[Previous: July - September 2024] [Next: January - June 2025].
This is my Shroud of Turin News for September - December 2024 (see below why). 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. I have realised that before I write my open letter to Nature (see below), I need to write a "My Hacker Theory in a Nutshell" post, along the lines of my, "The Turin Shroud in a nutshell." That is, a (hopefully) one-page summary of my Hacker Theory, with links to my previous posts on it.
"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 each 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. And that Linick may not have intended his program to yield a combined average date of 1260-1390 = 1355 ±65. However, Linick's program was trending towards 1260-1390 = 1355 ±65 when Oxford ceased its dating after only 3 dating runs.
So I have reverse-engineered Linick's hacking algorithm! Which was: 1. Hardwire into the program the first-run dates of each laboratory: Arizona 1350 (adjusted later to 1359), the most recent date of all three laboratories; Oxford 1155 the least recent date of all three laboratories; and Zurich 1217, the least recent of Zurich's dates. 2. 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 important psychological date, 1260-1390, or 1325 ±65, or close to it because Oxford didn't complete its dating. And therefore I claim that, together with my other evidence for it (see 24May14 and 23Jul15), my Hacker Theory is the only true explanation of why the first-century Shroud has a 1260-1390, or (because Oxford did not complete its dating runs) a 13th-14th century, radiocarbon date.
I am considering writing an open letter to Nature here on my blog, and then emailing and snail-mailing it as a letter for publication to Nature. I will point out:
"The curious fact that in Table 1, Sample 1 (the Shroud), of the article, "Radiocarbon Dating the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16 February, 1989, pp. 611-615, the very first dating run, that of Arizona laboratory (1359), was the most recent of that laboratory's 5 runs and in fact the most recent of all three laboratories' dating runs. And the first dating run of Oxford (1155), was the least recent of that laboratory's 3 runs, and in fact the least recent of of all three laboratories' dating runs. Finally, the first dating run of Zurich (1217), was the least recent of that laboratory's 5 dating runs. The chance of this occurring would be 1/4 x 1/3 x 1/5 = 1/60. But clearly the dates should be spread evenly across all three laboratories, considering their sub-samples were cut from the same ~10 mm x 70 mm (~0.4 x 2.75 in.) sample of the Shroud and dated by identical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) systems at each of the three laboratories. An explanation of this curious fact, which has been hiding in plain sight for 37 years, is that the dates of Sample 1, the Shroud, are not real dates, but computer-generated by a hacker's program which was inserted into each of the three laboratories' AMS system computer. The hacker's algorithm has been plausibly reverse-engineered and it is surprisingly simple!"Nature probably won't publish my letter, ostensibly on the grounds it is such an old article, but at least it will be on the Web!
And as we shall see below, the British Museum's Michael Tite (1938-) committed scientific fraud by inventing the "1260-1390" date! Oxford was the last of the three laboratories to commence its dating in July 1988 because of equipment problems[08Dec22; WI95, 16-17; PM96, 91; WI98, 310]. Having overcome those problems Oxford could presumably have continued for one or two more runs. But Tite, the coordinator of the laboratories' dating and receiver of their results[AM00, 183; RC99, 118; GV01, 112] would have realised that if Oxford 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, 614], which he could then fraudulently round "down/up to [the] nearest 10 yr"[DP89, 614], so he could then claim that "The age of the shroud is obtained as AD 1260-1390"[DP89, 611]! But why round "down/up" at all, when the actual range was "1262-1384," unlesss it was to make the "results appear just a little crisper or more definitive than they really are," which is "scientific fraud" (see ). And since 1384 is closer to 1380 than it is to 1390, if Tite was going to round 1384, he should have rounded it down to 1380. But then 1320, the mid-point of 1320 +/- 60, is 35 years before 1355, which doesn't have the same round number psychological impact as 30 years before 1355.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 conference 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]. As science writers William Broad (1951-) and Nicholas Wade (1942-), pointed out in their book: "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science" (1982), scientists "making results appear just a little crisper or more definitive than they really are" is "scientific fraud":
"The term `scientific fraud' is often assumed to mean the wholesale invention of data. But this is almost certainly the rarest kind of fabrication. Those who falsify scientific data probably start and succeed with the much lesser crime of improving upon existing results. Minor and seemingly trivial instances of data manipulation-such as making results appear just a little crisper or more definitive than they really are, or selecting just the `best' data for publication and ignoring those that don't fit the case-are probably far from unusual in science. But there is only a difference in degree between `cooking' the data and inventing a whole experiment out of thin air"[BW82, 20.]So Tite was doubly guilty of "scientific fraud" in making the final radiocarbon date "appear just a little crisper or more definitive than" it really was: first by rounding the actual range "1262-1384," and second, rounding 1384 to 1390.
Tite and Hall had a motive to stop Oxford's dating after only 3 runs (not knowing that had the dating continued for another one or two runs, Linick's program would have dated the Shroud 1260-1390 = 1355 ±65 anyway), and fraudulently round up 1384 to 1390, so that Tite could falsely claim that, "The age of the shroud is obtained as AD 1260-1390." And that motive was, the Oxford Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory had been largely privately funded by Hall, who was independently wealthy due to an inheritance from his grandfather, who had `struck it rich' investing in a gold mine in Australia[WI01, 59]. But Hall was due to retire and so he had arranged for his "rich friends" to donate £1 million to fund a new Oxford Chair of Archaeological Science, so that the laboratory would continue[WI89, 7; GH96, 254; PM96, 125]. However, if the radiocarbon dating failed to prove the Shroud was medieval, those promised donations might be in doubt[RTB]. With so much at stake, it is not hard to imagine Hall privately promising Tite, words to the effect, "Get this right Michael, and the job is yours"[RTB]! And as it turned out, the radiocarbon date of the Shroud was medieval (thanks to Linick's program!), Hall's rich friends did donate £1 million to fund a new Oxford Chair of Archaeological Sciences[WI89, 7; WI98, 311; GV01, 134], and Tite was appointed to that new Chair and succeeded Hall as Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory[WI89, 7; PM96, 111; WI98, 311; GV01, 134]!
Twentieth anniversary of my discovery of the Shroud! As I wrote in my first post to this blog, on 30 June 2007, it was on a day in January 2005, now twenty years ago, that I discovered the Shroud and my life 
changed forever:
"My interest in the Shroud of Turin began in January 2005 when, as I posted to my then Yahoo group, after reading Stevenson & Habermas' "Verdict on the Shroud" (1981) [Right], I accepted (then provisionally but now fully) that the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial sheet of Jesus Christ and therefore extrabiblical evidence of His death and resurrection."
In a 2019 post I gave more details:
"... in January 2005 I found in a secondhand bookstall a book, "Verdict on the Shroud" (1981) ... which was co-authored by Gary Habermas. I knew from Habermas' other writings that he was a sound, evidence-based, evangelical Christian philosopher, so I bought the book. I was amazed at the evidence that Habermas and his co-author Ken Stevenson presented for the Shroud being the burial sheet of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels (Matthew 27:59; Mark 15:46 & Luke 23:53).According to Blogger I have published 668 posts. Days between 30 June 2007 and today, 22 January 2025 = 6416. Divided by 668, is an average of 1 post every ~9.6 days. As of tonight my blog has had 1,935,191 pageviews. Which divided by 6416 days is an average of 301.6 views a day! I hope I am still blogging about the Shroud when Jesus returns, which I expect will happen before 2037, only 12 years away!
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
AM00. Antonacci, M., 2000, "Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY.
BW82. Broad, W. & Wade, N., 1982, "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," Simon and Schuster: New York NY.
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.
GV01. Guerrera, V., 2001, "The Shroud of Turin: A Case for Authenticity," TAN: Rockford IL.
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.
RC99. Ruffin, C.B., 1999, "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN.
RTB. Reference(s) to be provided.
WI89.Wilson, I., 1989, "Dr. Tite to succeed Professor Hall at Oxford," STS Newsletter, No. 22, May, 7-8. https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/n22part4.pdf.
WI95. Wilson, I., 1995, "From a Forgotten Memorandum: A Visit to the Oxford Research Laboratory 7 July 1988," BSTS Newsletter, 15-18, 16-17.
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.
WI01. Wilson, I., 2001, "Obituary: Professor Edward Hall, CBE, FBA," BSTS Newsletter, No. 54, November, 57-60.
Posted 22 January 2025. Updated 31 January 2025.
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