Reach Paul Conant's pages
Reach yet more Conant pages
Useful synopsis of technical evidence ( pro-authenticity)
Nicholas Allen's 'primitive photography' conjecture
Microbial evidence (pro-authenticity)
Walter McCrone's 'blood stain' analysis (anti-authenticity)
The resurrection of Schrodinger's cat: oddities of perception
On spacetime curvature
The Shroud of Turin is reputed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The seemingly photographic image couldn't possibly have simply been painted onto the cloth, say supporters of authenticity, some of whom believe that the image was, by a process unknown, burned onto the cloth at the moment of resurrection. The fellow on the cloth, however, appears to be at rest, presumably dead, though perhaps he was on the very brink of resurrection.
One shroud student, who does not favor authenticity, goes so far as to suggest that the shroud was manufactured by some primitive form of photography in the mid-14th Century. This is not an unreasonable conjecture if one is impressed by the strong evidence favoring a physically induced (photographic-like) image and yet is faced with the 1988 mass spectrometer carbon 14 analysis which put the age of the cloth sample at circa 1550.
Electron microscopy of alleged blood stains on the cloth show plainly that the 'blood' isn't blood at all but is an artist's paint pigment, according to microscopist Walter McCrone, who has also debunked the Vineland Map.
McCrone does not offer a plausible idea of how an artist could have been so skilled as to convey a photographic image, a skill that was far beyond the means of his contemporaries and, without electronic assistance, is beyond the means of 20th/21st Century artists. Also, his web site does not (at least directly) tell us the provenance of his samples; without that, we cannot be sure of their authenticity.
At this point I would like to offer some seemingly 'out there' conjectures on the carbon 14 issue:
1) The KGB or some other militantly atheist force intercepted the cloth samples en route to the labs and switched them. Remember, it was 1988, when the Soviet Union was coming unhinged.
The Soviets were well aware of the role that Christian belief played in the hearts of the Poles as they were rattling the chains of communism and threatening the continued existence of the Warsaw pact. Any publicity that threw cold water on anything smacking of Christian miracles would have been very welcome to the party chiefs.
2) The resurrection -- if that's what imposed a photographic image onto the cloth -- altered the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the cloth.
We are aware that high heat, such as from a nuclear explosion, can sear an image onto surfaces such as brick walls. So, we may suppose that the shroud image was instilled with a blast of heat, perhaps originating, by an unknown process, from the body.
Now carbon 14 has two more nucleons than carbon 12. The carbon 14 atom is unstable, meaning that every now and then the extra nucleons come loose, leaving a carbon 12 atom.
The precise moment and conditions for such an event are, by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, fundamentally unknowable. But quantum statistics can be used to say what ratio of carbon 14 atoms to carbon 12 atoms should exist. Carbon 14's half-life of about 5,000 years says that for a particular amount of carbon 14, half of it will have decayed into carbon 12 after about 5,000 years.
However, problems with the dating procedure are illustrated by the fact that carbon 12/carbon 14 ratios are out of kilter in the era of nuclear weapon explosions. These explosions have added carbon 14 into the atmosphere and hence into organic materials, such as cotton.
Similarly, space-based radiation storms -- perhaps very high energy gamma rays -- can cause high-altitude air molecules to be sufficiently agitated to yield a large number of collisions of enough force to fuse loose nucleons into a carbon 12 atom. That is, carbon 14 can be formed from carbon 12 in the presence of enough energy and ionized hydrogen. Ionized hydrogen would also tend to form through sufficient agitation of the air molecules.
In other words, under certain conditions the carbon 14/carbon 12 ratio can be altered, giving perhaps a misleading impression of a sample's age.
The carbon 14 test data might alternatively be read as an indication of the heat on hand at the time, which could have caused a percentage of cloth molecules to be transformed from carbon 12 to carbon 14.
A problem with this scenario is that the carbon 14 dating is very close to the date of the first recorded public mention of the shroud in the mid-14th Century. In other words, isn't it odd that the carbon 14/carbon 12 ratio just happens to coincide with that date? Why not the 12th century, or the 19th?
3) We also cannot exclude the possibility that time itself was bent under the force of the 'resurrection event,' if that's what it was. Although this may seem like a childish extension of Einstein's general relativity theory, there is surely a lot more to time than meets the eye.
One of the most profound discoveries about time, both in relativity theory and in quantum theory, is that it has a necessary subjectivism. In fact, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics makes one wonder how hard and fast history really is.
If the shroud event was unusual enough, we might conjecture that the shroud's timeline (technically called a 'worldline') deviated from the timelines of other artifacts of the 1st century.
However, the weakness of this scenario is that, supposedly, pollen and bacterial residues are consistent with 1st Century Palestine.
Considering that options 2) and 3) are flawed and also considering that the imprint has photographic precision and is known to date to at least the mid-14th Century, we might consider the possibility that the imprint was devised by a very clever 14th Century technician.
But the man's wounds are those consistent with scourging and crucifixion. In fact, they are reportedly so accurate that it appears that the image was made of a crucified man. So the technician apparently was also involved in a homicide.
But again, there is no serious evidence from the 14th Century that such a 'primitive' imaging technology ever occurred elsewhere in Europe or the Mediterranean.
These leaves us with option 1) as the most likely scenario.
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