Late addition (July 2019)
Please forgive this postscript, correction, “prescript”, correction, intrusion, added many years later – based on some 350 and more postings here and elsewhere.
That’s including some 7 years of my hands-on investigation into image-forming techniques, chosen to be credible with simple, indeed crude, medieval (14th century) technology etc etc.
(Oh, and yes, I accept the radiocarbon dating, despite it being restricted to a single non-random corner sample, making all the oh-so-dismissive, oh-so-derogatory statistics-based sniping totally irrelevant – a ranging shot being just that me dears- a single ranging shot, albeit subdivided into three for Arizona, Oxford and Zurich).
Sindonology (i.e. the “science” , read pseudoscience – of the so-called “Shroud ” of Turin) can be simply summed up. It’s a re-branding exercise, one designed to pretend that the prized Turin possession is not just J of A’s “fine linen”, described in the biblical account as used to transport a crucified body from cross to tomb.
Oh no, it goes further, much further, way way beyond the biblical account. How? By making out that it was the SAME linen as that described in the Gospel of John, deployed as final “burial clothes”. Thus the description “Shroud” for the Turin Linen, usually with the addition “burial shroud”. Why the elision of two different linens, deployed for entirely different purposes (transport first, then final interment)?
Go figure! Key words to consider are: authentic relic v manufactured medieval icon; mystique, peaceful death-repose, unlimited opportunity for proposing new and ever more improbable image-formation mechanisms etc. How much easier it is to attach the label “Holy” to Shroud if seen as final burial clothes, in final at-peace repose – prior to Resurrection- as distinct from a means of temporary swaying side-to-side transport in an improvised makeshift stretcher !
As I say, a rebranding exercise (transport to final burial shroud) and a very smart and subtle one at that . Not for nothing did that angry local Bishop of Troyes suddenly refer to a “sleight of hand” after allegedly accepting it when first displayed. Seems the script was altered, or as some might say, tampered with! It might also explain why there were two Lirey badges, not just one. Entire books could be written on which of the two came first… I think I know which, with its allusion (?) to the Veil of Veronica… yes, there are alternative views (the face above “SUAIRE” a visual link to the face-only display of the Linen as the “Image of Edessa” or as that on the then current “Shroud” per se.
Face shown (left) on mid- 14th century Machy Mould (recently discovered variant of the Lirey Pilgrim Badge) above the word “SUAIRE” (allegedly meaning “shroud”). Inset image on the right: one version among many of the fabled “Veil of Veronica” image. I say the two are related, and deliberately so, but this is not the time or place to go into detail.
No, NOT a resurrectional selfie, but instead a full size version of, wait for it, the legendary VEIL OF VERONICA , product of inital body contact – no air gaps- between body and fabric, but with one important difference. The Turin image was intended to look more realistic, less artistic.
How? By displaying a negative tone-reversed image implying IMPRINT (unless, that is, you’re a modern day sindonologist, in which case ‘resurrectional proto-photographic selfie” becomes the preferred, nay, vigorously proferred explanation assisted by unrestrained imagination, creation of endless pseudoscience etc etc, with resort to laser beams, corona discharges, nuclear physics, elementary particles, earthquakes etc etc – the list is seemingly endless!
Welcome to modern day sindonology.
Personally, I prefer no-nonsense feet-on-the-ground hypothesis-testing science, aided by lashings of, wait for it, plain down-to-earth common sense.
Start of original posting:
Here’s a picture I took of a lightly-scorched linen fibre last January.
Lightly scorched linen- note the high density of pigmentation at those dislocation nodes,
The concentration of tan coloration at the nodes was reported, but at the time there was no obvious explanation.
Now, after experiments with strong alkali, designed to extract hemicelluloses, while probably leaving most if not all crystalline cellulose in situ and relatively intact, there is now a possible explanation (see previous post) namely that there is a particular kind of carbohydrate at the nodes that is alkali-resistant but susceptible to scorching. I have proposed that it is amorphous cellulose, i.e. relatively non-crystalline cellulose. So, contrary to received wisdom (to which I too have previously subscribed) that cellulose is unlikely to be the prime target molecule for any kind of chemical dehydration (“scorching”), due to crystallinity and accompanying chemical resistance, it may be that more disordered regions are a prime target, especially if there are relatively small amounts of the more chemically reactive pentosans of cell wall hemicelluloses, as seems to be the case for linen (as distinct from cotton). The so-called dislocation nodes of linen fibres, absent in cotton, are variously reported to be the site of less crystalline, i.e. amorphous cellulose.
But how would Shroud image fibres look like at a similar level of magnification, capable of showing the nodes?
Has anyone ever seen such pictures (“photomicrographs”) or, better still, know where they are and whom to contact?
They must surely exist (it being the simplest thing in the world to place some back-lit linen on a microscope slide).
Colin Berry
email: sciencebod01 (insert @ symbol) aol.com
Update: Friday 14:00
Comment posted to Dan Porter’s shroudstory.com site
Now we are back discussing image formation, this seems as good a moment as any to announce something I discovered earlier today from looking at a pdf accessible on this site.
It’s from Thibault Heimburger MD, and displays photomicrographs from the Mark Evans collection. Previously I had assumed that they were not of sufficiently high magnification to show the nodes on linen fibre, which is true. But if those nodes become pigmented for whatever reason, the sites of those nodes show up as banding, with relatively white/transparent areas in between.
One such Mark Evans picture shows up precisely that kind of banding on a Shroud image thread. That makes the pigmentation consistent with what I see in my model systems, using scorching/pigmentation by direct contact with heated solid, and thus consistent with medieval fabrication. However it is not, repeat NOT consistent with the Rogers’ impurity coating hypothesis, unless one tries, late in the day, to build in qualifying assumptions about starch sticking preferably to the nodal regions. (Reminder: scientists, whether regarded as “true experts” or not, do not care much for qualifying assumptions, certainly not defensive ones).
I’ll post some enlarged/cropped pictures from that Evans archive later today on my own site, which Dan Porter is free to post here if he so desires (see my latest posting).
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Circled area, lower left, before enlargement
(from Mark Evans archive)
As above, enlarged. Note the interrupted pigment distribution along the fibre, consistent with concentration at the linen nodes.
Here’s a close-up of the second circled region on the right. Again, despite the poor resolution, one can clearly see the distribution of pigment along the strand to be interrupted, consistent with concentration at linen nodes.
2nd interrupted distribution of pigment from same Mark Evans field of Shroud image fibres.
The pattern we see here fits the one obtained in model experiments with a hot solid template pressed agains the linen to produce a contact scorch – one that targets susceptible nodes. Conversely, it does not fit the Rogers’ “natural” tomb scenario of a continuous impurity coat of acquired starch (allegedly 1st century AD linen technology) as the image-receptive layer.
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I’ll search the remaining Evans archive for more close-ups of those interrupted pigmentation areas. But what’s needed now, as per title, is high magnification, high definition close-ups that show the nodes more clearly. They must surely exist. Why are they not in the public domain? What was the point of STURP if we do not have the kind of photograph that a 9 year old could take with a toy microscope?
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Update: 19:40: Caveat: who’s to say those pigmented regions in the Mark Evans pictures are not inter-nodal. rather than nodal? Until we have some higher magnification photographs, anything one says now is provisional.
I must also get the microscope out again and check what happens to pigment density distibution at different stages of alkali treatment (at least I can home in at high magnification). At present, I’m assuming that that because ones sees nodal pigmentation before alkali treatment, then any remaining pigmentation after alkali is also nodal. That may seem self-evident, but needs checking.
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Update (cold light of day) Sat 2nd November 06:30
Parts of microscope
So why are there no close-up photographs of Shroud image fibres, at least none that I’m aware of, forcing me to do blow-ups of those Mark Evans pictures?
Could it be something as simple as the fact that a microscope has an arm, see diagram above, which prevents one from looking at the centre regions of a large (say 4.4 x 1.1 metre) sheet of linen? Hand lens – no problem, but microscope – no! In ordinary forensic work, one would simply excise a sample, and place it on a microscope slide. But one’s not allowed to do that with the Shroud. What about the sticky tape samples! Were they never photographed at high magnification? It is bizarre, truly bizarre, that 25 years post-STURP I am bemoaning the lack of a decent high mag picture of a Shroud image fibre and having to ask these questions.
Having got the microscope out yesterday, and trained it on scorched linen fibres, I am also beginning to doubt my “node ” story. It’s possible that it’s an artefact of light microscopy, possibly related to rear-side illumination that makes the nodes look more pigmented than they really are. I may be moving into dissolving perspective, egg-on-face territory, not through an excess of subjectivity, but one of unconscious selectivity – the brain has a tendency to filter signals from noise, and the trouble with the modern USB-connection microscope is that one clicks on and stores the fields that show a pattern, omitting to do the same with those that don’t. Result – one returns later to an unbalanced archive.
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My answer to the steeped-in-mystique Turin Shroud - evolving gradually from some 10 years of science-based experimental modelling. 