The ghastly image of the shroud of Turín has been an enigma during centuries. Recent investigations have revealed some of their surprising secrets, but the mystery continues. When the Academy of Sciences rejected the physician's discoveries Yves Delage - who it was convinced that the sheet of Turín was the authentic shroud of Christ -, the topic was in abeyance during 30 years.
In 1932, another French, this time a forensic called pathologist Pierre Barbet, began to study the image from the medical point of view, taking advantage of a group of much clearer pictures that you/they had been taken the previous year.
The basic point that intrigued the physician Barbet was the position of the wounds caused by the nails in the dolls and not in the palms of the hands, like it was represented traditionally. Experiencing with cadavers, he/she discovered that the flesh of the hands cannot support the weight of a dead body, and less that of an alive body that is contorted; the flesh is torn quickly. As from the century IV of our era had not been practiced crucifixions, logical era that the traditional painters ignore the procedure; how was he/she able to, then, to have known it a medieval counterfeiter? Barbet discovered that the only form of crucifying a body was crossing the radio with the nails to the doll's height, like it happened in the shroud. Also, a nail arranged would damage this way the average ledge, causing the involuntary retraction of the thumbs toward the palm of the hand: another patent and not very well-known fact that he/she appears in the shroud.
The "blemishes of blood" that there is around the wound of the side they also show rakes of a clear liquid, what coincides with the biblical description of the "blood and the water" that sprang from Christ's flank. But the death for crucifixion not happens for the blood loss, but because of the asphyxia and the shock. Due to the stretched position of the body, the lungs are compressed;
the victim gets up relying on the nails that their feet and their dolls hold and you/he/she is able to breathe, although to coast of an intense pain. Each movement goes weakening the victim progressively, until, finally, it cannot incorporate and he/she drowns. The suffocation causes the deposit of mucosity in the base of the lungs, and Barbet it could demonstrate that a lance wound in the side of a human body would cross the end of the left lung, allowing to exit this liquid.
The physician's report Barbet caused a refreshed interest of the science men for the nature of the shroud, and noted "sindonólogos" - derivative term of the Greek word that means shroud - they requested a scientific exhaustive exam. But he/she was necessary to wait until the years 70
so that the former king Humberto waived before the pressures. To date the shroud appropriately was one of the preemptive tasks, but the obvious form of making it, using the process of the carbon 14, it had caused the destruction on one side of the shroud, and Humberto resisted. However, in 1973 it was invited two European reputed scientists so that they used more orthodox methods. The professor Max Fried, Swiss outstanding forensic surgeon, and the professor Gilbert Frays, expert in tissues of the University of Ghent (Belgium), they had access to the linen. First informed that "the image is totally superficial, whereas only the filaments higher of the raster they are affected. Pigmentation is not observed neither even magnifying the image."
I fried it picked up powder particles so that they were analyzed in a lab, finding 48 types different from pollen. The identification of grains of pollen that you/they outlive almost indefinitely even under the less favorable conditions, is one of the most exact processes in the forensic up-to-date science. As era of waiting, most of the grains came from France and the north of Italy, but seven types turned out to belong to plants halófilas (lovers of the salt) that are accustomed to finds around the Dead Sea and in other fields of Palestine. Although the discovery was certainly interesting, it didn't constitute an absolute test of the origin of the shroud, since the pollen is transferred at long distances by the wind and he/she could book credit been transmitted by the clothes of the travelers, máxime if one keeps in mind that, during the first times, the shroud was exhibited without some protection.
But Gilbert Frays it picked up a petty quantity of fibers, and the tests that it got they support the thesis. The thread used in the confection of the shroud proceeded of kind of a cotton cultured in Half East, and it had been knitted in a crossed framing type, very expensive comparative method with that of the plain normal raster of Palestine. The spinning-mill had been carried out by hand, and it is necessary to keep in mind that in Europe the distaff was used from 1150, on or about. Also, the fibers without stopping had been whitened before the elaboration of the tissue, very archaic procedure.
In 1974 he/she took place the important discovery that the shroud constituted a photographic negative. Scientific Dos of the Air forces of United States, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, browsed pictures of the shroud with a complex instrument: the image analyzer VP-8. Using a computer in adjunction with VP-8, they were able to build in laminated cardboard a stereomodel of the man of the shroud. This convinced to a group of scientific that it was worthwhile to thoroughly study the shroud and, in March of 1977, the Project of Investigation of the Shroud of Turín achieved the former king's authorization Humberto to start "nondestructive" tests.
October of 1978, 8 after being exposed the public, the shroud were taken out of their antagonist and transferred Actual Palacio of Turín, where it was studied by 36 investigators that had taken I get 72 boxes of ultramodern team. Among them there were physiques, biochemical, forensic, pathologists, experts in microphotograph and - something incongruent - representing of Nuclear Technology Corporation of United States.
Three years later, the discoveries of the team have not still been published entirely, but, in spite of the match of opinions, the mystery of the shroud continues as impenetrable as always. The only one that differed among the 36 investigators was Walter C. McCrone, director of a private company of chemical analysis of Chicago. In fact the physician McCrone was who it proved that the ink of the "Viking" map of Vinland era of medieval origin, and its opinion on the shroud was in the same line, although it admitted that it was not present during the main meeting in Actual Palacio and he/she worked with samples.
In a series of conferences that gave in Great Britain in 1980, the physician McCrone said that its microscopic tests revealed blemishes of iron oxide, a traditional pigment. "But I cannot reveal how the artist got ready them - she said -. I believe that the shroud is a falsification, but I cannot sample it." He/she thought that a test for the method of the carbon 14 would date it in the XIV century: " .... in that time the falsifications were in vogue. I believe that the remainder of the group won't discover if the shroud is authentic or not. They will probably say that the physique is very similar to a burnt image, but that they cannot distinguish it of her. Until where they will arrive later, I don't know" it.
One of the chemical main investigators, Ray Rogers, of National Scientific Laboratory of The Poplars, discovered that the image consisted on a slight layer of xanthic color that only affected to the external surface of the fibers. The color was not "diffuse, it had not penetrated in the cloth, one had not run toward the sides neither deposited among the threads", like it would have happened, if has put on makeup or rubbed with pigments. In this point the fire of 1532 was useful: an enough heat to burn the cloth would have to have altered the coloring of any proximate pigment, but it didn't happen this way. The color was even until the edge of the scorched fields. Also, with the water that was used to shutdown the flames, the paint to the watery one or the ink one has run, but it was not this way. In 1980, Rogers said: Most of us believes that the shroud has not been colored. Except for a petty quantity of iron oxide, we don't find any pigment. And we don't create that liquids neither vapors have produced the image that we are seeing.
The expert in espectroscopia Sam Pellicori, of Santa Bárbara Research Center, decided to browse the theory "vaporográfica" of Delage and Vignon who affirmed that the image had been formed by a chemical reaction between the perspiration of the body and spices. But, like Pellicori explains, in the image the face and other body parts that you/they should not enter in contact with the linen also appear.
The process of the formation of the image in the shroud is incomprehensible. The best form of describing it is as the "ebullition" of the superficial material of the external part of the tissue. Some particulars indicate that that could book credit been caused by a violent explosion of radiant energy. The "blemishes of blood" that they appear in the image they were studied. The first and more important conclusion was that they had been deposited in a normal way; they appeared as "positive" in the "negative" of the shroud, and when the lining, applied to the cloth in the XVI century, it was unstitched, he/she was discovered that it had only been stained in the field of the "blood."
The physician John Heller, of New England Institute, said that none of the tests had demonstrated that the old blemishes were not of blood, but that some indicated that they could be it. The blemishes were surrounded by other microscopic secondary, very similar to those that he/she leaves the serum of the blood. The ultraviolet rays made fluorescent the blemishes, and the rays X revealed the exact percent of iron that corresponded to the blood. And what is more important, Heller found tiny glasses among the threads of the raster in the spotted fields of blood, and it considered that it was haemoglobin "altered by the time."
The form and the address of the blemishes were "authentic", as if is about a recently crucified body. The blemishes of the wounds of the dolls, for example, reflected for the forearms until the elbow, just as it would happen in a hung up body of a cross. Also, the blood of the wound of the side one had run until being deposited in the shoulder, below the waist... another authentic detail. Finally, the whole surface of the body was covered with scars in parallel pairs, probably the trademarks caused by two flageladores that managed Roman flagrae, scourges of two belts with lead tips or bone.
Up to now the method of the carbon has not been used 14 to date the shroud, since this procedure had required the destruction on one side of the linen. But new systems that you/they only specify of very petty pieces of cloth and that they can provide a date with a margin of only 150 year-old error, they could be used. Only ullage the former king's authorization Humberto.
They are in foot two big polling about the sacred shroud of Turín. First, if the image was created by "a violent explosion of radiant" energy, what did it cause this explosion?. And second, the question that made Yves Delage in 1902 to the members of the Academy of Sciences: "If it is not Christ's shroud, of who is it?"
As Kenneth he/she has commented Weaver, editor of the scientific National magazine Geographic and witness of the investigations: "That, they affirm as much the scientists as the theologians, it is and it will always be outside of the land of the tests."
If a virus of average size measured hundred nanometers, is even more diminutive the gimmick built by a team of U.S. experts in nanoscience, coordinated by Professor James Al. Tour of Rice University.
