Online Anonymous Discussion

S&V - Page 121
Another advanced argument in favour of the authenticity of the relic is supported by the optical characteristics of its image. With the difference of a photograph or a painting, this one is of three-dimensional nature: its intensity seems to vary according to inverse ratio of the distance between a point of the body and its imprint on the fabric. The body parts most prominent (nose, knobs, chin...) would have generated the darkest spots.

But is this for as much a body that the linen cloth wrapped? The American researchers Eric Jumper and John Jackson tried to show it in 1984 (with William Ercoline, then Kenneth Stevenson) while extracting from this three-dimensionality enough of spatial information to reconstitute the form of the matrix having marked the fabric. The shroud was studied with the assistance of an analyzer of images which translated the luminous intensity into data of the topographic type. The obtained images, published in the scientific review Applied Optics, show indeed a body in relief evoking that of Christ.

But for Henri Broch, professor of physic and zetetic at the university of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, these images reflect especially the faith of their authors. « Jumper, Jackson and Ercoline specify themselves in their publication that, to obtain an anatomically correct result, they had to modify the surface of reference, and to give it... the shape of a body, exclaims the physicist. Because they describe their reference system as a geometrical representation of what separates the scanned image from the real volume of a body. In fact, their analyzer of image provided a low-relief for which it was necessary to give a little thickness! It's just data they've hacked up... ». Everybody can note it besides by taking the imprint of his own face: an image in 3D projected on a surface 2D is inevitably deformed, except if it is a low-relief... The cheeks of the man on the shroud should thus be inordinately broad, just like its forehead.

However, Nello Balossino, who conducted complementary studies in the data processing department of the university of Turin, persists in denying the possibility of a manual intervention in the formation of the shroud image, by stressing that invisible details to the naked eye appear on the numerical reconstitution. Like others, he sees a clot of blood on the left cheek close to the nostril, which presents an incision produced by a pointed object, or a drop of blood on the right nostril, which corresponds to a gradual flow of blood on the inclined face, i.e. once occurred death. And even the circular imprint on the eyes would be the circumference of a coin used to maintain the eyelid closed. The bulge has the size of a lepton, a Roman coin in use in the Palestine of Jesus...

...no document corroborates such a funerary practice in the Jewish population during the 1st century of our era. Jumper and Jackson affirm the opposite in a scientific publication by quoting a text of the XIX century. But, Henri Broch says that this text attributes this habit to the Russians of the XIX century...

Nevertheless, certain sindonologists like the father Francis Eilas, of the Loyola university of Chicago, affirm to have deciphered inscriptions on these famous bulges. However, no readable photography, no serious study on the subject were to date published in a scientific review. And the partisans of the authenticity themselves doubt it, following the example of Andre Marion who, after numerical analysis, sees only simple artefacts due to the structure of fabric...

VSD - Pages 28-29
...The scientific studies on the nature of the image also refute the thesis of the forgery. If one looks closely the shroud structure, one realizes that results in fact from the superposition of two images of different nature :

. the liquids (water, blood, sweat...) which impregnated cloth formed, after absorption by the fabric, an image which we will name an imprint. This first image, which exists at the same time on and between the rafters of fabric, is tributary of the cloth deformations: thus the bloodstains are on their correct location in the median axis of the body, but shift little by little towards outside when one moves away from there;

. the image of the whole of the body is a second image only printed on the rafters. It is certain that it is neither a painting nor a reproduction. It is a not deformed image, which cannot thus result from a simple contact of the cloth with the body of the crucified man. It shows the characteristics of a plane optical image, similar to a negative photograph which would have been created by orthogonal projection of an unknown "radiation" on the tight cloth acting as a sort of film. It does not show any preferential direction, which excludes manufacturing process using directly the hand of a man. It is also three-dimensional: the intensity decreases according to the distance between the body and the presumed tight cloth, which makes it possible to reconstitute the volume of the body. This characteristic, that no portrait has, remained, so far, unexplained. Moreover, if the image is enlarged, one notes that it is made of a multitude of small regularly distributed points forming a screen similar to a screen of printing works. Each one of these points is a superficial reddening of the top of fabric fiber, in accordance with the observations of the researchers of the STURP.