Hall, Edward (Teddy)

The Flat Earth Society

hall">“We have shown the shroud to be a fake,” Teddy Hall, the director of Oxford’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art said following carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin in 1988. “Anyone who disagrees with us ought to belong to the Flat Earth Society.”

That should have been the end of it. The big piece of cloth with two life-size images, front and back, of an apparently crucified man was not—could not be—the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. Science had just proven that.  It originated, so the scientists said, in the Middle Ages sometime between 1260 and 1390, or thereabouts. We must say thereabouts because in such scientific measurements, there are margins of error. But the margin of error was small. We might really say it was irrelevant. The work was done at three different prestigious laboratories by thoroughly qualified, highly respected scientists. The carbon dating should have been the end of it. For most people, it was. It was until it wasn’t. Serious mistakes had been made.

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry

The Shroud of Turin was not a good candidate for Libby’s new carbon dating method because too much of the cloth would have needed to be cut away and destroyed by incinerating it to extract the carbon. But a new method using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry would allow the cloth’s age to be determined using a much smaller sample. And that is what happened in 1988. And Teddy Hall made his flat earth quip.

The radiocarbon dating results did stimulate debate. The first responses from shroud apologists were a series of poorly developed and scientifically questionable hypotheses. For instance, some suggested that a fire in 1532, which nearly destroyed the shroud, somehow changed that ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 and carbon 13 isotopes in the cloth. Others suggested that a biological polymer had grown on the fibers of the cloth and that this newer material skewed the results. But these ideas, when understood, did not gain much support among scientists.

Mixed Reaction to the Carbon Dating

That is what happened when the carbon dating results were announced for the Shroud of Turin. Many who already were convinced (or hoped) it was a fake, were gleeful. But those who had become convinced from the avalanche of historical and other scientific evidence—good or bad evidence, interpreted one way or another—were sure that there must be something wrong with the carbon dating. They argued so. And they expressed their frustration. Physicist Peter Carr would later write words that expressed that frustration.

When the testing was complete, the scientist reported their findings . . . giving the age as 1260 to 1390, therefore the cloth was mediaeval. This was the limit to their remit, to date the cloth. But they exceeded their remit by making comments about the nature of the cloth, ie that the shroud was a mediaeval forgery. In making such a sweeping statement, they showed complete arrogance of other disciplines and a blind faith in a piece of technology. No self respecting scientist would be so bold. They ignored, or were ignorant of the wealth of historical information that shows that a cloth of some form has been in existence for many centuries, and it predates the carbon dates. The carbon dating information should have been presented along side all other information, and an objective discussion taken place. (44)

If arrogance was a strong word to use, it seemed justified. The official press conference to announce the results really didn’t go beyond the boundaries of science. Newspapers did that. The photograph that appeared along with the story said a lot. There were three people in the picture. There was Teddy (Edward Thomas) Hall, the director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford who had previously played a significant role in exposing the Piltdown Man hoax.  Robert Hedges also from Oxford and Michael Tite of the British Museum and were the dates 1260 to 1390 with a big explanation mark. The faces and the body language seemed arrogant. Perhaps there was nothing of the sort in those faces or in the way Hall crossed his arms in front of his chest. Perhaps it was an unfortunate Kodak moment.

But it wasn’t the frustration steeped with emotion that caused people to question the carbon dating. The picture in the Hungarian Pray Codex, the very convincing history from Constantinople, the apparent pollen data, the mysterious and so far inexplicable image characteristics, the forensic pathology all combined to trigger a cascade of research.

Red Flags Ignored

There were other clues, as well. All of them were warning signs that something might be wrong with the carbon 14 samples:

• Giovanni Riggi, the person who actually cut the carbon 14 sample from the Shroud stated, "I was authorized to cut approximately 8 square centimetres of cloth from the Shroud…This was then reduced to about 7 cm because fibres of other origins had become mixed up with the original fabric …" (emphasis mine)
• Giorgio Tessiore, who documented the sampling, wrote:  “…1 cm of the new sample had to be discarded because of the presence of different color threads.” (emphasis mine)
• Edward (Teddy) Hall, head of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory, had noticed fibers that looked out of place. A laboratory in Derbyshire concluded that the rogue fibers were cotton of “a fine, dark yellow strand.”  Derbyshire's Peter South wrote: “It may have been used for repairs at some time in the past…”
• Gilbert Raes, when later he examined some of the carbon 14 samples, noticed that cotton fibers were contained inside the threads, which could help to explain differences in fiber diameter. This may also explain why the carbon 14 samples apparently weighed much more than was as expected.
• Alan Adler at Western Connecticut State University found large amounts of aluminum in yarn segments from the radiocarbon sample, up to 2%, by energy-dispersive x-ray analysis. Why aluminum? That was an important question because it is not found elsewhere on the Shroud.
• The radiocarbon lab at the University of Arizona conducted eight tests. But there was a wide variance in the computed dates and so the team in Arizona combined results to produce four results thus eliminating the more outlying dates (reportedly they did so at the request of the British Museum, which was overseeing the tests). Even then, according to Remi Van Haelst, a retired industrial chemist in Belgium, the results failed to meet minimum statistical standards (chi-squared tests).  Why the wide variance in the dates? Was it because of testing errors? Or was it because the sample was not sufficiently homogeneous? The latter seems very likely now, and the statistical anomaly indicates something very suspicious about the samples.
• Bryan Walsh, a statistician, examined Van Haelst’s analysis and further studied the measurements. He concluded that the divided samples used in multiple tests contained different levels of the C14 isotope. The overall cut sample was non-homogeneous and thus of questionable validity. Walsh found a significant relationship between the measured age of various sub-samples and their distance from the edge of the cloth. Though Walsh did not suggest invisible reweaving, it is consistent with his findings.