I didn’t get it. How does just pressing a hot statue into a linen cloth with sand underneath get you a halftone? I asked a friend who I was sure could answer. Let me paraphrase what he told me:
It may be possible. If it is, it could explain the 200nm thinness and the halftone. Think of the hemicelluloses, since it is exothermic, acting like a binary operative. If a fiber gets enough heat the highly conductive hemicelluloses ignites and burns to completion for the exposed length of the fiber. It is now a dark-pixel, albeit not the shape of a pixel but acting like one. But if there is not enough heat to ignite it it stays a white-pixel. Where there is more pressure, like at the tip of the nose, there is more conduction of heat and thus more fibers are triggered, ignited or turned on, so to speak. That is how you get your half tone.
I know he has done some experimenting. What is he finding out? Is the hemicelluloses really all that different than the rest of the fiber? If it burned would it confine itself to the crowns. And wouldn’t it be black or very dark? Where are the close up photographs that show halftone? Has he actually looked at anything under a microscope? How carefully and thoughtfully has he conducted and documented his experiments? This initiating selective pyrolysis of hemicelluloses on that opposite side, the so-called Giuilo Fanti phenomenon, is a real stretch. He can talk about enough thermal energy to push it over that Arrhenius activation energy hump, and sound brilliant, but has he done it. Or is he just talking a good game?
We need to see results. The last thing we want is some newspaper reporting once again that a scientist has figured out how the shroud was faked. Didn’t the shadow shroud guy get national attention but refuse to let scientists see his work.
Nathan Wilson showed his Shadow Shroud to CBS News. He published a website and claimed a great deal. He still gives lectures. But he refused to let a chemist at the University if Idaho, not but a mile away, look at his work. Yet, today, thousands of people claim that Nathan Wilson proved that the shroud was a fake.
I give Colin a lot of credit for experimenting. I would like to see results that support what he contends.