As part of a comment, last evening, John Klotz wrote:
There is an recent positing by Barrie Schwortz concerning the quad mosaics. I defy anyone, who has the slightest regard for scientific method to review the illustration that appears with the article and still claim hat the carbon samples were not from an anomalous portion of the Shroud.
Paper: Some Details About the STURP Quad Mosaic Images by Barrie Schwortz
If I tried to sell this “dye transfer process” quaility image to Jay Maisel, he would have shown me to the doors and requested I never return. The image process separation technique created by the mosic is not balanced with each other. Without proper aim points utilizing even a basic 3 point wedge the characteristics of each exposure can’t be determined if it’s balanced. However, the neutral hues presented in this image one can make a quick observation that the seperations are off. What’s supposed to be white (Tape) and neutral (Mag strips) are not. I also observe major color crossovers and solorazation that no matter what I do I can never produce a balanced neutral using these three separation films.
With that said, I don’t see how anyone can make a spectrometer observation with this image. Sorry, 39 years producing images and color separation I’m never going to be convinced by this image.
If the patches of different colour in the quad mosaics have some relationship to the chemical make-up of the shroud, then frankly the dark green irregularities found in irregular blodges around the C14 sample area, and the side strip, pale into significance compared to the bright yellow area we see to the right of the picture, and the huge bright blue area which has been conveniently cropped from this photo, but which occupies the entire upper half of it, from the knees of the shroud man to the level of the groin. Remarkably, perhaps, the pattern of colour (mostly orange, with bright yellow in the middle, a blue upper half and a dark green lower left hand corner) appears in almost every one of the quad mosaic pictures, which suggests to me that it is nothing more than an artefact of the process.
How much of this apparent chemical difference is due to a non-homogenous potpourri of surface contaminants accumulated over many centuries. That would have been cleaned off by the three labs. I think the carbon dating is wrong and the reweaving a reasonable theory. But this is weak and perhaps meaningless. Maybe a better explanation would help.
Yup, all it lacks to make it a scientific exercise are some controls, experimental interventions, testing of authentic chemical standards, you know, all the tedious spade work that is needed to make a start on disentangling a complex set of variables. It’s so much easier to blithely talk about each filtered ‘discriminatory’ colour representing a distinct chemical species, and immediately declaring shades of green to be a modern intruder that signify contamination (charring included it would seem) which (needless to say) throw the radiocarbon dating…