Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Nowheresville

Is this a flight of imagination by a few mad scientists? Physicist Thaddeus Trenn, of the University of Toronto, explains it this way:

[When] you do the calculation back and you find there is only one way—and that is for the units of matter that we ordinarily call nucleons of matter—decouple. And the only way to get that is to overcome the strong force. Incredible, as it seems, we can back out into this Nowheresville—it's an impossible situation. But, that's what you're left with.

Do we simply dismiss this as too weird? Perhaps! If we are ardent skeptics we cannot help but do so.

When Trenn says, "that's what you're left with," he is expressing a principle that is near sacred in the philosophy of science, a principle shared by cosmologists and theoretical physicists: A strange hypothesis can be proposed on the basis of observation alone.

Aristotle concluded that the earth was round by observing the shape of the earth's shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse. That was strange in his time. Edwin Hubble recognized that the red shift in light from distant galaxies implied an expanding universe, one that started with a big bang. That too was strange even only a few years ago. It contravened the widely accepted view of a static universe. And now we must consider negative gravity, black holes, dark matter, imaginary numbers and time running backwards.