The Conference Is Over

Stuck at Chicago O’Hare. Next, some sleep

The last presentation was Robert Siefker’s excellent explanation of The Shroud: A Critical Summary Of Observations, Data And Hypotheses Version 2.0, a document published by the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado headed up by John Jackson. More on this shortly in another posting.

It was a good conference. All of the presentations were very good. Most we’re excellent. A few were outstanding. Some, to my particular way of seeing things, were particularly notable for one reason or another. I’ve already mentioned Andrew Silverman’s mind consciousness talk and Ray Schneider’s overview of significant evidence in earlier postings. There were others.

Saturday afternoon: When Bob Rucker finished his extended talk, MCNP Analysis Of Neutrons Released From Jesus’ Body In The Resurrection the applause was seismic.  In closing, he mentioned that he had a few handouts of his slides. They were gone in 15 seconds as people all but climbed over tables to grab them. I was approached by several people to see if I would publish his PowerPoint now because nobody wanted to wait until the conference papers were published, probably in December. Bob has given me an electronic copy of 54 of his charts and is writing up notes of what he said. When I get it I’ll post the whole thing here. So watch for it.

Sunday morning: Nothing will wake you up like a ten foot tall picture of Charles Freeman at 8:00 in the morning (see picture above).  It was one of the slides Jack Markwardt used in his most outstanding special presentation, Modern Scholarship And The History Of The Turin Shroud. This is a big deal. If Jack is right, and indeed he may be, we may need to completely rethink the history of the shroud before it arrived in Western Europe. We may need to reconsider the notion that the cloth was “doubled in fours” or whatever definition we have been using for the word tetradiplon. We may need to reimagine what happened before, during and after AD 944.

Still Sunday morning: Barrie Schwortz gave an eight minute talk about Ray Rogers. Strip away any mention of the shroud, as Rogers did in his work-a-day world, and you find a brilliant and dedicated scientist admired by his peers at Los Alamos. Thanks, Barrie. It needed to be said. For now, and until we can get Barrie’s full presentation, lets not have any comments on Barrie’s talk.

As for comments on Bob Siefker’s presentation, let’s wait for a subsequent posting on the subject, maybe later today. And, as for Jack Marwardt’s new historical theory, let’s wait for the actual paper to be published because this is potentially seminal.

Much more to talk about.