Preface to my next posting, one that pinpoints the liberties being taken with so-called modelling of Turin Shroud "cloth-body distances".

 What could be a more established unquestioned, unchallenged tenet of Shroud (pseudo)science than the notion that variations in image intensity are related to cloth-body distance? Try googling (shroud “cloth-body distance”) and see the 4 pages pages of returns, 10 entries per page, all deploying, or as I would say, bandying around, those words “cloth-body distance”.

 Remove the search-narrowing quotation marks  and there are 30 pages of returns in Google (its maximum?) with enshrined  references to cloth/distance/body, not necessarily in that order.

Examples:   

“2nd entry (shroudstory.com) “The point is that the intensity I correlates with cloth body distance (which is ...

3rd entry:   G.Fazio (recently enjoined with Yannick Clement): “…tion between image intensity and cloth-body distance, shows codified information re-.”

4^th entry:    frenz64.wordpress.com/    “The empirical fact that the Shroud frontal body image is highly correlated with cloth-body distance presents major problems for hypotheses describing the origin ...£

5^th entry:  Mark Antonacci, 2001:   In addition, to encode all of the body image and off—image ... in the number (density) of engraved lines that represent cloth-body distance, ...

6th entry: NASA   The controversial shroud is a 4 1/2 meter, 7.62 centimeter long linen cloth that .... to white) and cloth-body distance, Air Force Academy professors and students ...

6th entry:  theshroudofturin.blogspot   “Figure 2 shows how the image intensity on the Shroud can be converted to a three-dimensional plot of cloth-body distance by a single ...”

7th entry: Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince:   “… and begs the question of whether or not the Shroud ever enveloped a real ... They took their measurements of cloth-body distance manually from ...”

and so it goes on…

Btw: the 1st entry was to my specialist TS site. No liberties were being taken with "cloth-body distance " there.

Anyone perusing these entries could be forgiven for assuming  there was a general consensus that image intensity was related to cloth-body distance.

Well, Houston, we have a problem. How do we know what the cloth-body distance was at the instant of image imprinting? Or what was being imprinted:  a real person, living or dead, or even a bronze or plaster model thereof? How was the image being imprinted (by  unspecified "radiation" conveniently able we are told to project across air gaps, or boring old heat conduction, that cannot do so, needing direct physical contact, nor miracles)? Was the cloth simply draped loosely over the subject, like a dust cover? Or was it wrapped tightly around the subject, maybe with additional securing strips? Or was the “subject” pressed into linen, or the linen pressed against the “subject|” so as to get a better contact for imprinting by direct contact?

If one cannot answer those questions, then how on earth can “cloth-body” distance be reliably estimated, far less used to “explain” the Shroud image, as if the latter were simply a photograph taken with exotic light/or other mysterious radiation source, somehow focused or collimated onto linen with no external optical hardware, and somehow able to pyrolyse linen in a precise and metered fashion as to produce a faithful Xerox copy of the original.

It was through addressing these issues that this researcher came to realize that “cloth-body distance” was at the root of what can only be described  as “pseudo-science”. Instead of looking at an image, and attempting to deduce cloth-body distance, those pro-authenticity models, if one can so dignify something so agenda-driven, were being used to estimate cloth-body distances from a wholly imaginary standpoint, and those measurements were then being used to “explain” why some Shroud  features were more easily visible than others. As I say, it's pseudo-science, or more charitably, theoscience, which has now become received wisdom in the stagnant confines of Shroudology's so-called congresses,, with those words cloth-body distance being deployed mantra-like as if they were real measurements taken at the instant of image-imprinting.Thus the reams of pages when one googles that term, with scarcely a word of criticism.

As already indicated, there is an alternative to the pro-authenticity model, one that rejects the idea of cloth being loosely draped or tied around a real human being. It takes the radiocarbon dating as the starting point. It is a viewpoint that needs to be heard. Otherwise the purveyors of pseudo-science will continue to foist their convenient assumptions as if they were fixed parameters that no one should even think of challenging (certainly not at the succession of dreary shroud congresses that come most years, all attempting to sustain the same played-out fiction).

Time now to re-examine the TS image, detail by detail, and to ask at each step: what is the image telling us about cloth-body distance. More to the point, is there ANY imaging at places where it’s unlikely there was actual physical contact between subject and cloth? If the image characteristics are consistent with imaging-by-contact only, then references to “cloth-body distance” need to be ruthlessly purged from the literature (the scientific literature that is).  What any prospective "Journal of Theoscience" wishes to say is its business. 

Update Thursday: here's the main posting to which the above was a ground-preparing preface. 

Thursday, July 24, 2014

The Turin Shroud looks for all the world like a man-made contact imprint, probably from a hot metal template, NOT the product of a supposed flash of radiation.