You can find comments about the Shroud of Turin in the most unexpected places and under the strangest of circumstances. This time in Quantum Diaries in a posting by Pauline Gagnon about the latest data suggesting the possible existence of the theoretical Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, called that because some believe it is the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything,” as one commenter describes it.
Quantum Diaries is a blog authored by about 20 particle physicists. Three are from CERN, four are from Fermilab, and so forth.
Along comes a commenter who calls himself Uncle Al who writes:
The Higgs is required because the Standard Model arrives massless. The Standard Model arrives massless because it postulates fundamental, elegant, facile mathematical vacuum mirror-symmetries that do not empirically obtain (e.g., SUSY, SUGRA; arxiv:1106.4804, hep-th/0511086; a contingent flurry of manually inserted symmetry breakings). Candidates for Higgs’ evidence are decayed vector bosons of the 100% homochiral Weak interaction. One entertains doubt that the Higgs has been detected.
Then with no apparent connection to anything in the blog posting, in his comment or in other comments, he adds:
The Shroud of Turin – a projection of an ellipsoidal face upon a Euclidean plane absent distortion – is either a miracle of projected disjoint geometries or a forgery. That it can be trivially reproduced in all its aspects with a kitchen oven, a flat bas relief sculpture, and a bedsheet emphasizes the magnitude of the miracle, doesn’t it?
Was he referring to Luigi Garlaschelli’s method of creating an image. It seems so. But then again, his first comment seemed well informed.
Probably was referring to Garlaschelli, sure seems like it, but he also shows his total lack of ‘understanding’ of the Shroud attributes in saying “That it can be trivially reproduced” or by not noticing the comic character reproduction by Garlichelli.
It’s odd how someone who seems to be well educated, going by his first comments, can show such lack of knowledge in the same paper….go figure.
Ron