Ultraviolet Illumination Florescence on the Shroud of Turin
 This is
a photograph taken with ultraviolet illumination. The vertical
darker shade of brown to the left of the red arrow is not
noticeable in visible light. It is, in this special photograph, a
difference in florescence from the UV light and it signifies a
different chemical composition. Because this is the area from
which the carbon 14 samples were cut, it suggests that the samples
were chemically not representative of the rest of the Shroud.
(See: Cutting
Map)
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The almost-white triangle is where
a sample was from the Shroud in 1973, by Gilbert Raes,
a textile expert. Threads from the Raes sample have been retained
by scientist who continue to study them.
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The dark brown area in the bottom
of the picture is unrelated. It is not part of the cloth.
It was from the dark vertical band
just above the white triangle that the samples were cut for the
carbon 14 testing.
Granted, it might have been thought
that the chemical difference was the result of contamination. The
cloth was often held be the edges and was quite dirty in this
area. Carbon 14 dating laboratories have excellent ways to remove
contamination before converting the sample to simple carbon for
testing. But it might have been material intrusion from a medieval
repair to the cloth.
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No one knows for certain
if the Shroud of Turin is real. But if we
focus only on what is published in peer-reviewed
scientific journals then we know certain facts. The
Shroud of Turin is at least 1300 years old.
It could be older. The images are unexplained. As
Philip Ball wrote in Nature, in
commenting on a 2005 article in
Thermochimica Acta
that proved that the 1988 carbon 14 dating was
invalid, "It is simply not known how the
ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made" If
we turn to a 2003 article in
Melanoidins
we find that the images on
the Shroud of Turin are a chemical
caramel-like darkening of an otherwise clear starch
and polysaccharide coating on some of the shroud’s
fibers It is not paint.
There is the enigma
of the second face on the reverse side of the Shroud
as reported in 2004 in the Journal of Optics
published by the Institute of Physics. Other
peer-reviewed evidence is clear: The bloodstains are
from real human blood. The images have peculiar 3D
properties. The Shroud was bleached by
methods used in the first century and not later in
the medieval.
Throw in some
history, and given what is known scientifically, and
there is ample reason to infer that the Shroud of
Turin is genuine. The thoughtful skeptical
inquirers aims not to achieve this or that
conclusion. Rather their aim is the process of
honest skeptical inquiry. There is ample room for
the thoughtful skeptical inquirer in Shroud
of Turin research. But the articles that appear now
and then in the Skeptical Inquirer
magazine are preposterously polemic, filled with
arguments refuted by peer-reviewed scientific
observation and lack proper historical
investigation.
The American
Chemical Society website quotes a thoughtful
skeptical inquirer, the late Raymond Rogers, the Los
Alamos scientist who showed that the carbon 14
dating was invalid: "The observations do not prove
how the image was formed or the "authenticity" of
the Shroud. There could be a nearly infinite number
of alternate hypotheses, and the search for new
hypotheses should continue." |
NEW 2005 SHROUD OF TURIN BROUHAHA: SCIENCE vs PAPAL CUSTODIAN
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