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Colin Berry: Yes, it’s vitally important to match every tiny detail
Inés San Martín, a Vatican correspondent for Crux has written an interesting article: Is the Shroud of Turin real? Some say it doesn’t matter
Therein we find Joe Nickell saying:
Proponents lack any viable hypothesis for the image formation, and have dismissed re-creations that others have found convincing.
and Barrie Schwortz saying:
Despite being the most studied artifact in history … modern science is still unable to explain the image or how it was made.
and also saying:
… no one in the past 40 years has been able to duplicate it or create any image with the same chemical and physical properties.
Well, yeah, duh, to what Nickell is saying. In every case there have been problems with the re-creations. It is all about details. That’s why they have been dismissed.
But then isn’t Barrie’s argument stale. That’s not a criticism of Barrie, it is the situation. Just as we say that no one has figured out how the image was formed – which every student of logic knows is a big fat fallacy – we haven’t figured out anything better to say about the image except what it is not and to keep bringing up those chemical and physical details.
Why?
The Rev. Andrew Dalton, a Legionaries of Christ priest who’s a shroud expert, told Crux that although the Church respects the autonomy of the scientific community, there are details that simply couldn’t have been forged centuries ago.
Details like what?
Isn’t Colin Berry trying to figure out how the image was maybe formed by a forger with Thibault Heimburger reminding him about those pesky little details that “that simply couldn’t have been forged centuries ago.” Inés San Martín should be interviewing them. Here, right out of this blog, let’s look at two comments.
Thibault Heimburger (April 29, 2015 at 3:32 pm):
Colin,
“These aspects of the TS that the new model is supposed to match” are very important.
Your new model, at the end, must match (or at least be compatible with) the fundamental surface distribution properties of the TS: superficiality (at fabric, thread and fiber level), uniformity of the image (no “hot point”, no spot, no “hole”), half tone and fuzzy contours, and bundles of fibers adjacent to uncolored fibers…
Now, if you think that these facts are not proved, despite the many photos you have, I can’t add anything.
If you think that those properties are not important at all, please explain…
The ” ‘scattered colored spots” (also seen in Garlaschelli’s shroud) is only my description of your hand imprint.
I’ll be in Turin until Sunday.
Colin Berry (April 29, 2015 at 10:25 pm):
Yes, it’s vitally important to match every tiny detail of the TS, as it existed when first produced. My new project will attempt to simulate in the kitchen the effect of centuries of subtle degradation on an image of unknown provenance, whether 700 or 2000 years old.
Seriously, TH, one has to recognize the limitations of any attempts at model building. That’s what we scientists, as distinct from physicians, engineers, technologists etc do – we build models. Recognizing the limitations of models, we are concerned primarily with the principles, especially when there are so many who claim for example that a 200nm thick image in unexplainable by conventional science (wrong, it is).
I am not trying to produce a facsimile copy of the TS (forgery Mark 2?) merely to show that its defining characteristics are consistent with medieval forgery. That’s as a counter to those pseudoscientific agenda-pushers who say they are not. (That’s my agenda – anti-pseudoscience). “Defining characteristic” must not turned into a trail (trial?) with no ending.
Hat tip to Joe Marino for sending the Crux article along.
Paper Chase: The origin of Rogers’ Raes and C14 samples by Thibault Heimburger
In view of the suggestion yesterday in a paper by Giorgio Bracaglia that The Raes samples that Rogers used had been switched it seems like a good time to examine the St. Louis presentation by Thibault Heimburger, The origin of Rogers’ Raes and C14 samples along with his PowerPoint Presentation.
Here is a chart that addresses that very point:
Here is the concluding PP chart from Thibault’s talk:
*The paper at HSG has been locked up with a password. Apparently and unfortunately, it was not supposed to have been released.
Revisiting: The Turin Shroud Image is not a Scorch
Thibault Heimburger recently commented:
I do not think that the image formation process is a stochastic process. . . . In addition, I completely disagree with Colin. I repeat: the distribution of the image color is not consistent with any kind of scorch, even if one takes into account ageing etc.. This has been shown in :
https://shroudofturin.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/scorch-2-eng-final.pdf
Leading Colin Berry to reply:
Nothing is “shown” unless opened up to debate. Pdfs do not open up to debate. Criticizing others via pdfs is a means of evading both online counter-criticism or more formal peer review.
Personally speaking, I can scarcely be bothered to read pdfs any more – they occupy a nether world between public and private domain, and at best qualify as vanity publications in my mind.
Huh? PDFs “. . . at best qualify as vanity publications”? Really? Almost every article I read in Nature, International Weekly Journal of Science is a PDF document. Is that a vanity publication in anyone’s mind? As one might expect, Nature pondered the question of using PDF files for its articles. They report, “So far, scientists have shown a strong preference for the portable document format (PDF) version of individual articles. . . .” And so they and nearly every ethical journal use PDF.
On this blog, I will use the PDF format when it makes sense to do so. A 23 page article makes sense. It would not make sense to clog a blog page with that much content. It slow down page loading. It hampers debate; comments are a mile away down the page.
On April 17, I announced Thibault’s paper, The Scorch Hypothesis: New Experiments, April 2014. There were thirty comments and it is significant to note that about half of them were not from Max and none of them were from Colin.
Perhaps we need to revisit this topic. So HERE IS THE PDF. And right below this sentence is space for debate. Over to you Colin.
Photomicrographs and Stochastic Imaging
Colin Berry in his blog tells us that Thibault Heimburger is correct – Shroud photomicrographs lend no support to the notion of a ‘stochastic’ imaging mechanism. Colin writes:
So where does Thibault Heimburger MD, Paris-based French physician and member of the Shroud Science Group enter this story? Some might be surprised to find his views being favourably received on this site, given there is so much on which we differ, notably the contact scorch hypothesis (one that TH rejects). But that does not mean he’s wrong – or right- on everything, far from it, as my follow-up to a recent comment on his on shroudstory.com will now show.
TH appeared on the recent thread, the latter flagging up the presence of a Fazio et al paper recently published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. He queried the claim (or supposition?) that yellowed fibres were randomly distributed across Shroud image-bearing regions, stating that they could appear together in bundles . . . . Were that correct, it would deal a devastating blow to any theory that required the coloured fibres to be randomly distributed (though occasional clumping is not totally ruled out, albeit being of low expected frequency).
You are going to want to read Colin’s posting. Now we just need to hear from Thibault.
Note about the image: The above image is ME-29, a 64x photomicrograph of a part of the nose area by Mark Evans. CLICK HERE or on the picture to enlarge it to 1088 by 770. Because I am hot-linking to the image as it is stored in Colin’s blog, it appears as a properly proportioned rectangle. For some reason it has been distorted into a 320 by 320 square in Colin’s blog (not that this seems to make any difference for the purpose at hand). According to the shroud.com gallery of images, the original size is 2940 by 1984.
Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
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