BBC Focus Magazine

[MikeG]

Any comments on this article?

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12 ... 60227.html

What type of element could leave a signature similar to a laser?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Amazing coincidence they should announce this so late in the year..

Personally I think it has all the hallmarks of being utter rubbish, as far as I was aware the Turin shroud has already been shown to be a clever fake created, along with much of the christian religion around the fourth century AD?

[Doonhamer]

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/6443 ... esurrected

[Shadowwolf]

First point of issue is that the article is on Huffpo, a greater den of credulous knaves you will not find, tis a place where science is thin on the ground and what there is tends towards the pseudo end of the spectrum.

Second, the article has no useful links to further info whatsoever, don't even know where they culled it from.

Third, I have a hard time buying that the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development would be in the business of shroud analysis. Not saying it's impossible but it does seem well outside their purview and a waste of resources. There is also no news of this in the Agency's sites news section.

Apart from online news sources there is no further info as to how they went about their investigation and what their data was; we're just left to go on the alleged words of Prof Paolo Di Lazzaro. His words that they just looked for verifiable evidence with the hope it would start a theological debate to be answered by the "experts" are also hardly reassuring.

Apart from that it does appear to be an argument from incredulity as mentioned on Mr Doonhamer's link, "we've replicated the effect with ultraviolet lasers and we can't imagine what else could have caused it therefore it must have been with a high energy EM source." This based on an artifact that they have likely never touched and are thus bereft of vital information.

Given the info to hand or lack-there-of, their unclear motive and that they appear to be labouring under a fallacy; I don't think there is anything of note here.

...as far as I was aware the Turin shroud has already been shown to be a clever fake...

There is a question over the radiocarbon dating, all samples came from the same area and that area appears to have been repaired after fire damage thus contaminating the sample with more modern fibers.

[Lateralman]

Darn clever those folks in the fourth century AD. To be able to out fox the clever folks in this century.

Talk about forward planning.

[Shadowwolf]

It was not forward planning, likely it was created to dupe or provide a focal point for faith at the time it was created.

It's not hard to fool those who want to believe whether in the fourth century or the twenty-first.

[Healerman]

Not lasers! Not Aliens! Leonardo did it!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religio ... Vinci.html

Think I better go take my meds now.

[Shadowwolf]

Does anyone speak Italian?

Because here be the report - it's a pdf btw - by these folks. Oddly enough it does appear to be funded by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, and as the research appears to have nothing to do with that remit it seems a stunning waste of resources.

I also learned - via an eSkeptic email - that the researchers could not replicate the shroud with their lasers and only hazarded a further guess that only a particular laser could achieve similar results. Which is of course meaningless, discovering that they could not achieve a Turin like image using lasers is about as useful as discovering they could not do it using arc welding as neither existed when it was made. Their further speculations about what laser it might require are unwarranted.

[Nails]

If you converted the 2-D image into a 3-D one you would have a person with a very strange head.

You can try this in reverse at home using an old sheet, drawing an outline of someones head on it and then looking at the flat image.

It looks..... wierd.

Also the book of John states that Jesus was wrapped in cloths (note the plural) with a seperate cloth for his head...
They can't both be right!

[Shadowwolf]

Now when have such contradictions ever been an obstacle?