Okay, this was awesome. Total fisk and takedown of the Italian article will go live an hour and a half past this next midnight. You can bookmark where it will appear as http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/5132 (just note nothing is there now and won’t be until the clocked time).

Oh, this is rich. I’m reading the original article now. I’m going to blog this tomorrow. Keep your eye out. Thanks for the tip!

That is either a joke article (for the original news report and citation go here), or the Italians at the Politecnico di Torino are some of the goofiest cranks in human history. Not only is the science massively implausible (the effect would have been observed for all objects in earthquakes, then and now, as has been aptly pointed out by numerous scientists, cf. “Shaky Science” here and read the amusing remarks) but it also gets the history wrong: a previous geology report confirmed a large earthquake for the 30s BC, not AD. The geological evidence of seismic activity for the 30s was of events so small as to have had no physical effects (and no such earthquake is recorded in the historical record). See Jefferson B. Williams, Markus J. Schwab and A. Brauer, “An Early First-Century Earthquake in the Dead Sea,” International Geology Review 54.10 (May 2012), pp. 1219-28.

Study suggests earthquake may have created image on Shroud of Turin