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I put little if any stock in the Turin cloth being the actual shroud of Jesus.
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However, as a "gedanken" (thought) experiment, consider this:
1) Bodies in Jesus' time were washed and coated ("annointed") with perfumed oils.
2) A cloth is placed in proximity to the body, covering it.
3) The body, itself, totally disappears in a flash of energy.
4) The oils (or their residue) vaporize and travel at speed toward the cloth surface.
5) Following the inverse square law, cloth closest to the body gets the densest (darkest) coating of the condensing material; areas farther away (opposite eye sockets, for example) get proportionally lighter coatings.
Voila! -- a negative image -- only on the surface of the cloth fibers...
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That's an analogue of "Dye Sublimation Printing"...
However, how do you account for the vertical collimation of the image? There is literally zero aberration from the vertical that would occur with any gaseous diffusion as such a scenario would require. Gas does not operate in such a manner.
In addition, it is recorded in the Bible they did not have time to wash and anoint Jesus' body before the Sabbath began, and that was what the women were on their way to do on Sunday morning when they discovered the stone rolled away.
Such a diffusion as you propose would diffuse into the fibers, not just onto the surface as well. . . as would any gaseous material.
The other problem also is that such a diffusion would leave residues that would be traceable with a micro-X-ray spectrograph. . . and there simply is none. We are talking about a device that could find the traces of the vinyl baggies the thread samples were carried to the test lab in, and was so sophisticated it could tell from those traces what company made those baggies by the composition of those chemical traces!
Is this your view of the matter, dear brother in Christ? If it is, then I especially thank you for the "gedanken" you proposed. It clearly demonstrates your continuing open-mindedness respecting the facticity of the Shroud, and what that entails.
It seems your gedanken has already been anticipated, in the article "Singularity Found in the Shroud of Turin". Its author argues that there are "unprecedented implications of [the Shroud's] authenticity for quantum mechanics." A key excerpt:
The experts are saying that what happened in that tomb represents an 'event horizon' — the singularity (intelligence explosion) that Einstein and others have endlessly searched for. It turns science upside down. In the simplest of terms, an event horizon is a boundary beyond which events are unobservable.Tantalizing suggestions, but probably unwelcome ones to people whose science is stuck on Newton....
Unlike anything ever seen before, the image of the body lies on the top layer of the linen threads; it is not absorbed into the fibers. This means that the universe does not work in the way we have always thought. A scientific level of authenticity of the Shroud now exists beyond question. But it raises many new questions. Does the image itself contain information? Why has this just now been discovered — or withheld from mankind — for 2,000 years? Do answers lie, not in the fabric, but within the image itself? ...
A group of physicists recently made a startling discovery. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 4 astronaut, said: "Scientists have generally concentrated on the particle aspect, not the information aspect of science. It's only been with the hologram that we've moved information up to a par of importance with energy itself, so that we know the universe exists because of its physicality, but understood because of its information. This is a powerful new concept. All physical bodies have such a holographic emission that is available non-locally at all times, meaning throughout the universe."
He is saying that the event horizon from the Shroud image sent information instantaneously throughout the universe! Does this mean that the Resurrection was a universal event? I think so! On a par with creation.
Some scientists believe the characteristics of the Shroud image, such as 3-dimensional information from a 2-dimensional photo; the negative reversal aspect of the image; and the fact that the image is virtually free of distortion as it appears on the cloth, are basically holographic. Mitchell: "The quantum hologram is merely a method of describing the total emissions from an object, very much like looking at your fingertip. One of the little swirls doesn't tell you very much, but if you look at the swirls on all ten, all at once, that's your 'fingerprint.' It uniquely defines you, identifies you. It's the same with a quantum hologram. The emissions from a physical object, when studied as a whole, uniquely identifies events and history of that object."
Could it be that events in the history of the Shroud are still there for us to discover, decipher and understand? If the essence of physical law is informational, perhaps the image has given us not only a record of the Resurrection, but a description of Creation as well? Could it be, that instead of science proving the Shroud as authentic, that the image is proving the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of science? In the quest for scientific authenticity, if the miraculous meaning of the Shroud were rediscovered, what would it mean to the world? Christ, at the time of his Resurrection in the 1st Century, and at the same time squarely at the center of a 21st Century scientific paradigm that suggests a new understanding of our places in the universe and how it all began?
I very much appreciate the idea stated by Edgar Mitchell, that "Scientists have generally concentrated on the particle aspect, not the information aspect of science. It's only been with the hologram that we've moved information up to a par of importance with energy itself, so that we know the universe exists because of its physicality, but understood because of its information."
It seems that participants in this discussion so far have fallen into two basic camps, based on differing concepts as to how the Shroud image should properly be analyzed: (1) as a digital (dot matrix) or (2) as an analog (continuous-tone) image. But if this image is a hologram, neither of these approaches apply at all.
Because an "event horizon" of a "singularity" may be involved, the crossing of which, by definition, means subsequent events are unobservable in principle.
Boil it all down, Newtonian science has two fundamental principles. The first is that all events in the physical universe are ultimately reducible to the interacting behavior of massive bodies (of whatever scale) in local proximity. [Both Relativity theory and quantum mechanics seem to have overruled that notion by now.] The second is that the only things worth knowing about the universe are phenomena that are directly observable by human sense perception, as technologically aided if need be. [Again, both Relativity theory and quantum mechanics seem to have put the kerbosh on that expectation.]
The point is, if one is dealing with a hologram, neither of these expectations holds up. A hologram specifies information, not the nuts and bolts of physical reality — which depend for their own order on the proper execution of information in the first place.
But this information is not accessible by the operations of the scientific method. If we are dealing with a singularity, with its inescapable event horizon, the scientific method as we know it can shed no light on the ensuing details at all.
As I see it, science is no threat to the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud simply is what it says it is. But the Shroud of Turin may well be a threat to what passes for "settled science" —an oxymoron if I ever heard one — nowadays.
Thank you ever so much, dear TXnMA, for the ping — and for sharing your thoughts on this subject!