Colin Berry Takes on Ray Rogers’ FAQ (This Should Be Fun)

He writes in an posting with the cumbersome title, Raymond N Rogers: STURP supremo chemist (RIP) who sadly lost the plot (due to an apparent blind spot, it would seem, for those ultra-thin and highly superficial primary cell walls of flax and linen fibres). writes:

Somewhat weirdly and who cares:

Warning to readers and/or other website administrators: this posting is under construction (the reasons for which will shortly become apparent). New text and probably images too will be added throughout the next few hours, possibly days, the most recent additions being added to the TOP with time and date stamps i.e. “reverse chronological order”, to use old-style bloggers’ jargon. In view of the delicate matter of criticizing the ideas of a recently deceased (2005) and respected scientist, I reserve the right to edit or delete first draft passages, flagged up with use of the strike-through editor, but with later clean-up and deletion of discarded Mark 1 versions. Comments and/or correctives are welcome at any time. I reserve the right to incorporate them into the text if I feel they make a worthwhile point, or are posted with a view to correcting perceived inaccuracies or injustices.

And then with substance:

A detailed critique now follows. I have chosen Rogers’ own FAQs as source material, at least for starters, being reasonably concise, and accessible without charge as a pdf document. The chief problem is knowing which of the 19 FAQs to include and exclude, and in which order to tackle them. I have opted to deal with most if not all in the same order as Rogers, even though that means dealing with issues that are not immediately relevant to the main issue addressed here, namely Rogers’ proposed mechanism by which the Shroud acquired its superficial image involving a hypothesised “impurity layer”, without (as we shall see) so much as a nod in the direction of the primary cell wall. By taking them in the same order, I avoid the charge of being selective in my choice of material, or of deviating from Rogers’ order of presentation. If crucial details appear to be omitted from crucial arguments, that will be because Rogers chose to withhold them, not me, and those that he considered important simply appear later rather than sooner. I shall have to make frequent use of the “read on” tag to keep the posting to a reasonable length.

And he goes on and on.

Here is a quick list of the subjects in Rogers’ FAQ with links. Or you can access the entire FAQ document in PDF form:

– The Shroud of Turin images are not painted

– The bloodstains are real blood

– Why radiation did not cause images

– Why scorching did not cause images

– Why the carbon 14 samples are not valid

– The 1532 fire and autocatalytic process

– The meaning of variegated bands

– Cellulose decomposition and image formation

– Superficiality of the images on the Shroud

– Double superficiality and what it means