A reader writes:
Colin Berry’s experiment with scorching an onion skin raises an interesting question. Is it possible that the impurity layer that Ray Rogers proposes, an evaporation concentration residue of starch and soap (saponaria officinalis), is what caramelizes at a lower temperature? Certainly Colin could make up some fiber samples with soapwort soap and wheat starch, scorch them, and check them out in the chem lab of local university. He could then send them to De Lazzaro and Fanti for confirmation. My guess is that it mught work and it would be doubly superficial in every regard like thickness of 200-600 nanometers and only crown fibers of thread. Short of that he has got to do it with flax fibers and that may be impossible. I really think it is.
BTW: we have been misusing the term crown fibers. It isn’t the topmost surface scorched with hot iron. It is the outermost fibers of the thread and may be out of the way and away from conduction contact. That is the case with the real shroud. I doubt it is with Colin’s coin tests unless he really smooshed them hard in which case its not superficial. That too might be why an impurity layer may be essential. I mean give it a try and see what happens. LOL: Whoa! Why are we using onionskin? Its ranges from about 200 to 400 microns in thickness. That’s microns. That’s 200,000 to 400,000 nanometers. Onion skin is like about 1000 x thicker than the image on the shroud.
Of course an impurity layer doesn’t rule out radiation. Colin seems to be showing us that De Lazzaro might be right?
