The Turin Shroud's all-important negative image: from smoking gun to resting parrot.

Shroud as-is negative image( left); after tone-reversal (right). Excluding photography, negative images should be seen as contact imprints, unless one has exceptionally strong grounds for thinking otherwise.

The negative image is the smoking gun where the TS image is concerned, pointing to or at an imprinting mechanism that involves direct contact between linen and a 3D or semi-3D template.

 Shroudology’s response? To install an efficient extractor fan and claim it’s a toy pistol that some passing child must have left behind. 

It isn’t, needless to say, and that gun has fired real bullets, but shroudology closes ranks in an attempt to maintain the toy gun fiction.

 (Yes, that gun is shown as a negative image  - just like the Shroud's).

From left to right: (a) Rogers' Maillard model (non-contact); (b) Jackson's air-attenuated radiation model (non-contact); (c) Paolo Di Lazzaro's laser beam model (non-contact). Oh, and there are more life support patients in other wards too (Fanti's corona discharge model - non-contact etc etc).

Meanwhile, shroudology’s dwindling number of surviving non-contact models, some with total loss of brain stem activity,  remain on life-support, being drip fed in a desperate attempt to keep them alive, or at any rate in a permanent zombie state, one that hovers somewhere between life and death.
 

 That priceless Monty Python sketch said it all:

Further reading: I have posted many times before on the subject of the Shroud's negative image, observing the way that shroudology fails properly to address its obvious interpretation as a contact imprint, in fact rushing with indecent haste (and generally zero experimental data) to pre-emptively rule that anti-authenticity model out of contention. Attempts on my part to resurrect it are generally treated with condescension and mild derision by so-called scientists (whether real or self-appointed) who rarely bother to conceal their agenda-driven interest in promoting Shroud authenticity.

Here's a link to a recent posting I did (though admittedly over-long).

Postscript: here's an image for David Hines' attention on an ongoing thread over at shroudstory.com. I'll give some background later, and might even try venturing an opinion or two. For the moment, let's stick with the facts re the frozen images, before considering 'superimposibility' , "perfect matches" etc.

Saturday am

Here's a marked up graphic that I believe makes a point.

There was also this comment  addressed to me from Thibault Heimburger MD beginning with a quotation from the posting previous to this one:

• 

  Thibault HEIMBURGER
  August 22, 2014 at 4:19 pm

  Colin: “Why is there so much indifference to the TS image being a negative, when there is no known physics, other than direct contact imprinting, that can produce an image across air gaps without external hardware (converging lens, camera obscura, photosensitive film etc)?”
  See: http://colinb-sciencebuzz.blogspot.fr/2014/08/the-turin-shrouds-all-important.html
  Who says that the TS image is not a contact imprint?
  Nobody.
  Everybody agrees that most parts of the body imprints are contact imprints (probably 80% of the frontal image).
  The true question is: is the TS image a contact-ONLY imprint?
  In order to answer to this question, several researchers performed many detailed experiments in the past. None of them have shown that a contact-ONLY mechanism could explain all of the TS image.
  The TS image seems to be incompatible with a contact-ONLY process. The term ONLY is important.
  In this sense there is a tremendous difference between contact-ONLY image and contact+non-contact image.
  
   Here was my reply (with apologies for the editing glitch - 2nd sentence of 2nd para- that I failed to spot before hitting the send button):
  
  
• 

  Colin Berry
  August 22, 2014 at 4:45 pm

  “None of them have shown that a contact-ONLY mechanism could explain all of the TS image.”
  That’s because the modelling assumed a corpse (or human volunteer in lab experiments) and a loosely draped cloth. In other words the model assumed authenticity, and is simply trying to account for apparent discrepancies. Thus we have the absurdity of the ‘collapsing cloth’ theory that even Rogers felt obliged to dismiss as unscientific.
  
  To be scientific means to be entirely objective, considering all possibly models without preconceptions as to age or provenance. In a medieval scenario, that means viewing the image as produced by contact-only, i.e. in accordance with feasible physics and chemistry, and contact moreover, i.e. a source of thermal or chemical energy capable of leaving a contact imprint. But one is then no longer constrained to modelling with a loosely draped cloth. One can consider the problem of imprinting into the valleys and hollows of a 3D template that would normally be inaccessible to a loosely draped cloth that missed them through bridging extremities. That’s where some methodology I described previously comes into its own, i.e. with manual moulding of linen to 3D relief, increasing the area that is imprinted.
  
  As for contact or contact-only, I consider that a semantic irrelevance, believing as I do that there is no known physics that will imprint across air gaps. If you or anyone thinks there is, Thibault, then please specify the nature of the process. Is it convection or radiation? If radiation, is it electromagnetic or not? if electromagnetic, which part of the spectrum?
  
  For my part, I regard the TS image as the product of a contact-only mechanism, so make no apology whatsoever for occasionally omitting the word “only”. Non-contact imaging is frankly pseudo-science in my opinion.
  
  I am parking a few images here that I wish to  cut-and-paste to other sites.
  
  
  

   

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  

  Colin Berry

  August 25, 2014 at 6:12 am

  Reply

  TH writes: “Everybody agrees that most parts of the body imprints are contact imprints (probably 80% of the frontal image).
  The true question is: is the TS image a contact-ONLY imprint? “
  I don’t as yet know how to use ImageJ to quantify image density (but may try doing so soon). But there is a way of amplifying image density in a manner highly suited to the TS image on Shroud Scope, which is to apply the 3D tool which simply reads image density as elevation on an imaginary z axis. In other words, it amplifies into a viewer-friendly third dimension.
  This is what you see when you do that:
  
  It would seem to me that Thibault’s figure of 80% would apply more to the dorsal than the frontal side.
  Imprinting of the frontal side is nearly complete, except for a few awkward locations that are easily explicable in a contact model, e.g. in and around crossed hands etc where linen would tend to bridge at the boundaries separating higher and lower planes.
  It is the dorsal surface where there are major areas that have failed to imprint (not just poorly imprinted note – an important distinction).
  As I’ve said before, there is a simple way of accounting for the differences between frontal and dorsal imprinting that is not only explicable but largely anticipated in a contact-only imprinting model.
  It arises from a single-stage imprinting where a 3D template is first pressed dorsal side down onto the lower half of the linen, underneath which is a soft yielding underlay, and the top half then turned over to cover the frontal surface, with a soft yielding overlay. The double layer of the latter is then being patted in and around the major contours. The two configurations are LUWU and LOTTO respectively (Linen Underneath With Underlay; Linen On Top Then Overlay). The first of those is more prone to bridging, with incomplete imprinting, whereas the latter gives a superior imprint, thanks to manual moulding of fabric to frontal relief.
  
   Thanks to OK in Poland for showing me how to use the Thermal LUT tool in ImageJ, to convert image density to a "heat map".