Poletti, who has a Medium site popular with what I'll call "edgy evangelicals,", people who promote "dudebro Christianity" or whatever, claims the Shroud of Turin artifact really is 2,000 years old and that a new study proves that.
My response? Expanded from what I posted on Medium:
Bullshit by Poletti reaches a new level, including a flat-out lie with the Fox News line of "I report, you decide" in your headline, you explicitly claimed it's 2,000 years old, which even your new study doesn't, hedging your bet.
Bullshit on the original and bullshit squared in your response to CA in comments. CA is right; the test is NOT designed to test the Shroud's age, and in fact, the way it's conducted, and framed, comes off as handwaving to try to get the gullible to ignore that it's not designed to test its age and to give the Shroud-grifters (anybody you know?) an ammunition head fake.
The testers also give away the game with their statements about presumed and required preservation history. Anybody who knows anything about Turin knows it gets well below 20C in winter and that damp medieval castles and cathedrals got and remained well below 20C for weeks at a time without central heating. Humidity could also have gone well above 75 percent.
As for getting about 22.5C? Erm, there's this fire that burned the shroud that the authors (refuse to call them "researchers" as they're not) conveniently ignore.
(The original pseudo-research presumes the shroud was kept consistently between 20-22.5C and 55-75 percent humidity.)
Poletti admits the fire, and flooding as well, which would have pushed the shroud above 75 percent humidity.
More specifically, here's their claim:
Moreover, it is interesting to point out that our analysis has shown that, in order for the TS fabric to be about 20 centuries old, it should have necessarily been kept at an average secular temperature of about 22.5 ± 0.5 °C and an average relative humidity of 55 ± 5% for 13 centuries preceding the XIV century. From Equation (5), it follows that if the average relative humidity was of the order of 75 ± 5%, to obtain the same value of the measured natural aging of 0.60 ± 0.02 for the TS sample, the average secular room temperature should be about 20.0 ± 0.5 °C. Therefore, from our WAXS characterization it follows that we have a range of allowed secular average room temperatures of 20.0–22.5 °C, correlated with a range of average relative humidity values of 75–55%, as climate constraints, for the TS to be a 20-centuries-old relic. These physical constraints on the secular average room temperature and the average relative humidity, obtained by measuring the natural aging of the cellulose of the TS sample, here realized through WAXS characterization, could help historians test their hypotheses throughout the possible locations in the world and historical periods in which the TS could have been kept during the 13 centuries before its documented history in Europe.
And, we know that the shroud was NOWHERE NEAR that well preserved on this tight of a temperature and humidity range.
Oh, "appears to be Jewish" means nothing. I "appear to be Jewish" because of what a hospital doctor did days after I was born. So that's a bullshit framing line, Poletti. As for details of why it might "look Jewish"? Per the Wiki link, probably because it's a deliberate forgery, and modern researchers have shown how it could have been done.
Back to the Fox News line of "I report, you decide," Poletti.
It comes off as an oxymoron, but will you be honest enough to admit you lied?
I already know the answer and it's "he won't."
He's an evangelical evangelizing doorknob. I've argued with him before but never busted him in a flat-out lie.
And, hypocritical in that, if he's following the Calvinist version of the Ten Commandments, the shroud at least approaches being a graven image. It certainly is the spirit of one. It's an idol. That's especially true with it not only being a medieval creation, but — as recognized in that era, no less! — it likely being a medieval forgery.
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But, the authors not researchers are themselves liars with the heading of their study, too: "X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample." The study itself doesn't claim to actually date anything, once you look past the handwaving.
And, there's lies in their full study text:
Moreover, other dating methods agree in the assignment of the TS to the first century AD [5,10,11,12]. Spectroscopic methods, based on Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy/Attenuated Total Reflectance [10] and Raman spectroscopy [11], date the Shroud to 300 Before Christ (BC) ± 400 years and 200 BC ± 500 years, respectively. The mechanical multi-parametric method, based on an analysis of five parameters, including the breaking load and Young’s modulus and the loss factor, after an adequate calibration based on the results of two dozen samples of known age, dates TS as 400 AD ± 400 years old [12]. Estimates of the kinetic constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin suggest that TS has an age range from 1300 to 3000 years [5]. A recent numismatic analysis [13] proposes that TS was already present in 692 AD.
Bullshit.
Let's quote Wikipedia in response:
After years of discussion, the Holy See permitted radiocarbon dating on portions of a swatch taken from a corner of the shroud. Independent tests in 1988 at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology concluded with 95% confidence that the shroud material dated to 1260–1390 AD. .... The most recent analysis (2020) concludes that the stated date range needs to be adjusted by up to 88 years in order to properly meet the requirement of "95% confidence".
And add this from a separate piece on radiocarbon dating of the Shroud:
Despite some technical concerns that have been raised about radiocarbon dating of the Shroud,[5][6] no radiocarbon-dating expert has asserted that the dating is unreliable.[7]
Period and end of story. People working at some crystallography institute are grasping at straws.
Let's also note these are all native Italians. This underscores my contention that while formal church-going religiosity may be much lower in Western Europe than the US, non-structural religiosity is still pretty high there.
Finally, per Wiki's article on it, wide-angle X-ray scattering is not a scientific dating tool.
I also see, per Wiki's link on radiocarbon dating, that this is NOT the first time Sgr. Giulio Fanti has promoted Shroud bullshit. And, not the first time he's engaged in scientifically iffy methodology as part of this. Oh, and publishing your findings at places like the London School of Economics and Political Science also undermines you.
Fanti has also claimed to be able to date the shroud with infrared light, Live Science notes. So, if that was so perfect in 2013, why did you need to do it again with WAXS? Oops. And, because it of course needs to be said, infrared light is not a scientific dating tool. (Let's note that he self-references in the new study, to this study, when claiming that previous studies confirm a circa 2,000 year old date. Also note that he uses wiggle room by saying it's around this time — lest anybody accuse him of doing exactly what he's doing, namely, stacking the deck.)
And, Fanti is ALSO listed at another Wiki piece on "fringe theories about the Shroud of Turin." And, he's been called out for that bullshit.
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