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This is the second installment of my Shroud of Turin News for September - December 2024 . The first instalment has been moved to "Neutron flux," part #35 of my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. Blogger would not allow me to re-date the original 12 January 2025 post, so I published this today, 21 January 2025, and deleted that original post. The articles will be in date order (earliest first). My words will be in [bold square brackets] to distinguish them from the articles' words./p>
"Reverse-engineering Linick's Shroud hacking algorithm." This is an
[Right (enlarge): Photograph of Arizona laboratory physicist Timothy Weiler Linick (1946-89) and report that "He died at the age of forty-two on 4 June 1989, in very unclear circumstances ..." (my emphasis)]
item of my news. For those who don't know who Linick was, read 21Mar23.
I am no mathematician, unlike the "extremely mathematically gifted" Timothy Linick[JS89]. That said, in chapter "16. Were the laboratories duped by a hacker?" of my book in progress, "Shroud of Turin: Burial Sheet of Jesus!" (see 06Jul17, 03Jun18, 04Apr22, 13Jul22, 8 Nov 22 & 20Jun24), I will include a section headed, "Reverse engineering Linick's Shroud hacking algorithm." My starting point is that the very first of all dating runs of the Shroud, that of Arizona on 6 May 1988 (see 08Dec22) which produced the `psychological hammer blow' date,"1350," was, according to Table 1 of the 1989 Nature article[DP89, 612], the most recent of all dating runs at all three laboratories (see 03Aug19).
[Left (enlarge): Dating runs of "Sample 1" (the Shroud) across all three laboratories, in Table 1 of the 1989 Nature article. Years are before 1950[DP89, 611] after which atmospheric nuclear testing ejected large amounts carbon-14 into the atmosphere.]
Recently I finally got around to checking Table 1 for the first dating run years of the other two laboratories, Zurich and Oxford. I expected there to be no clear pattern to support my reverse engineering of Linick's algorithm. But much to my surprise, there is a pattern! The first dating run of Oxford and Zurich is the least recent of those two laboratories' dates. See the spreadsheet below which converts each laboratory's dating runs to calendar years (before 1950). As can be seen, Arizona's first run date, "1359" is the most recent of not only Arizona's but of all three laboratories' dates!
[Right: Spreadsheet table of eachn laboratory's dating runs in the order they appear in Table 1 of the 1989 Nature article, converted to calendar years (before 1950).]
And Oxford's first run date, "1155" is the least recent of not only Oxford, but of all three laboratories' dates! Finally, Zurich's first run date, "1217" is the least recent of Zurich's dates. If these were real dates, they would be evenly spread across all three laboratories. But because Linick, according to my Hacker Theory, chose "1350" (later adjusted to "1359") for its psychological value: "1350 ... corresponds very closely to the shroud's known historic date"[GH96, 279], he had to ensure his program balanced Arizona's recent dates with Oxford and Zurich's older dates. The "Change" column indicates that Linick's algorithm was a simple: 1. start with the first date of each laboratory, which was `hardwired' into the program; 2. then for each successive dating run, add or subtract from that first date, and each successive date thereafter, to converge on the target date for that laboratory; 3. which when combined and averaged across all three laboratories would yield the next important psychological date, 1260-1390, or 1325 ±65! Which was exactly 30 years before the Shroud first appeared in undisputed history at Lirey, France, in 1355!
It may be argued that had Oxford continued its dating runs, the final combined average of all three laboratories would not have been 1260-1390 and therefore not 1325 ±65. Linick may only have intended his program to yield a date before 1355. The "1260-1390" was the result of a statistical manipulation by the British Museum's Michael Tite (1938-) who wrote the 1989 Nature article[MR90, 7] and stood to gain the retiring Prof. Edward Hall (1924-2001)'s newly endowed Chair of Archaeological Sciences at Oxford if the radiocarbon dating found the Shroud was medieval[GH96, 254; PM96, 125; WI98, 311]. Tite would have realised that if Oxford, which was the last of the laboratories to date its Shroud sample[08Dec22] stopped its dating after only 3 runs, the mean date of all three laboratories of the Shroud sample stood at 691 ±31[DP89, 613] or 1,259 ±31. By statistical manipulation Tite could then get the date to 1262-1384[DP89, 613], which he could then arbitrarily round "down/up to the nearest 10 yr"[DP89, 613], so he could then claim that "The age of the shroud is obtained as AD 1260-1390"[DP89, 611]! That Tite was aware of the significance of 1260-1390 being 1325 ±65, is evident that when he announced to those present at the press confernce in the British Museum on 13 October 1988, that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "1260-1390," he added that that was "on or about the year AD 1325, give or take sixty-five years either way"[WI98, 6-7].
To be continued in the third installment of this post.
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]
Bibliography
DP89. Damon, E., et al., 1989, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16 February, 611-615.
GH96. Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK.
JS89. Jull, A.J.T. & Suess, H.E. , 1989, "Timothy W. Linick," Radiocarbon, Vol 31, No 2.
MR90. Morgan, R., 1990, "Interview With Dr. Michael Tite by Orazio Petrosillo and Emanuela Marinelli, 8 September 1989, during the Paris Symposium," Shroud News, No 59, June, 3-9.
PM96. Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., 1996, "The Enigma of the Shroud: A Challenge to Science," Scerri, L.J., transl., Publishers Enterprises Group: Malta.
WI98. Wilson, I., 1998, "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY.
Posted 22 January 2025. Updated 22 January 2025.
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