Some of the material in this essay is obsolete. Please refer to the
Shroud of Turin Story Home Page

The
Resurrection
Problem
and the
Shroud of Turin

By Daniel R. Porter

1. Introduction
2. "Ann, You're Nuts"
3. What we need to know 
4. The newer evidence
5. The resurrection problem
6. Vetting
7. Acceptance
8. Textile studies
9. Plant images and pollen
10. Travertine aragonite
11. Sudarium of Oviedo
12. The Image of Edessa
13. Jesus in art
14. A negative that is not a negative
15. Other visual characteristics
16. The most intriguing characteristic
17. A picture of a million words
18. How were the images formed ? 
19. Appendix: Carbon 14, etc.

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Part 14:  A Negative that is not a Negative

Most of the time, the Shroud is stored in a silver casket at the cathedral in Turin, Italy. About once every forty years it is brought out, unfurled, and placed on public display. In 1898, during one of these rare exhibits of the Shroud, an amateur Italian photographer, Secondo Pia, was given permission to photograph the Shroud. Later, while developing his photographic glass plates in his darkroom, Pia was amazed to discover that the negative from his camera was, in fact, a positive image. In other words, the image on the Shroud of Turin is actually a negative image; Pia's negative was a negative of a negative. This was a phenomenal discovery. Suddenly, new details, never noticed before, were visible. It wasn't that these details did not exist in the Shroud's image; it's just that the human eye and mind is not good at discerning details in negative. His photographs got worldwide attention and helped launch a century of scientific interest in the Shroud of Turin. Those who believed that the Shroud of Turin was a painting or work of art were hard pressed to explain why an artist would, or how an artist could, paint a negative image centuries before the discovery of photography. How was the image created? Some speculated (and some still do) that the Shroud was, in fact, a crude medieval photograph made with some now lost-to-history medieval method. A popular theory was that Leonardo da Vinci invented photography and produced the Shroud. Those who promoted this theory ignore the fact that the Shroud was being exhibited in 1357, nearly 100 years before Leonardo was born in 1452.

We now know that the Shroud is not really a photographic-like negative at all - at least not one made with reflected light. While it is an image in negative, it is also an extraordinary three-dimensional encoding of the body of the man whose image appears on the cloth. Regular photographs, including their negatives, are encoded representations of light in varying degrees for darker and lighter colors as well as shadows and highlights. There is no three-dimensional information. When we look at photographs we construct three-dimensionality in our minds because we automatically interpret what we see. We see three-dimensional shapes because of the play of light and shade on objects, perspective and spatial relationships. When we look at a picture of a face we discern a nose that sticks out from the rest of the face, eyes that are recessed, and even the details of the eyes because of the amount of light that is reflected into the camera lens and onto the film. The Shroud is different. The lighter and darker areas of the Shroud image actually represent the distance between the cloth and the body it contained. We see a nose because it is closer to the cloth than the recesses of the eyes. That it functions like a photographic negative is coincidental if not somewhat phenomenal. Photographs do not display this dual quality. Nor do any known works of art.

In 1976, research physicists John Jackson and Eric Jumper along with an image specialist Peter Schumacher examined a photograph of the Shroud with the Interpretation Systems VP-8 Image Analyzer at the Sandia Scientific Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. NASA developed the VP-8 analyzer for creating three-dimensional plots of the moon and the earth's surface. The scientists discovered that a picture of the Shroud produced a highly detailed three-dimensional isometric plot. Peter Schumacher describes the discovery of the Shroud's 3D image this way:

Jackson placed an image of the Shroud of Turin onto the light table of the system. He focused the video camera of the system on the image. When the pseudo-three-dimensional image display ("isometric display") was activated, a "true-three-dimensional image" appeared on the monitor. At least, there were main traits of real three-dimensional structuring in the image displayed. The nose ramped in relief. The facial features were contoured properly. Body shapes of the arms, legs, and chest, had the basic human form. The result from the VP-8 had never occurred with any of the images I had studied, nor had I heard of it happening during any image studies done by others.

I had never heard of the Shroud of Turin before that moment. I had no idea what I was looking at. However, the results were unlike anything I have processed through the VP-8 Analyzer, before or since. Only the Shroud of Turin has produced these results from a VP-8 Image Analyzer isometric projection study.

Now, with personal computers and readily available ray tracing graphics software, anyone can demonstrate the phenomenon. I have personally done so on my home computer and the results are astounding. Any scanned-in picture of the Shroud will work, even Sister Ann's dog-eared postcard. Any painting, picture of a painting or any regular photograph only produces erratic distortion and no three-dimensionality.

The image on the Shroud is, to state it simply, a graph showing, at different places, the distance between the body and the cloth. It is much like the topographical maps found in any high school atlas except that such maps use different colors to represent altitude on the earth's surface. On the Shroud, the altitude is represented by different tones of a single, straw yellow color.

But this is not the end of the story of the Shroud's image characteristics. On the theoretical front there is the idea, advanced by theoretical physicist Sue Benson, that the Shroud's image may be more than a negative and a 3D encoding. It may actually be a quantum holograph. Quantum holography, still very theoretical, is getting considerable attention in research laboratories as prestigious as IBM, in search of new ways for storing and retrieving large amounts of information. Benson, in an article in the December/January 2001 issue of Journal of Theoretics describes macro-level quantum holography that may be applicable to the formation of the Shroud image. Quantum holographs should produce three-dimensional information as well as negativity and may very well offer some quantum event explanation for how the image was formed.

Dan Porter is an Episcopalian and a member of Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. He may be contacted by email at porter@shroudstory.com or by mail at 20 McIntyre Street, Bronxville, NY 10708. 

(c) Copyright 2001, Daniel R. Porter. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced in full for any non-commercial purpose without further permission.