albedo

Why Not!

Alan D. Adler, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Western Connecticut University, in an article, “The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin,” commented on those advancing this theory:

[they] propose a photochemical mechanism with sunlight reflected from a statue via optics to image on sheet of cloth charged with a mixture of egg white and chromium salts. As this is an albedo image, it will fail a VP-8 test and there is no chemical or spectroscopic evidence for their chemical sensitizers. They do not deal with the blood image problem [“exudates from clotted wounds transferred to the cloth by its being in contact with a wounded human male body”]. Leonardo may rest easily in his grave. (40)

Albedo Image

The most interesting tidbit in Adler’s words is this simple phrase: “this is an albedo image, it will fail a VP-8 test. . .” That, more than anything, is why the image was not created in some room sized camera.

albedo>The world albedo is not a word most of us use very often, if ever. It was coined by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1760. Lambert was another genius. He was, like so many geniuses of a previous era, a man of many talents. He was an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician and a philosopher. He suggested that our sun was part of a group of stars which moved together through the Milky Way, something that helped keep the astronomer Herschel busy when he was not making glass plates for cameras or discovering that hyposulphite of soda would fix photographs. Herschal was refining his father’s confirmation of what Lambert hypothesized.

Who Knew More First

Leonardo da Vinci beat Lambert to the punch as did Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo’s early teacher and mentor, explaining and diagramming the principles of modeling, which enabled the three-dimension representation of objects and people on a two-dimensional surface. But Lambert formalized the principles in more formal mathematical terms. It was Lambert who used the Latin word for whiteness, albedo. He assigned values to black and white and defined how all the shades of gray in between were to be specified. Black was 0. White was 1. Gray, halfway between was, well half, or 0.5. For those of us not enamored with decimals we can use a range between 0 and 100%, as photographers do.

Proximity to the Observer

The point about proximity to the observer is essential. The apparent whiteness, the albedo, the highlighted appearance of an object has nothing to do with proximity of the object to the observer—at least it doesn’t in practical terms unless we are cosmologists looking at distant stars and galaxies. The observer may be you or me or an artist trained to notice the highlights. The observer can also be the detector in a camera, which may be a modern digital chip, a piece of celuloid film, a glass plate with photosensitive emulsion or, if you still want to believe it, a piece of linen coated with something like chromium salt or silver nitrate. The VP-8 test to which Adler alluded is a handy way to find out if this is so.  

Blond Hair Issue

Today, a significant segment of the Jewish population has blond hair. Various studies put the percentages between 16 and 25 percent. Instinctively, we tend to think that this is due to intermarriage since the Diaspora.  To a significant measure that is probably true. But DNA don’t support the numbers—at least from what we now know not sufficiently to justify the large percentages.

Current theory is that blond hair evolved fairly recently, perhaps within the last 10,000 years, in northern Europe and that prior to that time most people, if not all people, had black hair.

By the time of Jesus’ birth, there was probably already the circumstances for blond hair to occur in the Palestinian region among Jewish populations. The region had been Hellenized since the conquests of Alexander the Great. Trade already existed with people of northern Europe. Chances are that in Jesus’ day there were blond haired Jews.

But so what? If as we have discussed, the image is not albedo or one made by reflected light, then hair color is unimportant. In the absence of light, and as Russell clearly points out, in the absence of light there is no color. In fact there is no lighter or darker.