My aboutface on the Shroud

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This article appeared a number of years (ca. 2005) before I reposted it in 2013 and again in 2020.

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Sometimes I am wrong

I haven't read The Da Vinci Code but...
. . . I have scanned a book by the painter David Hockney, whose internet-driven survey of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art makes a strong case for a trade secret: use of a camera obscura technique for creating precision realism in paintings.

Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost legacy of the old masters, 2001, uses numerous paintings to show that European art guilds possessed this technical ability, which was a closely guarded and prized secret. Eventually the technique, along with the related magic lantern projector, evolved into photography. It's possible the technique also included the use of lenses and mirrors, a topic familiar to Leonardo da Vinci.

Apparently the first European mention of a camera obscura is in Codex Atlanticus.

I didn't know about this when first mulling over the Shroud of Turin controversy and so was quite perplexed as to how such an image could have been formed in the 14th century, when the shroud's existence was first reported. I was mistrustful of the carbon dating, realizing that the Kremlin had a strong motive for deploying its agents to discredit the purported relic.

See my old page

Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nuzone/shroud.html
Also,
https://needles515.blogspot.com/2020/09/science-superstition-and-shroud-of-turin.html

But Hockney's book helps to bolster a theory by fellow Brits Lynn Picknell and Clive Prince that the shroud was faked by none other than Leonardo, a scientist, "magician" and intriguer. Their book The Turin Shroud was a major source of inspiration for The Da Vinci Code, it has been reported.

The two are not professional scientists but, in the time-honored tradition of English amateurs, did an interesting sleuthing job.

As they point out, the frontal head image is way out of proportion with the image of the scourged and crucified body. They suggest the face is quite reminiscent of a self-portrait by Leonardo. Yet, two Catholic scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab who used a computer method in the 1980s to analyze the image had supposedly demonstrated that it was "three-dimensional." But a much more recent analysis, commissioned by Picknell and Prince, found that the "three-dimensionalism" did not hold up. From what I can tell, the Jet Propulsion pair proved that the image was not made by conventional brushwork but that further analysis indicates some type of projection.

Picknell and Prince suggest that Leonardo used projected images of a face and of a body -- perhaps a cadaver that had been inflicted with various crucifixion wounds -- to create a death mask type of impression. But the image collation was imperfect, leaving the head size wrong and the body that of, by Mideast standards, a giant. This is interesting, in that Hockney discovered that the camera obscura art often failed at proportion and depth of field between spliced images, just as when a collage piece is pasted onto a background.

Still the shroud's official history begins in 1358, about a hundred years prior to the presumed Da Vinci hoax. It seems plausible that either some shroud-like relic had passed to a powerful family and that its condition was poor, either because of its age or because it wasn't that convincing upon close inspection. The family then secretly enlisted Leonardo, the theory goes, in order to obtain a really top-notch relic. Remember, relics were big business in those days, being used to generate revenues and political leverage.

For if Leonardo was the forger, we must account for the fact that the highly distinctive "Vignon marks" on the shroud face have been found in Byzantine art dating to the 7th century. I can't help but wonder whether Leonardo only had the Mandylion (the face) to work with, and added the body as a bonus (I've tried scanning the internet for reports of exact descriptions of the shroud prior to da Vinci's time but haven't succeeded).

The Mandylion refers to an image not made by hands. This "image of Edessa" must have been very impressive, considering the esteem in which it was held by Byzantium. Byzantium also was rife with relics and with secret arts -- which included what we'd call technology along with mumbo-jumbo. The Byzantine tradition of iconography may have stemmed from display of the Mandylion.

Ian Wilson, a credentialed historian who seems to favor shroud authenticity, made a good case for the Mandylion having been passed to the Knights Templar -- perhaps when the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. The shroud then showed up in the hands of a descendant of one of the Templars after the order was ruthlessly suppressed. His idea was that the shroud and the Mandylion were the same, but that in the earlier centuries it had been kept folded in four, like a map, with the head on top and had always been displayed that way.

The other possibility is that a convincing relic of only the head was held by the Templars. A discovery at Templecombe, England, in 1951 showed that regional Templar centers kept paintings of a bearded Jesus face, which may well have been copies of a relic that Templar enemies tried to find but couldn't. The Templars had been accused of worshiping a bearded idol.

Well, what made the Mandylion so convincing? A possibility: when the Templars obtained the relic they also obtained a secret book of magical arts that told how to form such an image. This of course implies that Leonardo discovered the technique when examining this manuscript, which may have contained diagrams. Or, it implies that the image was not counterfeited by Leonardo but was a much, much older counterfeit.

Obviously all this is pure speculation. But one cannot deny that the shroud images have a photographic quality but are out of kilter with each other and that the secret of camera obscura projection in Western art seems to stem from Leonardo's studios.

The other point is that the 1988 carbon analysis dated the shroud to the century before Leonardo. If one discounts possible political control of the result, then one is left to wonder how such a relic could have been so skillfully wrought in that era. Leonardo was one of those once-in-a-thousand-year geniuses who had the requisite combination of skills, talents, knowledge and impiety to pull off such a stunt.

Of course, the radiocarbon dating might easily have been off by a hundred years (but, if fairly done, is not likely to have been off by 1300 years).

All in all, I can't be sure exactly what happened, but I am strongly inclined to agree that the shroud was counterfeited by Leonardo based on a previous relic. The previous relic must have been at least "pretty good" or why all the fuss in previous centuries? But, it is hard not to suspect Leonardo's masterful hand in the Shroud of Turin.

Of course, the thing about the shroud is that there is always more to it. More mystery. I know perfectly well that, no matter how good the scientific and historical analysis, trying to nail down a proof one way or the other is a wil o' the wisp.

Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin

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This is a very old version of an article on the Shroud. Be sure to see my recantation on this blog.
Interestingly, I had to use a search engine other than Google to recover a later version, which then linked me to this version. Google came up slam dunk empty, as it does routinely with a great deal of my writing -- though I never prohibit search crawlers from my online material.

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Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin

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.
[The hit counter is unreliable, but I decline to disable it.]

Email: prconant@yahoo.com

Pinning down pride: the angels problem

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Below I post a collection of thoughts on this matter, though I have not troubled to write a formal essay.

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Notes from Wikipedia:

The question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" has been used many times as a dismissal of medieval angelology in particular, and of scholasticism in general. The phrase has been used also to criticize figures such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, who explored the intersection between the philosophical aspects of space and the qualities attributed to angels. Another variety of the question is: "How many angels can stand on the point of a pin?"
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The fact that certain renowned medieval scholars considered similar questions is clear; Aquinas's Summa Theologica, written c. 1270, includes discussion of several questions regarding angels such as, "Can several angels be in the same place?"
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Philosopher and historian Peter Harrison has suggested that the first reference to angels dancing on a needle's point occurs in an expository work by the English divine, William Sclater (1575-1626). In An exposition with notes on the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (1619), Sclater claimed that scholastic philosophers occupied themselves with such pointless questions as whether angels "did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points." Harrison proposes that the reason an English writer first introduced the "needle’s point" into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for a clever pun on "needless point."
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Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the question was "simply a debating exercise" and that the answer "usually adjudged correct" was stated as, "Angels are pure intelligences, not material, but limited, so that they have location in space, but not extension." Sayers compares the question to that of how many people's thoughts can be concentrated upon a particular pin at the same time. She concludes that infinitely many angels can be located on the head of a pin, since they do not occupy any space there.
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And from the Cambridge Descartes Lexicon [ 6], we learn:
In the Third Meditation, Descartes introduces the idea of angel as an instance of an idea the human mind can form from other ideas, namely from the idea of human being and from that of God (AT VII 43, CSM II 29; AT VII 138–39, CSM II 99). In the Conversation with Burman, Descartes reportedly asserts that he cannot say anything about angels’ nature, except that like human minds they are thinking substances (AT V 157–58). However, in discussing Regius's theory that man is a substance by accident (per accidens), Descartes provides one counterfactual detail concerning angelic knowledge. The human mind is really and substantially united to the extension of his body. In consequence of this kind of union, the human mind perceives the mechanical modifications of his body as obscure sensations and passions. By contrast, if an angel were joined to a body, his mind would perceive the modifications of this body as they really are, that is, as the mechanical effects of the external bodies that cause them. Consequently, he would know the former only through clear and distinct ideas (AT III 493, CSMK 206) (see clarity and distinctness). An angel united to a body would realize the kind of union that a pilot bears to his ship, which Descartes opposes to the kind of union that holds in the case of human nature (AT VII 81, CSM II 56). To Burman, Descartes adds that he deems wholly irrelevant what views Aquinas – who had been so concerned with angels to deserve to be called “Doctor Angelicus” – held concerning the nature and mind of angels.

Despite this dismissive attitude, Descartes draws on what Aquinas and John Duns Scotus say about angels in his account of the human mind and the nature of human knowledge. For example, the following Cartesian claims on the angelic mind can be traced directly to Aquinas:

1.The mind directly knows itself; its nature consists in thinking and hence it always thinks (AT III 478, CSMK 203; AT V 193, CSMK 355 (cf. Summa Theologica, I, q.56, a.1; q.58, a.1).

2.Understanding and will, and not imagination and sensation, pertain to the nature of the mind (AT VII 73, CSM II 51) (cf. Summa Theologica I, q.54, a.5).

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Blogger Conant remarks:

1. Aquinas and others are speaking of some noumenal (non-phenomenal or spirit) world "intersecting" the phenomenal world of Newtonian (or even Einsteinian) space and time. (Obviously, we have used anachronisms.)

Dorothy Sayers makes a good point that immaterial intelligences are not subject to the limits of our material world.

2. Recall how Jesus and the disciples were instantly translated across the Sea of Galilee. Space and time vanish when subjected to spiritual power. Recall that the resurrected Jesus would just show up somehow to speak with disciples. He was not an angel in the sense of never having been born of a woman, but otherwise had the attributes of an angel (in fact, a "son of God" carries the same meaning as "angel" or personal representative). So we see that non-fallen angels are not subject to earthly time and space.

Because of the fact that our fallen world is to a great extent a matter of (compelled) perception, I would say that when an angel appears, that being is projecting its spiritual essence into a person's mind. This may occur "in a dream" with such lucidness that the person takes it as having "really happened."

3. An interesting question is whether humans actually occupy positions in space and time; or is that belief an artifact of human perception mechanisms?

4. Many have heard of Enrico Fermi's famous quip about space aliens from other planets: "Where are all the tourists?" Some make the same jest about angels and other "immaterial" spirits. Yet, is it not so that such beings sometimes pass unnoticed? As the Bible says Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. -- Hebrews 13.2 (KJV/Authorized). And, if an angel projects itself into a human mind for a short time, certainly that being can limit its projection to one or a few persons.

5. For centuries, the image of counting angels on a pin head has been used by philosophers to scorn Aquinas and scholasticism. Yet, we see that the question performed a sound philosophical function of encapsulating serious questions concerning space, time and God's universe. Ridicule is an effective weapon, because it appeals to human pride in assuming one knows what is "obviously" so.

6. The logician Rudy Rucker observed that the "famous puzzle of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin can be viewed as a question about the relationship between the infinite Creator and the finite world. The crux of the problem is that, on the one hand, it would seem that since God is infinitely powerful, he should be able to bid an infinite number of angels to dance on the head of a pin; on the other hand, it was believed by medieval thinkers that no actually infinite collection could ever arise in the created world." [1]

But their "proofs that infinity is somehow a self-contradictory notion were all flawed," Rucker adds.

7. Yet the actual infinite was necessary if the mathematical notion of infinitesimal were to survive. Even if we replace infinitesimals with Weirstrasse's epsilon-delta limit points, the limit point is indistinct from the infinitesimal. Weirstrasse introduced Aristotle's potential infinity (a ridiculous term as a quantity or set is either finite or not) as a means of escaping infinitesimals. But if the limit points are only fictions, then space is discontinuous and there are no smooth curves. An object does not follow a smooth trajectory. Today, we can argue from quantum theory that this indeed holds, but it is doubtful one can get rid of all infinitesimals.

An infinitesimal implies a subspace in which tiny geometric relations can exist without being visualizable (much like quantum "phenomena").

Rucker points out that "Bishop Berkeley found it curious that mathematicians could swallow the Newton-Leibniz theory of infinitesimals, yet balk at the peculiarities of orthodox Christian doctrine." [1]

8. In fact, Amir Alexander has told of a tremendous cultural and ideological war against the infinitesimal led by the Society of Jesus and backed by some authoritarian Protestants. The concern was that if the world were composed of infinitely small bits, the conservative theological doctrines that underpinned the status quo ante would come apart [2]. Supposedly the worry was that Creation reflects a divine order, which the Jesuits interpreted as a "rational" pyramidal orderliness composed of "real" finite blocks in the earthly realm. Their society, founded by an aristocrat and backed by the aristocracy, was a rigorous hierarchical structure that aristocrats believed was natural. The Roman Catholic Church, with the Pope as the chief, should be hierarchical. But infinitely small quantities, to the Jesuits, were subversive of the spiritually proper order. Infinitesimals would raise doubts about reality and perhaps about God (and there is some truth in that fear). [3][4]

9. In his professional biography, Rudolph Carnap scorns the University of Chicago Philosophy Department for hearing a Ph.D dissertation on the ontological proof of the existence of God, saying he felt as though he had found himself back in the days when philosophers argued about how many angels could fit on a pinhead. Carnap laughed at a colleague's suggestion that one should remain open-minded [5]. Carnap spent much of his career trying to find a way to justify a scientific approach to philosophy, working to expunge metaphysics as a serious subdiscipline. Materialism (at times under another name) without Marxism was his aim. There is no consensus that he succeeded.

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1. Infinity and the Mind -- the science and philosophy of the infinite by Rudy Rucker (Princeton 1995).

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2. Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (Scientific American 2014).

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3. A mixed review of Alexander's Infinitesimal
http://www.historytoday.com/reviews/infinitesimal
In response to one criticism, I would say an indivisible may not be quite the same as an infinitesimal. And yet if we regard the reals as continuous points on a finite line segment, then we could regard each real as an infinitesimal. The Leibnizian type of infinitesimal which shows up in calculus is regarded as an infinitely small non-zero quantity with 0 dimension. In principle, a real number or a Leibnizian tangent point are seemingly equally goofy.

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4. Stanford Encyclopedia on infinitesimal, indivisible
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/continuity/ 

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5. The Philosophy of Rudolph Carnap, Paul Arthur Schilpp ed. (Open Court 1963).

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6. The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon by Emanuela Scribano, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Edited by Lawrence Nolan, California State University, Long Beach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press