Ball, Philip

Rogers in Turin

In 1978, Rogers had been selected as one of many scientists asked to go to Turin and study the shroud up and close. From his work on the shroud, Rogers’ only substantive conclusion was that the shroud images were not painted. He did not then offer an opinion on its authenticity. Following the carbon dating, he accepted the conclusion that the shroud was medieval. He had complete respect for the technology and the quality of work done by the carbon dating labs. In 2005, the same year that the student in Alaska contacted me, Philip Ball, a former editor of Nature, that most prestigious international journal of science, wrote in Nature Online that Rogers “has a history of respectable work on the shroud dating back to 1978, when he became director of chemical research for the international Shroud of Turin Research Project.”

Kim Johnson of NMSR wrote in an obituary for Rogers on the organization’s web site:

He was a Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and tried to be an excellent, open minded scientist in all things. In particular, he had no pony in the "Shroud of Turin" horserace, but was terribly interested in making sure that neither proponents nor skeptics let their scientific judgment be clouded by their preconceptions. He just wanted to date and analyze the thing. He died on March 8th from cancer. He was a good man, and tried his best to do honest science.

The Shroud of Many Myths

ball_quote">Shortly after Rogers published his finding, in Thermochimica Acta, Philip Ball wrote an opinion piece for Nature, the same journal that had published the carbon dating results in 1989. Ball wrote:

The scientific study of the Turin Shroud is like a microcosm of the scientific search for God. It does more to inflame any debate than settle it . . . . And yet, the shroud is a remarkable artifact, one of the few religious relics to have a justifiably mythical status. It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made. (4)

Ball’s assertion that it is not known how the image was made echoes what so many repeatedly say over and over. It isn’t just those who try to prove the shroud is fake by creating look-a-like images. Scientists who think the shroud might be real—or not—don’t know how the images were made. They are not even close. There is no best explanation; not yet. There is no theory. Though there are some guesses, some hypotheses, none seem to qualify in terms of chemistry and physical characteristics.  The images remain inexplicable, baffling, downright weird. Forget about how some medieval forger might have made the images. Even with the best of modern technology no one has been able to replicate them. That doesn’t mean they won’t. It may just be a matter of time and new ideas. It is a challenge. The mysterious qualities found in the images are among the most intriguing aspects of the shroud.

Mystical Status?

Ball’s suggestion about the shroud’s mythical status is interesting. Mythical implies fictitious but it doesn’t necessarily mean so. As C. S. Lewis, who called Christianity “The True Myth,” reminds us, “Myth does not equal the non-historical; myth equals the non-describable.” Nonetheless, in current usage, we tend to think of mythical as meaning fictional. Keep in mind that Ball is referring to the shroud’s status not the shroud itself. Pick up any two books about the shroud and you will likely find two completely different explanations for it. Television documentaries are no different. Early in 2009, one network, the Discovery Channel, aired two different specials about the shroud in the same week. They completely contradicted each other.

The Germ of the Photograph Idea

Because the picture was a negative, some speculated that the Shroud of Turin might be a medieval proto-photograph. At first glance this seemed reasonable. But then common sense prevailed. How likely was it that photography was invented in the Middle Ages, used once to make a single fourteen-foot long fraud, never to be exploited, never to have been mentioned or used again until it was reinvented in an age of science.  Such speculation seemed moot. I couldn’t imagine such speculation was realistic.

So entrenched was my skepticism, it would take me a year to become open minded and longer still to change my mind. I learned that McCrone’s identification of paint was a subjective and never verified. In fact, attempts to verify his observations showed that what he thought he saw could not be what he thought it was. This was especially true of tests conducted by one of McCrone’s own staff. Heproved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that McCrone was wrong. Moreover, I would learn that it was impossible that the images were photographs. I came to recognize what Ball would later write for Nature: “It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made.”

Our minds don't easily see details in negatives. But with photographic negatives of the shroud, which were in fact positive, new extraordinary details had been noticed for the first time. Then with newer pictures taken in 1931 and then, literally, with thousands of photographs taken 1978, it became obvious to some that then anatomical details along with contusions and lacerations were so precisely detailed that only a modern pathologist could properly understand them. While, I had taken notice of this, I had not comprehended how significant this was until I came across a relevant comment by the brilliant (though very controversial) historian and biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan on a major website called Beliefnet.

The Element of 3D Perception

Stereopsis is not by any means the only way that our brains comprehend three-dimensional space.  Some people suffering from a misalignment of their eyes in childhood never develop stereopsis even if the problem is later corrected. And people who are blind in one eye are incapable of stereopsis. Yet such people still can perceive depth quite well. The reason is that the brain is nonetheless able to construct a sense of depth using other visual information. They are:

·         The placement of objects in front of one another: For instance, if I am looking at a person and he is holding a book in front of his chest, my brain knows that the book is closer to me than his body even if I don’t consciously realize this.

·         Geometric perspective: We all know the relative size of a tennis ball even if we don’t know the exact measurement. So if I see several tennis balls, some that are visually larger and some smaller, my brain recognizes that some are closer than others. A more common example of geometric perspective is the sense that two parallel lines going off into the distance tend to converge until they reach a point—the vanishing point.

·         Play of light. The highlights and shading on Russell’s table or on a face is the most important aspect of this. But so too are shadows cast from one object onto another object or surface. Look at the picture of Kim Dreisbach in the front of this book. Notice the white or nearly white, highlighted parts of his face. Notice the left side of his nose (your right). It is nearly black. This is shading. Now notice the very dark area just below his nose. This is a cast shadow from his nose onto the face itself.

Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria

Carbon 14, or radiocarbon as it is frequently called, is the big exception. The carbon 14 we find on earth is not from distant stars. It is made right here on earth; well not exactly on the earth but in the upper atmosphere above 30,000 feet, up where jetliners fly.

In living things—Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria—there is one carbon 14 atom for every trillion or so other carbon atoms. To put that in perspective, if every carbon atom was the size of a ping pong ball and we lined up one trillion of them end-to-end, it would form a line long enough to reach from the earth to the moon. Only one of those ping-pong-ball-sized atoms would likely be carbon 14 isotope. If we could walk along that line, twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, examining those atoms at the rate of one per second, it would take us nearly 32,000 years. In other words one in a trillion is a very small number. So how do those carbon 14 atoms get made? How do they get to be in living matter? And why is that important to a study of the shroud?

What Rogers Discovered

But Ball, in his commentary, explained two distinctly different scientific empirical findings that challenged the accuracy of radiocarbon dating results.  These findings, by chemist Raymond Rogers, clearly demonstrated that the area of the cloth from which the samples were taken was chemically unlike the rest of the cloth in several ways. Thus he concluded that the samples were not representative of the cloth. Moreover, one of those chemical differences, the amount of vanillin, provided a new clue about the cloth’s age. Samples from the main part of the cloth, unlike the carbon 14 sample area, did not contain any vanillin. If the shroud was only as old as the radiocarbon date, it would have plentiful vanillin.

It should also be noted, as Ball makes clear, that Rogers had not set out to prove that radiocarbon dating was wrong. He had complete respect for the technology and the quality of work done by the labs. He had already rejected the two media-popularized theories as to why the tests might be invalid (the scorching fire and the biological film).  Rogers had a disdain for pseudo-science, for those who ignored scientific methods and for those who questioned unquestionable scientific observations. Rogers called those who persisted in defending and promoting unscientific theories, the “lunatic fringe” of shroud research.

It is perhaps human nature at its best or its worst that when something in science or history contradicts what we already believe we challenge it. There must be something wrong with the science. That was what happened to Galileo, was it not.

Rogers was Skeptical

Rogers was skeptical.  According to Ball, “Rogers thought that he would be able to ‘disprove [the] theory in five minutes.’” (brackets are Ball’s). Inside the Vatican, an independent journal on Vatican affairs, reported:

Rogers, who usually viewed attempts to invalidate the 1988 study as ‘ludicrous’ . . . set out to show their [Benford and Marino] claim was wrong, but in the process, he discovered they were correct.

Lignin and Vanillin

Lignin is significant not only because of the observed disparities but because it is the raw source for vanillin. Vanillin is produced from lignin by thermal decomposition. Rogers knew that if the shroud had been correctly carbon dated, the cloth should produce measurable amounts of the aromatic substance. Found in medieval linen, but not in much older cloth, vanillin diminishes and disappears with time. Rogers discovered that there was no detectable vanillin in the flax fibers of the main part of the shroud just as there is no vanillin in the linen wrapping from the Dead Sea Scrolls. There was, however, vanillin in the corner from which the carbon 14 samples were taken. He concluded that the main part of the shroud and the carbon 14 sample had a different age.

If the cloth had been manufactured in 1260, the earliest date suggested by carbon dating, it should have retained about 37% of its vanillin. Paraphrasing Rogers, Ball writes, “Let’s call it somewhere around the middle of that range, which puts the age at about 2,000 years. Which can mean only one thing… (ellipsis are Ball’s).

While this is not an accurate method for determining the age of linen because it depends on the average storage temperature over many centuries, it is useful as a sniff test for checking carbon 14 dating. Not only does this information verify that the carbon 14 sample is chemically different from the rest of shroud, it demonstrates that the carbon 14 sample probably contained much newer material than the rest of the shroud.

Vanillin Analysis Significant

The chemical differences and the vanillin analysis were significant. Ball, however, was not convinced that invisible reweaving was the underlying explanation. “Well, maybe,” he wrote, then added:

There is no explanation, however, of how the ‘repaired’ threads used in the radiocarbon dating were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution. This is by no means the end of the story.”

Indeed, as Ball recognized, “This is by no means the end of the story.”

Lloyd A. Currie

As the Associated Press, the BBC and The New York Times reported on Rogers’ paper, some people wondered, just as Ball had, if it was possible that threads “were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution.”  Others wondered if there was perhaps more to the story. Was this the whole story? How could such a mistake in radiocarbon dating happen? Was there something to learn from this?

About a year before Rogers’ paper was published, in early 2004, the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST, U.S. Government Printing Office) published an important paper by Lloyd A. Currie. Currie, a highly regarded specialist in the field of radiocarbon dating and an NIST Fellow Emeritus, wrote a seminal retrospective on carbon 14 dating. Because the Shroud of Turin was such a famous test, Currie devoted much of his paper to it.

Like Rogers, Currie dismissed any argument that radiocarbon labs had done anything wrong in dating the Shroud of Turin. Currie also rejected, as Rogers also had done, the theories of scorching effects or contamination caused by a bioplastic polymer. Significantly, Currie acknowledged that disguised mending was a viable explanation. He cited the work of Rogers and Arnoldi. He found it credible.

Facts vs Explanations

It is important to distinguish between observed facts and likely explanations. The sample used for the radiocarbon dating is chemically unlike the shroud. That is observed fact. It invalidates the sample and thus the conclusion of the tests. Completely! The spliced thread and the dyestuff suggest disguised mending. Disguised mending caused consternation among some. Ball wondered why it was not seen.  He is not alone.

Archeologist William Meacham was skeptical when Benford and Marino first proposed mending; long before Rogers examined the material. He had previously discussed this possibility with the archeological scientist Stuart Fleming who said that it was within the realm of possibility. But Meacham was not yet convinced. He challenged Benford and Marino, “to find at least one textile historian who could answer these questions [about it escaping notice] in support of their thesis.”

They did so. According to Benford and Marino, Dr. Thomas Campbell, Associate Curator, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, described the sixteenth century French weavers as ‘magicians.’ It was very difficult to identify their repairs. (2002)

The Real Flat Earth Society

At the time of the 1988 carbon 14 tests, when an Oxford researcher commented that anyone who now believed that the shroud was real must be a member of the Flat Earth Society, there really was a Flat Earth Society.

The Flat Earth Society was, and still is, a worldwide organization with a few members, headquartered in Lancaster, California. The worldview of its members is rooted in the tenets of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in England in the nineteenth century. Charles K. Johnson, its president in 1988, had, as he saw it, “reduce[d] truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable . . .” His history was right out of the King James Bible and from a collection of highly imaginative conspiracy theories, mostly in his head. “It’s the Church of England that’s taught that the world is a ball,” proclaimed Johnson. “George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions.” What is true, at least, is that in the late nineteenth century, a Yorkshire Church of England vicar, the Rev. M. R. Bresher, was so horrified by the Zetetic movement that he went about England strenuously arguing that the world was certainly round like a ball.

Who Thought the Earth Was Flat

While it may be true that a segment of the population believed the world was flat, it was not because of Christian thought and dogma but because of simple folklore, much of it pagan. Few who thought the world was flat ever read Topographia Christiana, the absurd, biblically-based description of the world by Cosmos, a sixth-century monk. Those educated enough to read his works, did not take him seriously. Arguably, much of the population just didn’t think about the shape of the world at all. It wasn’t important to most people who lived in small communities and never ventured more than a few miles from home. Those who did think about the shape of the earth were educated and actually understood that the world was round.

Clement (c.150-215), Origen (c.185-254), Ambrose and feet-opposite-ours Augustine all thought that the world was round. Thomas Aquinas when he wrote Summa Theologica spoke of a globe at the center of a universe encircled by transparent spheres holding the heavenly bodies. Aquinas was much into angels—his worldview—and so he thought that angels moved the heavenly bodies about the earth. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), once a custodian of the Sudarium and one of the most gifted, influential and best read writers of medieval Europe, expounded on the ancient view of a round world. His compendiums of classical learning were read throughout medieval Europe for many centuries. Dante Alighieri (c.1265-1321) wrote of “our hemisphere” in the Divine Comedy.  Dante's earth was a sphere at the center of the universe with a northern of mostly land and a southern hemisphere mostly water. The Venerable Bede described the earth as round “like a playground ball.” Roger Bacon, we know, also knew that the world was round. We can be confident that the world was well understood to be round in the medieval court of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. It was a well-known fact throughout all of Christendom.

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