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Replying to otseng in post #1820]
This is precisely my point. So, the question is, should this also apply to the TS?
Yes ... it should apply to any C-14 measured by AMS (or radiometric analysis). The big questions are whether the sample represents the original shroud material, if there was any contamination along the way, if the equipment was calibrated and the operators well trained, etc. It appears that the community directly involved in this entire 8-10 year long episode are convinced that none of these "gotcha" issues were in play and the results are valid (ie. they did their due diligence and were satisfied). This doesn't mean with 100% certainty that there were no issues, but the groups who did the measurements, and the people who contracted them to do it, all seem convinced that the measurements were done correctly.
What Diogenese is doing is claiming the C-14 is the final arbiter of the shroud. It doesn't matter if all the other evidence points to its authenticity. It doesn't matter if there are theories of contamination. It doesn't matter if there are potential procedural problems. It doesn't matter if specimens are not prepared correctly. They are all "silly stuff", "smoke and mirrors", and "garbage theories". The C-14 result makes it "pointless to continue the argument", "end of story", "it's a fake", issue is "closed".
I haven't read enough on the details to know what the results of investigations into claims of contamination, procedural problems, and sample contamination showed. But if these points are valid then of course the results would come into question. I'd assume these concerns were addressed during the process (and afterwards) and there was concensus that they were not issues. And having three independent labs do the testing should at least ease concerns on the procedural and equipment issues, and also the sample preparation issue if they all received sections of the same small rectangle and got essentially the same results. That leaves contamination of the samples themselves before reaching the science groups (they'd all have to be conatminated in the same way), contamination of the original patch before removal, etc. Do you have a link/reference to where these kinds of claims are described and summarized?
This is only one of a mountain of concerns. But, I will get to those later after I explore more the attitude of the C-14 being conclusive evidence.
It seems to me that the primary issue is not the reliability of the C-14 analysis by AMS, but on whether the samples themselves represent the original shroud material, and were not contaminated prior to being removed. The
Wikipedia article has a little bit on this subject:
Some proponents for the authenticity of the shroud have attempted to discount the radiocarbon dating result by claiming that the sample may represent a medieval "invisible" repair fragment rather than the image-bearing cloth. However, all of the hypotheses used to challenge the radiocarbon dating have been scientifically refuted, including the medieval repair hypothesis, the bio-contamination hypothesis and the carbon monoxide hypothesis.
In recent years, the radiocarbon dating data have been repeatedly statistically analysed, in attempts to draw some conclusions about the reliability of the C14 dating from studying the data rather than studying the shroud itself. The studies have all concluded that the data lack homogeneity, which might be due to unidentified abnormalities in the fabric tested, or to differences in the pre-testing cleaning processes used by the different laboratories. The most recent analysis (2020) concluded that the stated date range needs to be adjusted by up to 88 years in order to properly meet the requirement of "95% confidence".
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