [4, 5]

Editorial
Posts: In October I blogged no new posts because my "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: Sixteenth century (1)" began on 25 September and ended on 3 November!

Comments: There were no comments in October worth mentioning.

Updates In October there were no significant updates in the background of my past posts.

Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. Although I didn't start any new posts in October, I did mention the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud at "1508a" in my 16th century chronology (references omitted):


1508a On 20 February Margaret of Austria draws up her will, giving to the church of Brou, among other relics, a snippet of the Shroud .... Marino and Benford claim that this snippet was taken ... from what later became the 1988 radiocarbon dating area [Below (enlarge) ... and 16th century threads were used to repair the excision, thus giving the first-century Shroud a false 13th-14th century radiocarbon date ... However, see my comment below that:
"... younger carbon contamination and/or threads from a medieval repair included in the radiocarbon dating samples does not, of itself, explain why the first century Shroud had the `bull's eye' 1260-1390 = 1325±65 radiocarbon date. For an explanation of both, see my possible reconciliation of the carbon contamination and/or medieval repair theories with my hacker theory."

My book: In October I continued writing in Word, Chapter 3, "The man point outline of my book, "Shroud of Turin: The Burial Sheet of Jesus!" on my

[Left (enlarge): The planned cover of my book.]

on the Shroud" and in parallel also in Word, "Problems of the Forgery Theory." However, see my post of 04Nov19 where I realised that I was getting too bogged down with fine details, such that I had become increasingly worried that at almost (now) 73 years of age, I may never finish my book. So I decided to start posting here on my blog an online version of my book, with the same name.

Pageviews: At midnight on 31 October, Google Analytics [Below (enlarge)] gave this blog's "Pageviews all time history" as 1,112,790.

This compares with 972,213 at the same time in October 2018. That is 140,577 pageviews over the year, or an average of ~385 pageviews per day.

Google Analytics also gave the most viewed posts for October (highest uppermost) as: "Problems of the Turin Shroud forgery theory: Index A-F," Jan 20, 2016 - 401; Problems of the Turin Shroud forgery theory: Index G-M ," Apr 2, 2016 - 141; "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: Sixteenth century (1)," Sep 25, 2019 - 86; "Is the Shroud of Turin authentic? Or is it a forgery?' #1," Sep 8, 2019 - 75 & "Problems of the Turin Shroud forgery theory: Index S-Z," Jun 18, 2016 - 65.

Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]
2. "File:SJLukasik1990.jpg," Wikimedia Commons, 6 October 2019. [return]
3. Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK, pp.191-192. [return]
4. Gove, 1996, p.192. [return]
5. Antonacci, M., 2000, "Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, pp.199-200. [return]

Posted: 2 December 2019. Updated: 13 July 2022.

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