NEW 2005 SHROUD OF TURIN BROUHAHA: SCIENCE vs PAPAL CUSTODIAN
New Information: A team of nine scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has confirmed that the carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin is wrong. See the Fact Check at Shroud of Turin Blog The
cloth of the Shroud of Turin
 The Shroud is a single piece of linen cloth measuring about 14
feet by 3½
feet. The weave is a 3 over 1 herringbone weave. It is
bloodstained and shows faint ventral and dorsal images of a man
who, by the wounds that are visible, appears to have been
crucified. He seems to be in burial repose.
The bloodstains on the Shroud
The bloodstains on the Shroud are composed of hemoglobin and
give a positive test for serum albumin. Numerous tests confirm
this.
The Shroud of Turin images
The Shroud's images are superficial and fully contained within
a thin layer of starch fractions and saccharides that coats the
outermost fibers of the Shroud. The coloration is a caramel-like
product or the product of an amino/carbonyl reaction. Where there
is no image, the carbohydrate coating is clear. There is also a
very faint image of the face on the reverse side of the Shroud
which lines up with the image on the front of the cloth. There is
no image content between the two superficial image layers
indicating that nothing soaked through to form the image on the
other side.
Until recently, it was widely believed that the images on the
Shroud of Turin were produced by something which resulted in
oxidation, dehydration and conjugation of the polysaccharide
structure of the fibers of the linen itself. This has been shown
to be incorrect. The coating, whether imaged or clear, can be
reduced with diimide or removed with adhesive leaving clear
cellulose fiber.
The images as they appear on the Shroud are said to be negative
because when photographed the resulting negative is a positive
image.
The Turin Shroud was examined with visible and ultraviolet
spectrometry, infrared spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence
spectrometry, thermography, pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry,
lasermicroprobe Raman analyses, and microchemical testing. No
evidence for pigments (paint, dye or stains) or artist's media was
found anywhere on the Shroud.
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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 showed that previous 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.
Add 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 proved 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." |
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