Descartes
Scientists Mean Something Else
This is not what the scientists are referring to when the say the images are 3D encoded. They are speaking, instead, of a method for plotting three dimensional shapes in space. There are many ways of doing this, but we are only going to look at one, the one that applies to the shroud.
Imagine yourself sitting in Bertrand Russell’s chair at his table. Imagine looking at one of those pieces of paper on his table. Imagine that it is the same size as a sheet of ordinary copier or printer paper, once upon a time called typewriter paper. It has two dimensions, eight and a half inches across from left to right and eleven inches from bottom to top. In your mind or for real if you want to find a point two inches from the left and three inches from the bottom. Put a simple pencil dot. You have just plotted a point in two-dimensional (2D) space. Now draw a curvy line on the paper, anywhere on the paper will do. That curvy line can be thought of as a series of many dots, even if they all run together. Each of those dots represents two numbers, the distance from the left edge, which we will call X, and the distance from the bottom edge, which we will call Y. If we carefully measure along the line and write the two distance numbers (X and Y) for every possible dot, we can go over to another piece of paper and create an exact copy of our curvy line by measuring and putting dots. You have, by thought alone, invented a notation system for representing points, lines and shapes in two dimensional space. Unfortunately you are not first to invent it.
René Descartes did it first. René Descartes’ nome de plume was Renatus Cartesius. In an era, the first half of the 17th century, when the scholastic world was frantically translating Latin to the vernacular, Descartes was busy writing in Latin, creating more work for translators. Hence he used that Latin form of his name. Hence the XY coordinate system is called the Cartesian Coordinate System.
I Think Therefore I Am
Descartes is, as everyone knows, most famous for saying, “Cogito ergo sum.” We know it as “I think, therefore I am.” And ever since he said it, philosophers have been squabbling about what he meant and whether or not he was right. Bertrand Russell, in "Problems of Philosophy" thought that Descartes went too far in doubting, for instance, that Russell’s table might in reality exist given the appearance of it was sufficient.