Hugh Farey recently posted something of an eyeball challenge on the JREF Forum (James Randi Educational Foundation). This is on a BBS hierarchy styled discussion page organized thus: JREF Forum » General Topics » Religion and Philosophy » Merged: Miracle of the Shroud / Blood on the shroud.
James Randi (pictured), according to Wikipedia . . .
(born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928) is a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic best known for his challenges to paranormal claims and pseudoscience. Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician named The Amazing Randi, but after retiring at age 60, he was able to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal,occult, and supernatural claims, which he collectively calls "woo-woo".
It is worth a visit to the “Merged Shroud” page for a food read. Scroll down to 7978 for Hugh’s posting or read it below just as he sent it to me in an email:
To help move the discussion on, I believe I have found a bit of interweaving on the Arizona Shroud sample. There are, I believe, three photographs of the same bit of cloth, which can all be identified by a tiny twist of some blue material in the top right hand corner.
Photo 1: in the Jull/Freer-Waters paper, hugely magnified. This only shows a few threads, and I am only using it as a link. The wiggly blue thing is very obvious.
Photo 2: in http://shroudstory.com/2011/01/05/wa…roud-of-turin/. This is a rather poor newspaper photo (I don’t know where from) showing a much bigger area of cloth. Nevertheless, the wiggly blue thing is still clearly visible.
Photo 3: at http://shroud.com/pdfs/arizona.pdf, Figure 2, top picture. This shows the same area, now much trimmed at the bottom, presumably for Freer-Waters’s fibre examinations but the wiggly blue thing is still there in the top right hand corner.
Calling the thread with the blue thing 1, and counting to the left, thread number 19 has a smaller, darker thread alongside it over a small part of its upper length.I do not claim that this is part of an invisible mend, or, indeed that was a deliberate insertion at all. It may be entirely fortuitous, or the beginning of another thread as one was coming to its end, or any of a number of possible things, but I believe it is the sort of thing one might search for if one wanted evidence of some kind of irregularity in the weave of the Shroud.
Would anybody on shroudstory like to comment?
Best wishes,
Hugh
I’m trying to see it. Maybe after a bit more coffee. Unfortunately, photo 1 is behind a pay wall. Let me see if I can get a copy of it to post here. The other photos are repeated below:
Photo 2:
Photo 3:
Read page 201 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=226761&page=201) of the merged thread, comments #8011 to #8021. It is hilarious.
– This is the forum/thread I’ve been participating on since 2/12. I haven’t done very well and could use a lot of help — especially, with research and answers to their numerous questions and claims.
– For instance, how do we explain the “banding” that remains identical from the main body of the Shroud to, and through, the sample — if we think that significant reweaving is required to account for 1300 years in the dating?
– Thanks.
— Rich Savage (Jabba)
Rich,
Benford and Marino in their investigation sought out reweave experts who had no trouble spotting the invisible reweave and identifying but they were familiar with the invisible reweave. After the first hullabaloo they checked even further. It was identified by experts on the French, invisible reweaving process.
An excellent article on the invisible reweaving by Benford and Marino is located at
http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/histsupt.pdf
They first came to attention of the Shroud community in 2000 by presentation a Shroud Conference at Ovieto, Italy. Barrie Schwartz was there and was impressed, so he published there paper on Shroud.com
Ray Rogers called Barrie objecting to his publishing items from the “lunatic fringe” and that he could rebut them in fifteen minutes. Schwortz challenged him to do just that. Rogers hung up and examined some fibers from the Raes sample that had been given to him in 1978.
He didn’t call back in five minutes, but when he did he exclaimed, “They’re right!”
Actually, the findings by Rogers had been presaged twelve years before when a laboratory was contacted by Oxford to examine some fibers found in their sample. The results of that examination were never revealed by Oxford but shortly after the announcement of the C-14 results, an article was published about the Oxford fibers that totally presaged Rogers, Benford and Marino by 12 years. see
http://shroudstory.com/2013/06/25/cotton/
which contains a copy of a BSTS report published two years later in 1990.
You might also check:
http://shroudstory.com/2013/06/27/an-modest-inquiry-from-john-klotz/
Rich, you belong over here. That is a good question about the banding in the C14 sample. I wasn’t aware that there was any. Do you have a picture?
Paulette,
– Sorry not to respond sooner — have a lot to read and think about…
– I don’t have a picture, but I’ll see if I can get a copy of Jackson’s paper claiming to show how the banding continues through the region that the sample was taken from. I do wonder about his use of “region” to describe what he sees — does the banding clearly go through the sample itself, or just through the general area? I’m biased, and hoping the latter.
— Rich
Rich, try this: http://shroudstory.com/?s=banding
Paulette,
– Whew! Interesting stuff.
— Rich
Paulette,
– I don’t quite understand Rogers’ explanation for banding itself, and don’t think I can effectively communicate what I’m tripping over. Do you have an explanation, or know of a link with an explanation?
— Rich
None of the references above, I’m sorry to say, is completely satisfactory. There is no doubt that ‘almost invisible’ re-weaving exists, and there is an excellent London firm that specialises in it. However, the term ‘invisible’ is not meant to mean that such a repair is wholly undetectable, and Benford and Marino’s blurred pictures of large areas of tapestry are not convincing evidence that it is.
Look, at as high a magnification as you can, at the Schwortz photo above. Is it uniform? Or is about half of it different from the other half – either in two separate areas, or simply half the threads whereever they are, are different from the others? Or is it fortuitously true that this sample is in fact all old, or all new?
Rogers’s famous splice, which was subsequently analysed by Villarreal, shows two bits of cotton butt-joined together and glued with a darker-coloured water soluble gel. Can you see anything like this in the sample above?
As for the banding, I think the distinct continuity of the weft threads, at least, would be shown in the “transmitted light” photos taken by Barrie Schwortz, and the “X-ray” photos taken at the same time by the STURP team. Unfortunately the versions of these on the internet are not of sufficiently high resolution to follow them closely enough. Are the originals any clearer?
For those that can access it there is a very good good radiograph of the top left hand corner (as you look at it) of the Shroud , exactly the spot where the Raes sample and the radiocarbon -14 samples came from- but larger than that .eg. about 40cms by 30cms as Fig. 7 in Rogers and Schwalbe’s article ‘Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin’ in Analytica Chimica Acta, Vol. 135 (1982) . Rogers and Schwalbe used it to show that the banding, which is clearly shown, went across the seam which runs along the top of the cloth through into the main body of the Shroud. There is a clear line at the bottom of the radiograph e.g. on the left side of the Shroud,, where the Raes sample was taken from, but the radiocarbon-14 samples that actually went to the labs are much further in, beyond this line. if there was reweaving then it did not disturb the bands that run from the top of the Shroud well into its main body. But isnt’ this what John Jackson said in his article claiming that the rc dates were contaminated by carbon monoxide? It is ironical that Rogers himself used a radiograph in 1982 that seems to be evidence against his own argument twenty years later but perhaps other can see reweaving that Jackson and I cannot see. Anyone able to post this radiograph which i assume is the property of STURP ( no acknowledgment is given in the 1982 article)?
Quote from John Jackson ‘A New Radiocarbon Hypothesis’ , Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, May, 2008,(para one).
‘One hypothesis is that the linen sample used in the radiocarbon dating actually came from a medieval ‘re-weave’.While this hypothesis has been argued on the basis of indirect chemistry, it can be discounted on the basis of evident bandings in the 1978 radiographs and transmitted light images of STURP. These data photographs show clearly that the banding structures (which are in the Shroud) propagate in an uninterrupted fashion through the region that would, ten years later, be where the sample was taken for radiocarbon dating.’
I assume that the radiograph in the Rogers article of 1982 is from the STURP collection referred to by Jackson and we must leave it to them ( or John Jackson) to publish it so everyone can have a look.
Damn, I see the threads he’s talking about. It looks possibly like a smaller type thread weaved in between thread 18&19. Two threads can actually been seen, a main thread apart, one below the other. Sure looks like a mending to me.
Interesting…
R
It is evident that more research on the threads will be needed and very likely that new findings will emerge. But, coming to Randi, who is said to have researched occult and the paranormal, two very different things, one must presume that as a magician he can easily detect sleight of hand. In the case of Sai Baba (India), challenged by Dr. Abraham Kovoor (Sri Lanka) and parapsychologists from different countries, the history is known. So much for magic. How could Randi research genuine paranormal phenomena, which are spontaneous? Would he judge Abraham Lincoln to have been a liar, leaving aside Mary Todd Lincoln’s interests? It is known that the mind is capable of neutralizing space and time in genuine paranormal phenomena. Would Randi judge Jesus to have been a magician? Magicians do not heal and cure, and the secular and sceptical Jewish archaeologist Shimon Gibson has acknowledged that it was precisely because of his healing and curing activity that made Jesus hated and feared by the High Priests, leading to the crucifixion.
Louis,
The answer may well lie in the quanta. Some scientists are exploring the ability of hum sonsciousness to act independemt of sp[ace and time. There is an intersting, and intriguing video of Stuart Hameroff who is head of a consciousness project at University of Arizona. Yikes, don’t let Jull find out.
I cite the video in a blog piece I wrote last year that I think Dan Picked up. http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2012/08/michael-redux-quantum-mechanics.html
The Hameroff video from “Through the Worm Hole” hosted by Morgan Freeman:
http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2012/08/michael-redux-quantum-mechanics.html
The Hameroff video is
John, thanks for the lead, I will go through your blog the soonest possible because we have common interests. Some two years ago I received a book on theology published in England for review but the fact that the author sort of ignored the Gospel according to John kind of put me off. There are particles of Revelation in nature , Father Karl Rahner wrote, and I have seen scientist-theologians with whom such topics were discussed rejecting such a view, insisting that there was much more in nature than what the Jesuit theologian thought there was. The author of the book propounded such a view, but at the expense of rejecting John and thus concentrating only on the synoptics. It depends on how phenomena in nature are interpreted and Rahner did not have access to information about the universe that we now have.
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2294/2049/1600/corte%20.2.jpg
La esquina Raes-C14 ANTES de cortar las muestras. Está muy desestructurada.
Carlos Otal
Nice find Carlos, thank-you.
R