The Contents of a Nutshell

Most often, a nut.

[This post was written after Part 1 of Jones’s new series (see below), with Parts 2, 3 and 4 – or more – to follow. I don’t intend to wait for them as a) they may never happen, b) they may extend exponentially into the future, and c) I doubt if they will add anything to what I mention below. Part 2 is scheduled to be about the alleged artistic similarities between the Shroud and early depictions of Christ, and as such nothing to do with the hacker hypothesis, and Part 3 may be a painful determination to pin the blame on a young researcher from Arizona who took his own life, with absolutely zero evidence. See Section 6, below. Part 4 is amusingly proposed to be “Other Shroudie explanations don’t work and conclusion.” In the event that anything new does turn up, I’ll edit this post, and this comment, accordingly.]

Since 2014, Stephen E. Jones, a retired science teacher from Western Australia, has been promulgating a hunch that the radiocarbon dates were fraudulently manipulated by a KGB plan to discredit Christianity.¹ His blogs on the subject died down after a while, as he pursued an ever more convoluted attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of the Shroud, but have cropped up again as he embarks on yet another series of expositions, this episode called ‘My Hacker Theory in a nutshell: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia.’

This, we were told, was going to be “a (hopefully) one-page summary” of his hypothesis, referring where necessary to three previous series of posts on the subject. First came ‘Were the radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?’ a five-part series (#1 to #5) which was immediately rewritten, so that Part #1 (revised) became Part #6 and so on to Part #5 (revised), which became Part #10. Before completing the series, Jones said he had “decided to terminate this ‘Were the radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?’ series and start a new series: ‘My theory that the radiocarbon dating laboratories were duped by a computer hacker.'”

This new series lasted from Part #1 to Part 9, and was followed by a summary, Part #10 (1) to Part #10 (10), so the Summary had more parts than the work it summarised. It still wasn’t finished, so it was replaced by a new Summary, called ‘The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking.’ This consisted of eleven parts, Part #1 to Part #11.

At last, after 30 repetitions, Jones had completed his research into the possibility that the radiocarbon dating was the result of a hack. Or had he? Before long another series emerged, “Steps in the development of my radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud hacker theory.” There were twelve of these, ending in “To be continued in the next part #13 of this series,” but #13 never appeared.

What did appear was “Media release: Were the Turin Shroud radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?” This reiterated everything that had been reiterated, several times, before, and was so long that it was reissued as “Media release: Were the Turin Shroud radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?” – Simplified.

Things quietened down for a while, although Jones squabbled with David Rolfe when mention of his libel was omitted from a BSTS Newsletter, and conducted a series of intrusive phone calls into the suicide of Timothy Linick, one of the Tuscon engineers, but these were one-off inquires and not full reiterations of the argument.

But he’s off again, and what was going to be a one page summary has erupted like elephant toothpaste into yet another interminable re-iteration of the same collection of historical guesswork, mean-minded insinuation and scientific incompetence as the previous forty episodes. If it follows previous form, it will go on forever before petering out, only to re-emerge a few years later like a cancer emerging from remission.

Here, in a nutshell, are Jones’s points of evidence, and his misunderstandings.

1). CONVERTING BP DATES TO AD DATES.
This series begins with Jones’s belief that the radiocarbon dates ‘Before Present,’ as often generated by experimental procedure and processing, can be converted to calendar dates by subtracting them from 1950. This completely false (or possibly false, one of Jones’s favourite words). BP dates are converted to calendar dates by calibration against dendrochronological dates, which Jones either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about. What’s more, such were the vagaries of atmospheric radiocarbon in the past that a single BP calculation can convert to as many as three calendar dates, but with the exclusion of some of the dates in-between, so they cannot be averaged, although it is a mainstay of Jones’s claim that they can.

The Nature paper,² for instance, declared that the Shroud most probably dates between 1260 and 1390, which Jones averages to 1325, “which just happens to be exactly 30 years before the Shroud first appeared in undisputed history at Lirey.” In fact the data show that the Shroud probably does not date to 1325. As quoted in the Nature paper, the 95% certainty ranges are 1262-1312 and 1353-1384. The years 1313-1352 are excluded from these ranges.

2). CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.
Next Jones pettifogs over the meaning of “conclusive,” declaring that since “conclusive evidence” is “evidence that cannot be contradicted by other evidence,” and since the date of the Shroud often is contradicted by other evidence, the word “conclusive” is (you guessed it) false. Well, I think we can out-pedant the pedant here. At no point does the paper claim that the Shroud is medieval. What it does claim is that “These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.” The term “these results” encompasses the data and calculations in the report, from which a medieval conclusion is indeed incontrovertible. Even if the results and calculations were shown to be entirely random, that would not alter the logical conclusion to be drawn from them, although it would of course be a meaningless conclusion in terms of the actual date of the cloth.

3). THE CHANCES OF THE ORDER OF THE DATES.
There is, as Jones points out, a 1/60 chance that the first Arizona date to be measured was the earliest of all Arizona’s three dates, the first Zurich date to be measured was the latest of all Zurich’s five dates, and the first Oxford date to be measured was the latest of all Oxford’s three dates. So what? There is also a 1/60 chance that the second Arizona date was the latest of all Arizona’s dates, the first Zurich date was the third of all Zurich’s dates, and the last Oxford date was the second of all Oxford’s dates, and so on for all possible configurations. This is akin to being astonished that there was only a 1/10000 chance that the last four digits of my phone number are 4763.

4). THE ODDS AGAINST.
Having found the mean and standard deviation of a set of measurements, it is possible to calculate how likely it is that any particular value is part of the set. If a dozen measurements put an age of 700 years plus or minus 30 to a sample, then any value within the sixty year range is quite likely (68%), and a value within a 120 year range (two standard deviations) very probable indeed, with only a 5% chance that the true age is outside it. A true age of 1000 years (ten standard deviations) is very, very unlikely. An age of 2000 is about twenty standard deviations from 700, so Harry Gove quoted the probability of the age of the Shroud actually being first century, based on the measurements, as “about one in a thousand trillion.” I don’t think Jones understands this at all, and assumes that it can be reversed to mean that the probability of a first century shroud dating to the fourteenth century is also “about one in a thousand trillion.” This is nonsense. The probability is based on values obtained, and no radiocarbon values were obtained for the first century.

If we were to take some of Giulio Fanti’s measurements as valid,³ we could say that the Shroud has been found to be 250BC ± 400, or 30AD ± 400, or 260 AD ± 274. 1300 AD is about 4 standard deviations from these means, with a probability of about 1/1000. Mind you, of course, that’s still pretty remote, but hardly one in a thousand trillion.

4). REVERSE ENGINEERING THE HACKER’S PROGRAM.
Jones boldly proclaims: “So I have reverse-engineered Linick’s hacking algorithm!” and sets out a ludicrously over-engineered set of instructions which misunderstand BP/AD conversion, and don’t result in the date he thinks they were aimed at any way. Here it is:
1. Hardwire into the program the first-run dates of each laboratory: Arizona-1350; Oxford-1155; Zurich-1217
2. For each successive dating run, add or subtract [randomly?] 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 date 1325.

But they don’t. A table illustrating this absurdity gives 12 calendar dates which average to 1261. The brilliant hacker engineered a set of dates that not only missed his target, but arranged the Oxford dates to be so different from the other two that they would provide justification for rejecting the medieval date altogether. This is just bizarre. Why not get the program just to generate random dates around the ultimate target date? That way, there would be no awkwardness about them not overlapping.

5). THE CHI-SQUARE TEST.
Ah, everybody’s favourite bugbear. It seems very likely that for one reason or another, there is a genuine radiocarbon gradient across the sample. It is not necessarily a linear gradient, as Schwalbe and Walsh have pointed out, nor a genuinely chronological gradient, but it’s there, and it accounts for the irregular chi-square value. Had a hacker been involved, he would surely have made sure that this didn’t occur. Far from supporting the hacker hypothesis, the chi-squared value is powerful evidence against.

6). THE VILLAINS.
In 1986, a temporarily unoccupied astronomer at Lawrence Berkeley, Los Angeles, was reassigned to the computer room, where he discovered unauthorised access to a network connecting numerous institutions all over the United States, from Massachusetts to New Mexico. As detailed in his book The Cuckoo’s Egg, Clifford Stoll tracked down a German hacker called Marcus Hess, who with a handful of confederates acquired information from 400 or so military computers and sold it to the Soviet Union. Hess was arrested and his confederates gave themselves up. One of them, Karl Koch, was found dead in a burnt-out car near Hanover on 1 June 1989.

There is no evidence that any of these people knew or cared about the Shroud or its dating, and there is no evidence that the University of Arizona, let alone its radiocarbon unit, was connected to Arpanet or Milnet, the precursors of the internet active at the time, which the hackers did manage to infiltrate.

However, it is true that one of the Arizona lab team, Timothy Linick, a long-term depressive, was also found dead, a few days after Karl Koch, at home in Arizona. There is nothing to connect the two, but Jones is convinced that Linick, like Koch, was murdered by the KGB to prevent the possibility of him leaking his activity.

7). FROM ARIZONA TO OXFORD.
The precise method by which the hacking occurred in Arizona, then Zurich and then Oxford is poorly thought out. It begins like this: “[The] unique identifier code for each sample […] made it feasible for a hacker (whom I allege was Arizona physicist Timothy W. Linick) to write a program which included a test of which sample was from the Shroud, so that once installed on the AMS computers at all three laboratories, it could run automatically without further human intervention. Linick’s unauthorised program, according to my theory, when installed on all three laboratories’ AMS computers, substituted the Shroud’s radiocarbon dates with computer-generated dates, which when calibrated and averaged across all three laboratories, would produce a combined bogus radiocarbon date of the Shroud of around 1325.” Installed at all three laboratories, eh? How, I wonder? All Jones manages is, “Timothy W. Linick (1946-89) was allegedly the primary hacker who allegedly wrote and installed on Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory’s AMS computer a program which, when also passed on to KGB for which he was allegedly working, to be installed on Zurich and Oxford’s identical AMS computers, by confessed KGB hacker Karl Koch (1965–89), ensured that the Shroud samples’ actual radiocarbon dates would be replaced by dates which, when calibrated, combined and averaged clustered around 1325.” So the program [on a reel of tape? Jones doesn’t say] was simply “passed on” to a German who first strolled into a laboratory in Zurich and, knowing exactly where their programs were, neatly swapped tapes there, then flew to England to do the same at Oxford. What could be simpler? In fact Koch, a heavy drug user, had admitted himself to a rehabilitation asylum in February 1987, and after being released a few months later, was closely cared for by his friends and watched by the police, until his arrest in March 1989.

It is apparent that Jones is unaware of Karl Koch’s own account of his activities, written in early 1989.⁴ From the Summer of 1987, he lived in a residential home for the mentally ill in Hanover. In August, he started a one-year course at a business school, which lasted until June 1988, and that August began a two-year training course to qualify as a Business IT Assistant. The opportunity to pop across to Zurich in May 1988, or to Oxford in July, was non-existent, and neither Oxford nor Zurich, let alone their radiocarbon labs, were connected to any kind of internet at the time. What’s more, Koch was baptised as a Christian on 22 March 1988.

8). ALLEGEDLY?
Another misuse of vocabulary. Jones does not allege anything. It’s not his style. He proclaims. The use of the word ‘allege’ is a feeble attempt to avoid legal action from any of Linick’s relatives who might pick up on this scurrilous and unfounded ‘allegation.’

9). A LITTLE LEARNING IS A DANGEROUS THING.
Harry Gove, one of the inventors of AMS radiocarbon dating, had been left out of the process of dating the Shroud when his laboratory (Rochester) was not selected as one of the three to perform it. It was only fair when he was generously invited to Tucson to watch their operation, which he later described in detail in his book ‘Relic, Icon, or Hoax,’ which came out eight years later. Eight years is a long time to remember some tiny details, and I don’t think he was wholly accurate, as we shall see.

“There were three or four members of the AMS team there when I arrived and they had almost finished the five minute per sample cesiation. This consisted of rotating each of the ten samples, located on the ion source wheel, into the cesium beam ensuring that the sample was coated with cesium. […] Shortly after I got there, they started the second round of cesiation. […] Eight of the ten samples in this first historic load were OX1, OX2, blank, two shroud and three controls. I did not note what the remaining two were. […] The first sample run was OX1. Then followed one of the controls. Each run consisted of a 10 second measurement of the carbon-13 current and a 50 second measurement of the carbon-14 counts. This is repeated nine more times and an average carbon-14 carbon-13 ratio calculated. All this was under computer control and the calculations produced by the computer were displayed on a cathode ray screen.”

They were also printed out, and the printout looks like this:

Immediately we can see that there were only five samples on the wheel, and only five repetitions were carried out in the session. In the notes which accompany this printout in the British Museum, we find: “Notice that for each set of samples we used four standards; two oxalic acid I (old) and two oxalic acid II (new).” The oxalic acid standards define “modern” C-14/C-12 ratios. A graph of the first five measurements (including the Shroud), interpreted in the light of the description above, looks like this:

The printout does not give counts for other isotopes, but does give the 14/13 ratios. On similar axes, these look like this:

The ‘average OXII’ / ‘average OXI’ ratio here is 1.293, which is the recognised ratio,⁵ and the Shroud has a smaller ratio, being older – but not as small as it would have been if it was 2000 years old.

The other four runs of these five targets show similar results.

It is obvious that Jones knows nothing of all this, which is hardly surprising as he embarked on his conspiracy theory before they were published. Instead, he groped around looking for anything he could find regarding AMS radiocarbon dating and managed to turn this up:

Jones uses this image to illustrate the information, from David Sox’s book ‘The Shroud Unmasked,’ that “Ten pellets with graphite are loaded into holes in a small carousel that is a little larger than a two pence coin.” Jones’s caption reads “Carousel wheel of the CEDAD (CEntro di DAtazione e Diagnostica) AMS radiocarbon dating facility at the University of Salento, Italy. This carousel wheel has 12 target holders and is of unknown diameter. Arizona’s and Zurich’s (and presumably Oxford’s since all three were effectively clones) carousel wheel had ten holders and its diameter was about 26 mm or 1 inch.”

Well, no. This carousel holds 50 samples (the little tubes around the sides, not the dimples in the middle), and is more like 250mm across. Here’s another picture of it:

Slightly adapted from an image at str.llnl.gov, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s
‘Science & Technology Review,’ magazine, December 2013, captioned:
‘Bruce Buchholz loads a wheel of samples into the spectrometer at the Laboratory’s Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) to determine the materials’ concentration of carbon-14.
The inset shows a closeup of a sample holder.’

And that’s it, at least for now. To be fair to Jones, some of the detail above was not available when he devised his hypothesis, but less generously, I fear he has not pursued his investigations to obtain more recent information, and is woefully ignorant, for a science teacher, of the process of radiocarbon dating and the method of converting radiocarbon counts into calendar dates. His hunch that the medieval date was the result of hacking is based solely on a pre-conviction of authenticity, and is not substantiated by any real evidence whatever.

1 His website is theshroudofturin.blogspot.com.

2 ‘Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin,’ Paul Damon et al., Nature, 1989

3 See ‘Mechanical and Opto-Chemical Dating of the Turin Shroud,’ Giulio Fanti et al., MATEC Web of Conferences, 2015

4 A huge dossier on Karl Koch, with numerous primary documents, can be found at inventati.org/amprodias/secreto/Karl%20Koch%20Doku.pdf

5 See, for example, radiocarbon.com/PDF/AMS-Methodology.pdf