Raymond N. Rogers FAQ © 2004 All Rights Reserved Material Reprinted by Permission Ray Rogers was a Fellow of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and a charter member of the Coalition for Excellence in Science Education. He has published many scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. In 1978, together with several other … Continue reading
The primary goal of STURP was to test the hypothesis that the Shroud’s image was painted, as claimed by Bishop d’Arcis in 1389. If it had been painted, some colored material had to be added to the cloth, but the colored material would have gone through the fire of 1532. The pigments and vehicles would … Continue reading
Alan Adler was an expert on porphyrins, the types of colored compounds seen in blood, chlorophyll, and many other natural products. He and Dr. John Heller, MD, studied the blood flecks on the STURP sampling tapes [Heller and Adler, Applied Optics 19, (16) 1980]. They converted the heme into its parent porphyrin, and they interpreted … Continue reading
The primary effect of all kinds of radiation is to heat the material it hits. This statement includes electromagnetic radiation (visible, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation); ionizing particles such as protons, electrons, and alpha particles; and non-ionizing particles such as neutrons. You can feel the heat when you hold a lump of plutonium, a flask of … Continue reading
As discussed in (3. Why radiation did not cause images), the crystallinity of the flax fibers in all of the parts of the Shroud that were not scorched has not been significantly degraded. The Arrhenius Law describes the effect of temperature on rate constants for all consistent chemical reactions, as follows: k = Ze-E/RT … Continue reading
The 1988 radiocarbon age determinations were carefully done. The sample preparation methods, the measurement technologies and procedures, and the data reduction were adequately planned and executed to answer the most important question: was the Shroud produced in the First Century? Damon, et al., reported that "The age of the shroud is obtained as AD 1260-1390, … Continue reading
Based on the facts of chemistry and current storage conditions, the Shroud of Turin is not now and has never been in imminent danger of catastrophic autocatalytic decomposition. The "restoration" of 2002 was based on an erroneous understanding of chemistry. Autocatalytic chemical reactions are those in which the rate increases as the amounts of reactants … Continue reading
Bands of slightly different color can be seen in Shroud photographs. They are most visible in ultraviolet-fluorescence photographs (see Hands UV). Both warp and weft yarns show this property. Some areas show darker warp yarns and some show darker weft yarns. In some places bands of darker color cross. In other places bands of lighter … Continue reading
J. L. Banyasz, S. Li, J. Lyons-Hart, and K. H. Shafer [Fuel 80 (2001) 1757-1763] studied real-time evolution of formaldehyde, hydroxyacetaldehyde, CO, and CO2 from pure microcrystalline cellulose by EGA/FTIR (effluent gas analysis and Fourier transform infrared spectrometry). They detected 10 compounds simultaneously in the gas phase by FTIR. The cellulose decomposition is very complex. … Continue reading
Because the cellulose was not involved in image formation, the color must have formed in impurities on the surfaces of the image fibers. Independent observations have proved that all of the image color resides in a very thin layer on the outside surfaces of colored fibers. Evaporation concentration can explain the superficial nature of the … Continue reading
