The pseudoscience shaking the Shroud

Alongside UFOs, homeopathy and all manners of conspiracy theories, the Shroud of Turin has long been known as a perennial source of pseudoscience. It has almost certainly lived up to its well-earned reputation this week. An army of journalists have flooded the internet with stories about a new paper explaining why radiocarbon dating may not have given the “right” answer when aging the religious icon. It already sounds suspicious, doesn’t it?

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Shroud of Turin is a burial shroud that has the outline of a person imprinted on it, and is believed by some to have covered Jesus after his crucifixion. In 1988, carbon dating on the shroud concluded that it originated from around the 14th century, considerably later than the accepted lifetime of Christ. This, one might assume, should have been the end of the matter.

Not for Alberto Carpinteri, however. In his paper, published in the journal Meccanica (of which he is the editor-in-chief), he suggests that a huge number of neutrons released by an earthquake in 33AD may have disrupted the ratio of carbon isotopes and led to a much more recent estimate of its age.

The idea of a large neutron flux affecting the shroud was first discussed in the letters pages of Nature in 1989, but Carpinteri is the first to put forward a possible explanation for how it may have arisen. His theory relies on something called “piezonuclear fission”, a phenomenon where enormous numbers of neutrons can be released by applying mechanical forces to rocks, supposedly causing iron nuclei to break apart. Carpinteri is definitely a world expert on this: he came up with the idea several years ago and still may well be the only scientist who believes it to be compatible with the laws of physics.

Aside from the suspicion that this paper may partly have been a (remarkably successful) way of getting more publicity for the author’s favourite theory, there are more fundamental problems with the idea of neutrons affecting the Shroud. When it was suggested in 1989 by R.E.M. Hedges, one of those who first performed the carbon dating on it, he argued that why wasn’t everything else in the region also affected and why did his team just happen to get an apparently wrong date that corresponded with the earliest historical records of the Shroud?

In the greater scheme of things, stories like this are pretty irrelevant, but they highlight an important issue about science in the media. This story has been covered by several major news organisations including The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Telegraph, USA Today and, obviously, The Daily Mail. These are all respected news outlets (OK, maybe not The Mail...), and yet their journalists still can’t be bothered to do a bit of background reading before publishing an article. In this media culture obsessed by headlines and good stories over factual accuracy, how can the lay readers possibly get an informed view of the truth behind any science story?