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A Christmas Lesson
& The Shroud
by Daniel R. Porter
One Christmas, when I was about eight
years old, my father gave
me a chemistry set. I remember the metal box filled with little bottles of
chemicals, test tubes, stirring rods and a clamp for holding test tubes over
a small alcohol burner.
That Christmas morning my father and I set up the
chemistry set on the kitchen counter and tried some of the experiments
described in a book that came with the set. I remember one of the
experiments in particular because I think it had a
profound impact on my life. It was probably the beginning of skeptical
tendency that has affected my thinking throughout my life.
My father and I filled a small wine glass with water
and added several drop of a clear liquid chemical called phenolphthalein. It
looked like an ordinary glass of water. In another glass we added a few
drops of ammonia. Unless you looked closely, or took a whiff, it seemed like
an empty glass. We called my mother into the kitchen to observe and my
father explained that I was going to perform a miracle and change water into
wine. I then poured the glass of water into the empty glass and the liquid
abruptly turned dark red. It looked like wine.
It wasn’t a miracle, of course. It wasn’t wine that
I made. And there was a perfectly good chemical explanation for the deep red
colored liquid. One of the first thoughts I had was that perhaps Jesus also
performed some trickery at the wedding at Canaan. All the miracles, I thought, must have some
logical explanation. And over time, as my understanding of science and
history evolved, I became something of a modern iconoclast and a skeptic.
Now, some fifty years later, I
discovered another “try this at home miracle.” The difference is that no one
has ever been able to provide an
explanation for the results of this experiment. I have been seeking a scientific explanation for the last five years and have yet to find
anyone who can provide an explanation for the results. Most scholars who
have studied the Shroud extensively agree that there is no explanation.
I invite you to try it. All you need is a home
computer running Windows, a connection to the Internet, some software that
you can download for free and ten minutes of your time. Detailed
instructions follow the explanation below.
It turns out that only one known image
of a human face can be rendered as 3D picture by plotting the darker and
lighter shades of color in the image. The image is the face on the Shroud of
Turin. No other image of a human face, whether from a painting, drawing or
photograph will do this. Why is this so? Try the experiment or just read
what follows.
Some Basics
No one really knows how these images were formed.
They were not painted as some, in the past, have supposed. The chemistry and
physics of the image chromophore (that which gives visible image) are now
well understood even though the method by which the images were created
remains a mystery. The images are the result of a selective, color producing
chemical change to discreet lengths of some cellulous fibers of the linen.
Chemists describe the chemical change as an oxidation, dehydration and
conjugation of the polysaccharide (long-chain sugar molecular) structure of
the fibrils. Direct microscopic examination reveals that the image producing
chemical change to the linen is superficial to the top one or two fibrils of
the topmost threads of the cloth. There is no evidence of any matting,
capillarity, wicking, or penetration expected from liquids. The images could
not have been created with paint, dye, stain or liquid chemical. Numerous
tests including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light spectrometry; x-ray
fluorescence spectrometry; and direct microscopic viewing of the Shroud
confirm that the images were not painted. Other tests on particle samples
collected from the Shroud’s surface including microchemistry analysis,
pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry, and laser-microprobe Raman analyses further
confirm this.
The images, closely examined with the aid of
microscopes and microphotography, are similar to halftone images. Simply,
this means that all the different shades of color are derived from the
number and size of pixels of a single color in any given area of the image.
A pixel (picture element) can be a dot, a short line or, as with the Shroud,
a discrete length of fiber colored by the chemical alteration of the
cellulose. Halftone is the method used to print black and white photographs
in magazines and newspapers. Look closely at a picture in a newspaper and
you will see that all the shades of gray are achieved with dots of only
black ink. Halftone is also the way black and white pictures are printed on
inkjet printers connected to home computers. With such printers, every shade
of gray is produced by minuscule droplets of black ink. Where there are more
droplets of ink the printed image is darker; where there are fewer droplets
the image is lighter.
The images on the Shroud are not black and white, but
they are monochromatic; that is, they are of a single color. The color is
often described as sepia or straw yellow. The color produced by the chemical
change to the fibers is constant and the various darker and lighter tones of
color we perceive are the result of the density of the altered fibers
(length and quantity in a given area). It is interesting to note that on a
high quality inkjet printer (1200 dots per inch), the ink droplets are about
60 microns across, whereas on the Shroud, the image-bearing fibrils are only
about 15 microns thick or about one fifth the thickness of typical human
hair.
 Another
interesting attribute of the images is that they are negative images; that
is with dark and lighter tones of color reversed. In this sense, the images
on the Shroud are like photographic negatives. In the example shown here,
the image of a face on the left is as the image appears on the Shroud. The
positive image on the right is as the image appears when the tones are
reversed. This attribute was discovered more than a century ago, when in
1898, a photographer named Secondo Pia took the first-ever photographs of
the Shroud with a large box camera. While developing his photographs he
discovered that images that appeared on the glass plate negatives were
positive images that were startling in clarity and realistic appearance. For
the first time people could see the amazing detail in the Shroud’s
images. It is not that the detail is not there on the Shroud. It is. But our
minds are not well adapted to interpreting negative images. What for
centuries had appeared only as ghostlike images now appear to be graphically
remarkable front and back pictures of the man on the Shroud – and the face.
But they may not be pictures at all but something
else. At least they are not pictures of a human face or body in a
traditional sense. When we look at a picture of a person we are looking at a
representation of what we see with our eyes. What we see with our eyes is
the light reflected from the face or the body. We may see shape but that is
only a consequence of seeing reflected light. Light, in all its colors and
varying intensities, is all that our eyes can detect. While simple drawings
and cartoons may only show outlines and features, leaving it to us to
imagine depth, any picture that tries to convey a sense of dimensionality
always shows how light is reflected from objects, faces, and bodies. This is
true whether the picture is a sketch, painting, mosaic, photograph or any
other form of two-dimensional art. On the Shroud, the face – in fact both
body images – look like pictures of reflected light. We think they are
pictures, but image analysts tell us they are not that at all.
 Artists
use many techniques to convey the sense of three-dimensionality in a
painting or other flat-surface work of art: faces turned at angles, parts of
an object or body protruding outward, placement of objects in front of other
objects, perspective in which objects appear to become smaller as they
recede into the distance, and the play of light on shapes and surfaces. We
can see all of this in Carvaggio’s famous Supper at Emmaus shown
here. Notice in particular the treatment of light on the subjects’ faces.
Of all of the methods used by artists to convey
three-dimensionality, the play of light –highlights, lowlights and
cast-shadows – is the most important method for showing depth in a human
face. We seem to see this in the face of the man of the Shroud. But on close
examination we see that what appears to be the play of light is not light at
all.
 Light,
in order to produce highlights, lowlights and cast-shadows, must have
direction. While light may come from many directions, bouncing off of walls
and objects and diffusing in the air as it does, it must nonetheless have a
primary direction. If it does not, there is no way to convey a sense of
depth. Look at a picture of a ball or a globe. Without the play of light on
its surface, without highlights and lowlights it will look like a flat round
surface. By having directionality, light enables us to see that the ball is
spherical. We can say that light is what the artist encodes on his canvas.
Light, incidentally, is also what the photographer’s camera encodes on film.
 When
we look at the face of the man of the Shroud, we certainly seem to see depth
from the play of light. Look at the tip of the nose, at the sides of the
cheeks and the recesses of the eyes. But where is the light coming from?
What is its direction? Image analysts, using computerized tools, tell us
there is no light directionality at all. It doesn’t come from the left or
the right, from above or below, or from the front. That is because the
images we see on the Shroud are not representations of reflected light. The
areas of darker and lighter tones are not encoded light. The body images and
face we see so clearly are not pictures by the hand and eyes of an artist.
Nor are they some form of medieval proto-photography as some have suggested
in a vague attempt to explain the images’ photographic-like negativity.
It turns out that the Shroud images are terrain maps
– and we can prove this. What is encoded onto the Shroud is a terrain map of
a man’s head and body. Both the front side and the backside images are this.
With space-age image analysis equipment or off-the-shelf graphics software
running on a home computer we can plot this encoded information and produce
a realistic isometric plot (an angular view of a three-dimensional shape).
 The
hazy donut shape shown here is an example of a terrain map for the crater
rendered as a three-dimensional shape. Computer software, by plotting the
different shades of gray as altitude, is able to produce the picture of the
crater which is a simulated picture of reflected light.
It is important to stress that no identified works of
art, no known artifacts or relics of any kind will produce a 3D plot like
the one produced by the Shroud. Researchers have tried every imaginable
artistic method including bas-relief rubbings, scorching with hot statues,
daubing the surface with pigment dust, and image transfer rubbings. Nothing
does or can be expected to produce a 3D plot. No one knows how an artist or
crafter of false relics could have produced such an image. And certainly, no
one knows why.
 In
the case of the Shroud we do not get a perfect three-dimensional rendering
for many reasons: If, as scientists suspect, what is encoded on the Shroud,
as data, is the distance between any point on the man’s body and the cloth
loosely draped about him, then the distance will be distorted by the drape
of the cloth. We can assume the cloth was not perfectly flat. Physicists
have estimated that the maximum distance represented is about 3 or 4
centimeters, but we don’t know how linear the scale might be in the image
formation process. We might know that if we knew how the images were
created, but we don’t. The image is very old, medieval as some believe or
possibly even older then that. We don’t know how fading or maturing of the
images and the aging of the cloth might have altered the accuracy of the
distance that is encoded. Finally there are bloodstains and dirt that cause
distortions.
 Some
researchers have suggested that the images might have been formed by some
perfectly natural process such as a chemical reaction between funerary
spices and bodily fluids. Even chemicals used on the linen cloth for
softening, whitening, or preserving might have induced images. The working
premise for a naturalistic explanation has generally been that the Shroud
may be the authentic burial cloth of the historical Jesus or someone else
crucified in a like manner but that the images are not necessarily
supernatural in nature; that is they are not divinely wrought or the
accidental byproduct of a miracle.
Nothing has been found that works. So far, no method
has been found that will produce the chemical change to the cloth’s fibrils,
produce the negative image, and produce a spatially encoded 3D terrain map.
Are we to imagine that a medieval or pre-medieval
craftsman knew of some method for producing the images, unknown or
unrecognized by modern science? Whatever it was it seems to be without
precedent in the arts, among other known relics, and among other artifacts
of history. Whatever process a craftsman might have used, it seems never to
have been exploited since.
3D Renderings
These image were
produced electronically from the facial image on the Shroud. The green image
was produced on the VP8 Image Analyzer at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The
white images were prepared with Corel's Bryce 5 for Windows. They are
dramatic in the amount of 3D rendering.
 
Doing the Experiment
Using POV-Ray 3.5
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Download POV-Ray 3.5 (or later) from
http://www.povray.org/download/. The software is free. There are
versions for Windows, MAC OS, MAC OSX, and Linux. The instructions that
follow are for Windows but should be easily followed by others.
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Open the download file to install the program. I
recommend that you follow the default locations for the program by
installing it within Program Files. Povwin35.exe
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Using “My Computer” locate file folder “POV-Ray for
Windows,” within it the folder “Scenes” and within that the folder called
“Objects.”
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Download the following two files into
the “Objects” folder:
source picture for rendering (shrdface.bmp)
pov file (shroud.pov)
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In POV-Ray, open the file called “shroud.pov.” Then
click on “Run.”
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Experiment with different camera and lighting angles
by changing values in shroud.pov.
Note that the image of the face used with POV-Ray has
been smoothed and reduced in contrast to accommodate limitations in POV-Ray.
The image must be smoothed (blurred) to avoid dramatic peaks and valleys in
the rendered picture. Jasc Paint Shop pro was used for smoothing and
contrast reduction.
Using Jasc Paint Shop
Pro 7.0
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Download Paint Shop
Pro 7.0 from http://www.jasc.com
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With Jasc Paint Shop Pro you can easily conduct the 3D experiment by opening
ANY JPEG or GIF picture of the Shroud of Turin and clicking on Effect,
Artistic Effects, and Topography. Initially, set the width (smoothing) to
12, the Density to 100 and the Lighting Angle to 45 degrees. Then experiment
with different values. This is the easiest 3D rendering program I have
encountered for the Shroud and it does not require pre-smoothing or contract
manipulation.
This was adapted from an open letter to John Dominic Crossan,
Dear John, What Were You Thinking?
Other web pages address some of the
other evidence that argues that the Shroud of Turin Carbon 14 testing
does not make sense:
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