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.

Overview - attempts to reproduce the image on the Shroud of Turin with simple technology available to medieval forgers

Is it still worth attempting to reproduce a Turin Shroud-like artefact with modern materials and techniques? Could thermo-stencilling be a valid approach?

Scorching the charcoal image onto fabric using ceiling spotlight

Appearance after washing out the charcoal - drying in progress

We have been told repeatedly that the image on the Turin Shroud has features that have never been satisfactorily reproduced. Increasingly the message has become one of: “Don’t even think about it. That image could only have been made by supernatural means”

Whilst not verbatim, words to that effect have come recently  from a group of Italian scientists no less (YES SCIENTISTS would you believe it?) who are talking about  a miraculous corona discharge, producing ultraviolet or maybe some other high energy radiation. That shows the extent to which magic is now permeating into science. (We shall overlook the tiny fact that forming an image requires not just a source of light, regardless of which part of the electromagnetic spectrum – infrared, visible, uv etc. but in addition a means of focusing that light – see my previous post). 

Am I the only one to be deeply disturbed by the blurring of the boundary between science and magic? And whilst the Vatican, to its credit, has never claimed that the Shroud is the burial cloth of Christ, or indeed of anyone from that era (its first response being to dismiss it as a fraud) is it not time for the Vatican to stop treating it as if it WERE a holy relic, and allow scientists access to more of the fabric. Is it not absurd that the C dating should be rubbished on the grounds that the sample was from a corner of the cloth that had allegedly become contaminated by frequent handling or, with even more brass neck, that it was not the original fabric, but a repair job that had used “invisible re-weaving”. It is quite simply ludicrous that scientific time and resources should be wasted in this manner.

This series of posts began with a prediction – that an image could be scorched onto linen (or other cellulosic fabrics, e.g. cotton) by drawing or painting with a black pigment, exposing the image to radiant heat, and then washing out the pigment, leaving just the scorch mark, and no clue as to its origin. That prediction was quickly confirmed using lump charcoal as the pigment initially applied dry, i.e. drawing, and then more effectively by applying as a  pasty slurry in water, i.e. as charcoal paint.

So straightaway some pretty elementary science (black things absorbs heat) could be used to undermine one of the key claims made re the Shroud, namely that it was not “painted” on the cloth, that there are no brush marks, there are no residual traces of pigment.  Using the ‘thermo-stencilling’ procedure I have described, one can indeed paint with a substance that can then be removed, leaving nothing except scorched cellulose with NO CLUE AS TO ITS ORIGIN.  

That is just a beginning. There are further claims regarding the shroud (based it has to be stressed on that tiny, possibly unrepresentative sample of material). The crucial one is that the image is not a scorch mark, at least not a typical one (whatever that is – my own reading suggests that scorching of fabric has not been a major preoccupation of carbohydrate research). We are told that the coloration does not extend the entire width of the cloth, i.e. the total diameter of cellulose fibres- that it is confined to each of the external surfaces, with no coloration in between. We are told that the coloured material can be stripped off the surface with adhesive tape. We are even shown phase-contrast microscopy of a supposed coating on the surface of the fabric, with suggestions that it represents something acquired or added in weaving, possibly starch and simple sugars used as a processing aid for weaving, and that the image is confined to that layer.

Once you envisage the image being on an applied  or accidentally  acquired coating, rather than the cloth itself, then the number of formative mechanisms increases exponentially, and it becomes increasingly less worthwhile as a scientific exercise to explain images, if one does not know the starting materials. Indeed, some might say, especially in view of the C-dating, that the onus now rest entirely on the magicians to explain how the image was formed if wishing to prove a supernatural origin, as distinct from placing the onus on scientists to disprove a supernatural origin. Scientists do not like being asked to prove negatives, i.e. that there is no known non-supernatural means of reproducing the image, that exoplanets are not made of green cheese.

However, there is still some science that can be done, based on some rudimentary info we have re the nature of early linen, whether it be medieval in origin, or even 1^st century AD. It is said that it was treated with starch, accompanied perhaps by simple sugars, which are, needless to say, close chemical relatives of cellulose.

Experiments are underway, which I shall report in real time, i.e. as a (web)log, which was the original meaning and intention of the “blog”, with new items being added to the top, rather bottom.  It’s a little self-indulgent, I grant you, since it supposes that visitors come back for a second or third look. Neither is the end product terribly user-friendly to someone reading a reverse chronology, so to speak. But it’s a suitable format for a reporting a lot of bitty experiments in real time – as evidence that one is still busy and interested – and more user-friendly summaries of chief findings and conclusions can come later. I’ll call it : Weblog: further experiments to reproduce, albeit approximately,  the Turin Shroud by non-supernatural means, e.g. by thermo-stencilling.