What Di Lazzaro really accomplished
I typed the above headline on my iPad for a posting I was going to write and showed it to him. He was going to give me his views on how the image was made on the shroud.
“You can’t say that,” he said. “Sure enough, I did just dip a pickle spear in my beer. But you don’t know if I have ever done it before and if I ever will again, so you can’t say beers, plural. And you don’t know if I like to do it. You are assuming far too much.”
“Your point, being?”
He replied. “You’re assuming too much when you assume that the image on the shroud was created by chemistry you can understand. What Di Lazzaro really accomplished by using a uv excimer laser was to discard that assumption. There was no such source of light in the first century or the fourteenth century.”
He stopped to think, then continued: “Is Di Lazzaro saying that the image must have been created by a miracle or is he saying that we must look beyond our current understanding of nature? I’d like to think it was the latter.”
I did a quick search on my iPad. “Di Lazzaro wrote,” I said;
When one talks about a flash of light being able to colour a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things such as miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes.
We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals.
— from a story by Nick Squires of The Daily Telegraph
The man who dips pickles in beer went on: “If in 1898, someone had suggested that the image was caused by radiation, most people would have scratched their heads and asked what you were talking about. That was the year Secondo Pia took his famous picture and the year that Marie Curie first coined the term ‘radioactivity.’ I think it is something new, something amazing that we haven’t discovered yet that created the image.”
“You’ve had too many pickles,” I said.
BTW: Di Lazzaro also wrote:
Our results are more evidence that it is not easy to replicate the body image and skeptics will have to believe in a miracle to sustain it was done by a forger in the middle ages!
— from The Shroud in the News for Christmas 2011, An Editorial
Response by Barrie Schwortz, from which the above quote is taken.
I still stand by what I said that Barrie took such a strong exception to.
I do not believe in miracles. I only believe in things we can not explain. Threre is an arbirary divide in our thinking between was “natural” and what is and what is “supernatural or unnatural” If something happens we can not explain, that does not mean it is suprenatural or unnatural”,” it simply means that we cannot explain it.
The image on the shroud of Turin has yet to be explained. It that sense it is by definition “supernatural.” But it exists so no one can deny that it is “natural” either.
All op the evidence surrounding the image, points in one direcrtion: the Resurrection. Can it be said to “prove” the Resurrection. Maybe not, but the experiments in Italy and other places all point towards some kind of radiation (Sorry Ray R.). There is nothing in antiquity of which I am aware that exhibits the same characteristics and for which radiation seems to be the simplest solution. The fact that we can not explain the radiation by current science does not mean at some future date it will not be explained.
Ancients marveled at all kinds of things that we subsequently explained such as solar and lunar eclipses. Scientists are exploring the issue of human consciousness. It has yet to be explained.
Science is not an enemy of religion which posits a primordial conscientiousness from which our universe sprang. Science is the enemy of religion that trembles in fear at a solar eclipse because God has taken away the sun or that to prevent the volcano from erupting we must sacrifice a human being.
Something happened in that Jerusalem tomb circa 30CE. It is reported that Christ rose from dead. If so, then something in that process, undoubtedly some kind of radiation caused an image to be created.
I can understand an agnostic who doesn’t believe it’s been proven. But the atheist who claims it never happened, is well, a fool.
“the experiments in Italy and other places all point towards some kind of radiation (Sorry Ray R.).”
Thibault Heimburger is active on this blog, understands Ray R.’s work and is the fourth author on “Microscopic and Macroscopic Characteristics of the Shroud of Turin Image Superficiality”.
(http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ist/jist/2010/00000054/00000004/art00001)
Do you think he takes a stand for some kind of radiation mechanism? I’d be curious to know.
I just don’t have time to dig into this right now. Rogers in his book and other places recognized there was some x factor besides the malliard reaction. It’s the big unknown. That doesn’t mean it won’t be solved but it isn’t solved now.
No, I don’t take a stand for some kind of radiation mechanism.
I never did it.
The more I study the Shroud, the more I think that the image comes from some kind of low-temperature chemical reactions in the PCW or surface impurities on the fibers.
Sorry, but I can’t give more comments for the moment.
Now, I have to write my paper for the Saint-Louis conference.
For example, my third and last PDF about the “scorch hypothesis” needs more experiments.
Rendez-vous in October or November.
Thank you.
I really apologize for the typos but I am deep into converting my 500+ footnotes into Reference table which looks like it will have 300 +/- entries.
The Jesus movement became the Church not only with kerygma, healing and curing was also going on, and these were miracles. Even enemies acknowledged the ability of the disciples to heal and cure.
In the Catholic Church today, somewhat the same process is used in deciding who is a candidate for sainthood. Any healing and curing made in life are not taken into consideration.
There is the famous case of the Jewish millionaire in New York who had two wishes as he lay dying of an incurable brain tumour: meet Pope John Paul II and be buried in Jerusalem. An arrangement was made through the pope’s secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz and one fine morning the dying man was wheeled into the pope’s private chapel on a stretcher. There were also some others attending the mass and the dying Jewish man also received communion like them — from the pope’s hands. He was gently chided by the monsignor after this. A fortnight later the monsignor received a call and learnt that the man had been cured.
It was announced in the press in many countries.