Review Of The Metallurgical Part Of The RG Article
I believe it was Bertrand Russell who said that before one
can legitimately critique another person's piece of writing, one must spend
enough time to "get inside the head" of the writer and come to know his
arguments and way of thinking as well as you know your own. I have tried to do
that with the metallurgical part of RG's article, the part that comes mostly from Erik
Randich.
Let me begin by stating that I am not a metallurgist. I
respect Dr. Randich's deep metallurgical knowledge, and have
found his comments on the metallurgy of bullet-making to be very
informative and helpful. They supplemented what I already knew
about the subject. But it is one thing to understand this metallurgy, and quite
another to apply it properly to the JFK assassination. Dr. Randich has done the
first but not the second. One need not be a professional metallurgist to see
gaps in arguments and predictions that are incompatible with an argument.
The metallurgical part of the article looks very impressive at first
glance. Its text is long, and contains several beautiful figures and many
detailed numbers. It is no wonder that so many readers have accepted it
uncritically. Its main thesis is that you can't properly interpret the chemical
analyses of any lead fragments unless you understand a lot about basic
metallurgy and the process by which bullets are manufactured. When you apply
that knowledge to the JFK fragments, say the writers, you see that the variations
in antimony (and copper) between fragments come from microstructures in the
lead, and so do not represent the differences between bullets that Dr. Guinn
claimed. You can say virtually nothing about the number of bullets represented
by the fragments (anywhere from one to five bullets). You also can't say that
the little fragments came from Mannlicher-Carcano lead. In other words, the two
obvious groupings could actually represent up to five bullets from five
different manufacturers. In other words, Guinn's
interpretation and the later support given to it by Rahn and Sturdivan go down
the tubes.
One would naturally think that such strong conclusions would
be backed up by detailed data and consistent, impeccable logic. But the article
contains none of these things. Its followers have missed the absence of all three of these
critical points. The flawed, inconsistent logic and the lack of supporting data
are discussed here on separate pages.
Inconsistent claims
Metallurgical logic
Lack of supporting data
Lack of correlation between the three elements
Failed prediction about variability vs. size
The Rahn-Sturdivan approach
Do we really need to know metallurgy in order to get the right answer?
Brief summary of the pages from the above links
(1) The metallurgical argument presented in this paper does
not succeed. It establishes a theoretical
framework but fails to support it quantitatively.
(2) Worse, the paper ignores other sets of data that refute that framework.
(3) So the paper fails.
The metallurgical approach presented here fails
to debunk Guinn's simple, straightforward groupings of the fragments because it does not take into account the larger-scale heterogeneities
of antimony observed in WCC/MC bullet lead. It is not micrometallurgy that is controlling
the antimony, but something else altogether. One need not know anything
about metallurgy in order to interpret the elemental results from the JFK
fragments properly, for the relevant properties of antimony in the lead are
fully revealed by the empirical data. The work of Guinn, Rahn, and Sturdivan remains
unaffected by this metallurgy.