New: Shroud of Turin carbon dating proved erroneous ( performed on non-original cloth sample)

Ohio Shroud Conference ^

[dascallie]

PRESS RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud of Turin wrong

COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the C-14 sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to the theory that the threads were spliced together during a repair. LANL’s work confirms the research published in Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual C-14 samples and concluded the sample was not part of the original cloth possibly due to the area having been repaired. This hypothesis was presented by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and Marino proposed that a 16th Century patch of cotton/linen material was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the region ultimately used for dating. The intermixed threads combined to give the dates found by the labs ranging between 1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino contend that this expert repair was necessary to disguise an unauthorized relic taken from the corner of the cloth. A paper presented today at the conference by Benford and Marino, and to be published in the July/August issue of the international journal Chemistry Today, provided additional corroborating evidence for the repair theory.

[grey_whiskers]

Why not describe the process by which diamond's image was produced? Was it magicked into existence? What specifically do you mean by "gleaned"? Is this some process other than digital photography or scanning? Do you have a clue?

Answer your OWN questions. Diamond posted a photo exhibiting the pseudo-3D image on the Shroud, accepted by all and sundry, including skeptics like Schaeferman. You know, admission against interest and all that.

You replied to his post by posting that the image was no mean feat, since you could use a feature of photoshop to do the same thing.

That is not significant unless you can demonstrate that it *is* the same thing, as you implied it was.

Just as atheists always demand of Christians, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim.

Can you demonstrate that the algorithm used by photoshop is the same one as used by Shroud researchers to elicit the pseudo-3D information from the Shroud?

Alternatively, can you demonstrate that the algorithm used by Shroud researchers can elicit pseudo-3D information from a picture without such information implicit in the picture?

Cheers!

[Swordmaker]

The image on the right is from a painting.

Please post the the original painting image. Thanks.

[js1138]

Can you demonstrate that the algorithm used by photoshop is the same one as used by Shroud researchers to elicit the pseudo-3D information from the Shroud? Alternatively, can you demonstrate that the algorithm used by Shroud researchers can elicit pseudo-3D information from a picture without such information implicit in the picture?

Photoshop may not use the identical algorithm, but a commercial product (Bryce) does use the VP8 algorithm.

The VP-8 Image Analyzer is an analog device while the commercially-available Bryce4® Software is digital. Both techniques convert image density (lights and darks) into vertical relief (shadows and highlights).

Your central question is nonsense. The pattern of light and shadow is "implicit 3D information. It is, in fact, the very definition of implicit 3D information, and the pattern of light and shadow is present in most photographs and competitent artistic works.

Please note the false 3D rendering of a common x-ray image. Any image that has gradients can be rendered this way.

[js1138]

http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb33/pinoymoms/IMG_4068.jpg

[Swordmaker]

Thanks

[js1138]

Let’s make one thing clear. The claim is made on some websites that the pattern of light and dark on the image are a “graph” of the distance form the fabric to the body.

This is demonstrably untrue and requires no fancy software. On a positive image, the brightest spots are the tip of the nose and the chin. so far, so good, but the gradient of density does not comport with the three dimensional aspects of the face. The right cheek (left side of image) is almost as bright as the tip of the nose, and the brightness is uniform from left to right, up to the base of the nose. Fabric just doesn’t drape this way. Nor would a contour map of the fabric draping across eyes reveal a transition between the retina and pupil.

The claim that the image is a graph of the distance of the fabric from the body is bogus. Whatever produced the image, it didn’t produce a graph of distance or separation.

I invite you to find a volunteer, drape a sheet over their face and observe the contours.

[js1138]

“On a positive image” should read “On a negative image”

[Diamond]

The "information" needed to construct a false 3D image is contained in the lighting of the original scene, whether the scene is photographed or painted.

The hypotheses that the image on the cloth is a albedo image or a painting is not consistent with what is known about the physical properties of the shroud. The image is not a photograph. It is not a painting.

Photoshop is not exactly the same as the VP-8 software. Makes no difference. Both create a false 3D effect by manipulating pixel to pixel contrast.

VP-8 is not software, as you correctly realize in a subsequent post. It is an analog device, as indicated in the brief description of it that I posted. The VP-8 does NOT manipulate pixel to pixel contrast, because all the 'pixels' are the same color! While the image on the shroud is like pixelization in the sense that an exposed fiber is either colored or not colored, all the colored fibers are uniformly colored. The gray scaling of the image is due to areal density of the 'pixels', i.e., the number of pixels or the relative length of pixels in any given area of the cloth, like halftone pictures in newspapers and comic books. It is NOT due to pigment concentration of any one 'pixel', or pixel difference in value from pixel to pixel.

(from #220) suppose in 1972 this was cutting edge technology, and cutting edge technology gets people all weepy eyed with respect... the implication that "normal" photographic images can't produce this effect is bullshit. Any photograph that has contrast will produce a 3D effect when you process it this way.

The article was written in 1999 by an author who was an expert in imaging technology, who states unequivocally that no image studied, made prior to photography, or made after its invention, up to the present produces the same results as those observed relative to the Shroud of Turin image. He states that that the image itself is unique, unlike any other object or image known to exist. You can say it is b.s. if you want, but the reason that a normal photograph when input to a VP-8 does not result in a accurate dimensional image is because the lights and darks of a normal photograph result solely from the amount of light reflected by the subject onto the film, and the image densities of reflected light do not depend on the distance of the subject from the film.

Barrie M. Schwortz wrote in 1997:

...the image on the Shroud of Turin yields a very accurate dimensional relief of a human form. One must conclude from this that the image density on the cloth is directly proportionate to the distance it was from the body it covered. In essence, the closer the cloth was to the body (tip of nose, cheekbone, etc.), the darker the image, and the further away (eye sockets, neck, etc.), the fainter the image. This spatial data encoded into the image actually eliminates photography and painting as the possible mechanism for its creation and allows us to conclude that the image was formed while the cloth was draped over an actual human body.

Cordially,

[js1138]

First, the technobabble you toss out suggesting there is some magic involved in the original (analog) VP-8 analysis:

This dimensional data was first visualized by the STURP team in 1976 with an instrument known as the VP-8 Image Analyzer, a device used by NASA for mapping image density to vertical relief. It was further supported by the density/relief mapping techniques used by several Italian researchers around the same period of time and verified in recent years by the work of an Italian professional photographer and Shroud imaging expert using refined photographic edge enhancement techniques. Of course, today it can also be done using some of the latest digital imaging software programs. The fact that all of these techniques yield the exact same result clearly confirms the existence of the dimensional data first visually revealed by the VP-8.

source

Not that every discussion of this techique says the same thing I have been saying -- that you are simulating three dimensions based on differences in image density.

[js1138]

A couple of typos in the last post, but I think my meaning is clear.

[js1138]

Next, regarding the claim of image density being correlated with distance between the cloth and the body:

The STURP team concluded that there was a correlation between the density (or darkness) of the image on the Shroud and the distance the cloth was from the body at the time the image was formed. The researchers calculated that the image on the Shroud was formed at a cloth-to-body distance of up to approximately 4 centimeters, but beyond that, imaging did not occur. The closer the cloth was to the body, the darker the resulting image in that area, with the darkest parts of the image being formed where there was direct contact between the two. The image became proportionately lighter as the distance increased until it reached the maximum imaging distance.

An image formed by radiation or vapor from the body, having a variation in density proportional to the separation of the cloth from the body, would not show any bias or preference to angle of incident light when applying the 3D image filter. And yet the shroud image is extremely sensitive to the angle of virtual incident light.

Find someone with a copy of Photoshop or Bryce and check it out. This is a place where you don't have to be dependent on the opinions of experts.

[js1138]

Having found a shroud-friendly source for my claim that modern imaging programs produce the same results as the original VP-8 analysis, I will continue playing with the image when I have some time available.

My claim is that if the image density is correlated with distance from the cloth to body, then simply manipulating the contrast gradient should produce a good 3D image. On the other hand, if there is a bias in the direction of lighting, then an image filter that has a virtual direction of incident lighting will produce a more pronounced 3D effect.

I might note, that so far in my work with the image — occupying not more than 20 minutes total — I have seen a pronounced bias or preferred direction of incident lighting.

[Swordmaker]

I might note, that so far in my work with the image — occupying not more than 20 minutes total — I have seen a pronounced bias or preferred direction of incident lighting.

Which direction?

Your 20 minutes, I believe, are trumped by the years of experience and expert knowledge of many photographic experts who have spent far more time manipulating the images of the Shroud. They do not find directionality of light and in fact find no natural shadow artifacting at all.

The Photoshop embossing effect is created by color reversals (positive/negative) and offsets of the resulting layer to produce a pseudo 3D effect. The pseudo directionality of the light source depends on which direction (angle) the offset is made. Change the direction of offset and you change the pseudo shadowing direction indicating a light source from another direction.

The first picture above has the offset of the negative layer to the right, giving the appearance of being lit from the left with the pseudo shadows on the right. The second has the negative layer offset to the left, giving the appearance of being lit from the right, with the pseudo shadows on the left.

I have done this by hand, creating a negative layer of the positive, superimposing a semi-transparent layer of one over the other and offsetting the upper layer by a small amount. One can easily change the pseudo shadows by merely moving the upper layer around the lower.

Your "pronounced bias" is there. You do see it. However, it is an artifact of the default settings of the Photoshop emboss filter. It is not inherent in the Shroud's image.

[js1138]

Two things:

You cannot get a 3D effect from this image without inposing a pseudo iight source.

Secondly, the direction matters. Except for a couple of priveleged directions, most directions produce a jumble or a lessened effect. The information in the original image has a directional bias.

[Swordmaker]

You cannot get a 3D effect from this image without inposing a pseudo iight source.

Secondly, the direction matters. Except for a couple of priveleged directions, most directions produce a jumble or a lessened effect. The information in the original image has a directional bias.

That is simply false. It's not even a strawman. It's just wrong. Several techniques, including the technique used in the VP-8, have extracted apparent 3D data from the Shroud merely by plotting image intensity in the Z axis. To display the results, one needs merely to set the point of view at an oblique angle to the vertical. No pseudo light source is required. In addition using the embossing overlay technique, no matter where the apparent pseudo light source is placed by positioning the layers, the pseudo 3D affect is present, although some are more pronounced than others. There are no "couple of privileged directions" as you claim.

The information in the original Shroud image does NOT have a directional bias because of any light source. When using the embossing effect, using a top light, does present a "lessened effect" but that has more to do with edges than any assumed light source. There is a bias having to do with the longitudinal nature of the human body simply because there are fewer pseudo shadow creating edges in the vertical aspect than in the horizontal aspect. Using a density plotting technique, it matters not what point of view is selected: the pseudo 3D effect is present. That's because the original data has nothing to do with a light, or light angle, only image density based on distance from the recording media.

The left hand image is pseudo top lit while the second is pseudo lit from the right at a 45º angle.

Although these are not my images, I have moved the image layers around on my own and you get pseudo 3D no matter the angle of the overlay.

[js1138]

The image is most certainly sensitive to the angle of offset. More importantly, any image can produce a 3D effect. And there is no way that a graph of distance from body to cloth could produce a clear image of the pupil of the eye. You are imputing magic to the artifacts of image manipulation.

[grey_whiskers]

That's good.

Your original "refutation" of the 3-D image from the Shroud was merely to post a couple of embossed images as if that was sufficient.

It isn't, for several reasons.

An analogy would be as follows.

You are taken to what you are told is a crime scene, and you see a stick red liquid on the floor. You are informed that in all probability it is blood.

Your response is to pull out a gallon of Sherwin-Williams red paint, pour it on the floor in the next room, and say, "See! Another sticky red-colored liquid. I win!"

The only thing you did is to demonstrate that blood is not the only red liquid.

Which everyone else already knew; but you acted like you thought they *didn't* already know.

The problem with your approach, from what I have seen of it, is that you are taking the common skeptic's approach of treating everything as known to be untrue in the first place, and of all the apparent information to be a patchwork of lies, distortions, and mythology loosely based on anecdotal reports.

So it is up to you to sweep in, bearing the "bright man's burden", and explain to the dupes and simpletons just how simple it would be to account for the mysterious phenomenon causing the ignorant savages to shudder in wonder. Scooby-Doo writ large.

So in those circumstances, coming up with anything even approaching a loosely consistent explanation is enough. In the land of the blind men the one-eyed jack is king.

There does happen to be a reason that this approach is not enjoying its accustomed success in this case.

And that is that you are not in fact dealing with superstition, lies, and half-forgotten legends, but you do in fact have real, solid, falsifiable, physical material right in front of your very nose.

And that means that merely waving your hands with a flourish, and pronouncing from on high that a particular explanation can produce a result which looks similar to lay inspection, is not sufficient: you have to be able to reproduce the specific, measureable characteristics of the Shroud, which has been subjected to rigorous chemical and physical testing using well-understood methods: although for some reason most of the tests in which skeptics get involved always seem to have methodological errors which always cast the authenticity of the Shroud in doubt.

The reason this is significant, and not liable to the childish retort that "Well only the belivers' tests seem to show anything genuine about the Shroud" is that the tests which support the authenticity of the Shroud do not seem to have the constant strain of errors in the execution of the measurement: they are valid tests.

Which brings us back to the embossing of shaded images.

Do you know what the difference is, between the embossing of the map of North America which you first posted, and the embossing of the X-ray data?

It is a subtle yet important distinction, which you glossed right over.

And that's a shame, because in ignoring the distinction you missed a possible clue to the whole affair.

The map of North America is a *drawing*. You can make it seem more realistic and all, by using a mathematical technique, but you forgot one thing, which (review the earlier threads) I had *already* pointed out. In other words, this is not ex post facto special pleading: I was trying to lead you to this point but you seem to have missed it.

The scale of the mountains.

You don't notice it, since people are so used to relief maps, or globes with raised bumps for mountain ranges: and in order to people to notice with our limited sensitivity of eyes and fingers, the scale is exaggerated.

The mountains would have been approximately 1-2.5 pixels high in order to represent the height of real mountains.

No doubt you can tune the sensitivity parameters of the software so that it is more sensitive to gradients, thus making the mountains stand out more. And to do this on a computer might not be so bad, since with digital controls, turning up the "gain" won't throw all sort of spurious signals into your modified picture.

Which brings us to the X-ray image. The reason that works so well is that the shadow and light on the original image are in fact a manifestation of a physical process -- the absorption and scattering of X-ray energy on human bone and tissue. And this means the shading is a function of the actual depth and density of the tissue, since those are the physical features of the body which determine X-ray penetration.

So the pseudo-3D image from the X-ray is not an artefact of the picture, nor yet subject to the whim of the person tuning the embossing program: at its core there is real physical information and real physical processes which undery the information in the X-ray photo, which can be partially recaptured by the embossing technique.

Now for the Shroud.

The question is twofold.

The actual lights and shadows produced (merely as an easy to explain example) by shining a light on a human body lying on a photographic plate on a dark room might be subject to distortions, due to the relative position of the body and light source, the laws of light scattering through slits, folds in the limbs, and the like.

So you could produce--after a fashion--real recoverable information from a flat image of a human body. But depending on the exact method in which the flat image was made and recorded, the image might look more or less distorted. Presumably, good imaging software might be necessary to recover that information.

2) When you apply the embossing technique on the image on the Shroud, what is the signal-to-noise ratio? Think back to the example of the North America Map vs. the Pelvic X-Ray scan. The map is a computer generated image, hence homogeneous, so you don't have to amplify the gain to show the mountains. But if you have an *analog* picture, particularly one created by paint, the resolution capability of the scanning software is probably going to be far higher that that of the human eye and hand; so you should see, in an attempt to introduce 3-dimensional features, a great deal more variability in the recovered image; AND one might expect to see that certain features, if the image is "naively" embossed, to show as out of scale due to variations in pigment and aging, so that some areas have a much larger gradient (therefore much more apparent depth) than others. This would contrast with the regularity and symmetry of true human features.

But even this would not be all of the story.

For four reasons that I can think of off of the top of my head, some related to imaging and others related to known physical characteristics of the Shroud itself.

First, the software itself? How sophisticated is the embossing software? Can it be tweaked to produce purely local corrections in the shading, to compensate for the paint being slathered on more thickly in one part of the cloth than another?

Second, if so, can we find out what and which tweaks have been applied to the image, in order to provide a sort of inverse transformation, to find out how regular the shading in the original image is? That is, is it more like an X-ray or more like the North American map with mountains?

If it turns out to be *very* regular, this would tend to argue for the genuineness of the image, simply because of the difficulty in applying the paint in such a method that it would be smooth not just to the naked eye, but to the much more sensitive equipment used to scan and record the image. (By analogy, I know someone whose car was in a minor fender-bender and who went to the shop to have the fender straightened. It looked good to the naked eye, and in due course he tried to trade the car in. Alas! The dealer used optical equipment to measure the smoothness of the fender and discovered the car had been in a wreck, and lowered the trade-in value offered. Even though to any person looking at it, it seemed as good as new.)

Third, the provenance of the Shroud is checkered: it has been moved from place to place, caught in a fire, and boiled in oil. Would these things increase or decrease the inhomogeneity in any painted image?

Fourth, it might be worthwhile to consider art history and the study and practice of painting at the time in which a forger would have worked. If the Shroud was painted by hand, how does the knowledge of anatomical detail compare to the knowledge extant at the time among painters. Think of issues such as the placement of the nail holes to hold the arms, the curling of the thumbs inward as a result of nerve damage, mottling of the face, the seeming elongation of the fingers which led some to speculate that the man in the image suffered from Marfan's syndrome. Much of the painting from "medieval" times was flat and lacked true perspective: the first person I recall off the top of my head to master photorealism was van Eyck. So there are two objections here to painting, in addition to the vast array of chemical and physical tests already demonstrating the presence of blood and lack of paint.

If anyone had thought of it, they should have performed a sensitivity analysis consisting of painting an image with various pigments on linen and seeing the minimum concentration (particles at such and such mean diamter with such and such distribution in diameter, at what concentration per square centimeter, to produce an image). The presence of the image to be quantified by putting the linen in a dark room and shining light of such and such intensity and wavelength, to show the image on exposed film with a standard distance, shutter speed, and duration. This could then be compared to the Shroud as it exists now, using nondestructive (spectrophotometric) methods for the presence and concentration of paint -- I don't happen to be aware of any non-destructive methods to determine the distribution of particle sizes, if they exist in quantities near threshold detection values).

However, all the talk of the paint is in fact pointless, since it has already been demonstrated that the physical composition of the image on the actual Shroud is due to a discoloration of a very thin surface film on the individual fibers of the fabric. These are the byproducts of the Maillard reactions I mentioned earlier in the thread.

Click here for some details.

The point being, that if this coloration is due to the proximity of the Shroud with a dead body, there is the possibility that the degree of coloration might by proportional to the distance of the Shroud from that body at any given point. *IF* that is in fact the case, then the recoverable pseudo-3D imaging recoverable from the Shroud (in the absence of other factors distorting the color gradients, as mentioned earlier) would in fact represent useful, recoverable physical information about the body.

So if the 3-D embossing software gave the pseudo-3D image pretty much "as is" without a lot of local tweaking of the algorithmic parameters or sensitivity, *AND* the scale factors are correct (e.g. proportions of the beard to the lips and the length of the nose and size of the eye sockets and such) are all pretty much within a normal range...that would be significant additional evidence that the image on the Shroud was actually produced by physical proximity to a dead body, and not just painting.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

You forgot about outgassing of putrescine and cadaverine, and any laws of diffusion (both of the gas to the sheet and of any constituent reactants in the layer of the sheet as original starches react).

Oh, and by the way. If you *DO* insist that the coloration within the image is in no way indicative of the proximity of the body to the sheet, don't even *THINK* of trying to reverse course later on and claim that pretty good 3-D images can be made by dusting something on a sheet and wrapping it around the face and body. You have explicitly disclaimed that approach.

Think it over and decide which one you wish to lay claim to.

It's your claim, and I don't care either way which one you abide by, but you must remain consistent absent specific evidence which forces you to revise your estimation.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

This is a place where you don't have to be dependent on the opinions of experts.

I'm surprised at you.

Peer-reviewed scientific journals, and reproducible physical and chemical tests whose mechanisms are well-known, are not merely relying on the "opinions" of "experts".

Cheers!

[js1138]

So the pseudo-3D image from the X-ray is not an artefact of the picture, nor yet subject to the whim of the person tuning the embossing program:

The article from which the x-ray images were taken went to some length to say the 3D interpretation was inaccurate, and they had a holographic 3D x-ray process that produced non-arbitrary 3D rendering.