I have no idea who - if anyone reads these posts. Maybe nobody.
But it is time the record was set straight about the shroud, and the real science done in 1978.
1/ The 1978 sturp project was thoroughly professional. Unlike the later dating.
On the link you will find that the meetings over previous years yielded a peer reviewed plan.
The plan was executed as projected.
At least 20 papers were written (reviewed of course) - of which there is so much of it , that the central paper, Schwalbe and Rogers , only lists the scope of what was done and all the general conclusions. For the detail go to papers. For further detail and images of fibres and cloths, go to website images and books.
It also created a treasure trove of scans in natural light, UV, low energy XRAY etc, and a lot of fibre images all indexed and locations shown on photos in the database.
That is the master reference of what the shroud is. It is not a painting or artwork. The mark is inexplicable. It is real blood with real pathology.
The 1978 Scientific Examination
Sadly there is not room for all of the pictorial evidence to appear in papers. They are simply referrerd. And it is so wide ranging that beginners need books to make sense of it all
But also in that treasure trove an anomaly is noted. Rogers notes That the raes corner adjacent to the test sample contained cotton within the weave. (mentioned in Schwalbe and Rogers. The shroud itself has only a few surface fibres. That would become important later, as would the fact that the pictures show the later area sampled differs in UV, XRAY and visible light. It is clearly anomalous.
2/ Roll on to the most unprofessional "science" ever. The dating and daters.
Two years of meetings preceded it. And correspondence / minutes are available that can be read. It raised all sorts of issues including the need for multiple areas, for characterisation, for a blind controls and so on.
But instead of producing a peer reviewed test plan , identifying sample areas and processes, the daters failed to produce a plan and they marginalized everyone else, so most of the protocol was quietly forgotten or deliberately ignored..
The daters systematically excluded all of the people in STURP and anyone who had the a shred of belief in the authenticity. As a result the test team were blind about chemistry. Nobody was present or witnessing who knew anything of STURP science above. The daters were not and are not shroud scientists. They know little or nothing about it.
The test presided by Tite was a disaster from the off from the point of view of good science.
When they entered the room they had no idea of what they were going to sample!
how dare they? After all the professionalism of STURP, they were a disaster.They made it up as they went along. They picked the worst area possible. Consumate scientist rogers and meacham would have checked it before test, and agreed a detailed plan, and sample areas if they had been allowed.
Then a litany of failures. THere were three control samples present in the room, not just the two controls, and the shroud , put in cans.
So there is a legitimate concern of what was put in tubes? One sample was not used at all. It was all done away from camera and even basic weights and sizes did not add up. Who knows what went into cans. One of the textile experts (neither of whom knew the shroud, did not even show up till later!). One asked "whats that" pointing at the lance wound blood! shows they did not even bother to research it,and neither did the daters.
Far from testing with controls, the labs were given the dates of them! Outrageous! How then can they be controls? It means the samples were identified too, nothing blind at all. It was Unforgiveable. The labs conferred when they should have been prevented from it. They resisted witnesses. None of them characterised samples chemically. All notes red flags but then failed to deal with them.
Then after came the "unknown operation" that transformed the data into a paper, stating it was homogeneous. When it was inhomogenous. Unforgiveable.
The stats lab who was supposed to convert the data and makes sure no fiddling happened was not even appointed.
It was all a disgrace. Then of course came the questions.
3/ Ultimately proper science was allowed back in the room, But only after bad science had wasted a decade. Benford and marino showed that area was anomalous chemically, which you can see from the shroud archive, and proposed invisible reweave as the reason.
https://shroud.com/pdfs/benfordmarino2008.pdf
That is verified from STURP photos. In essence it does not matter why the area was anomalous, in chemical terms it was different, so the dating was not safe.
Rogers verified it by going back to the vault of documented samples of STURP. Remember them? All validated science from years before. Including RAES samples (yes he did a paper too). And that showed dye, spliced threads, cotton and all of the evidence that at some time the cloth was repaired. nobody had looked too hard at the raes sample fibres till then.
Then a legal FOI proved the data had been "Manipulated" from lab test to paper, so the RC test was invalid anyway.
Various other controlled tests (fanti) based on a suggestion by rogers, suggest first century.
The correspondence with the sudarium shows it must be a millenium older than the RC date.
Whatever the shroud is , is not medieaval and it is a crucified man compatible with middle east origin.
4/ A "conservation" done in 2000 has possibly wrecked a repeat dating, (thymol) and certainly messed with the dates. But they ignored meacham on that too.
And that brings us to where we are.
Except the daters so angered the pontifical academy and gonella in particular by their behaviour I doubt if the church wants any more to do with the unscientific community of daters
My suggestion of books is based on the fact it is very complex subject, and the papers alone have to be short so do not give a full picture. eg Rogers book is far more informative than any of his papers. Fantis book has a lot more raw data and images. I have many papers. The books are better.
The documentation in marinos book of all correspondence would never be allowed into a paper. But it shows how the dating fiasco came to pass and all the bad faith in the dating community.