The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [1]
But now all that seemed like a dream. The luminescence in the tunnel surrounded him like a fog and he felt drawn to move forward.
As he approached the end of the tunnel, he could see people milling about. Strangely, they all seemed to be floating with the light and the fog enveloping them. Vaguely he thought he could detect friends and relatives who had been dead now for many years.
Suddenly, he was thrilled to see his mother coming forward to embrace him. His mother had died ten years earlier of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive nerve disease in which the brain loses the ability to move the body’s muscles. The disease took five years to kill her and in the last two months of her life her paralysis increased to near total.
Paul at that time was on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He was the youngest physicist ever to be asked to join the esteemed institute. Before his mother’s illness, Dr. Bartholomew was considered one of the most promising young physicists in the world.
When his mother was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, his life was shattered. Six months before she died, he moved his mother out of the hospital and brought her back home, where he hired nurses around the clock to care for her. As his mother’s paralysis became complete in her final days of life, the institute gave Bartholomew a leave of absence. He never left his mother’s side until she died; he moved a small cot into her room so he could take care of her in the middle of the night. He prayed that God would take him and spare his mother.
Then, as she went into a coma, he spent hours at her bedside, holding her hand, trying to communicate with her one last time. In the middle of the night, as she took her final labored breaths, Bartholomew wiped her brow with a cold cloth, trying to ease her pain. When she died, he felt desolate and abandoned, his tears unable to bring her back or express his pain. At her funeral, Bartholomew wished there was a way he could join her in death, and he would have, except he felt it was against God’s law for him to commit suicide.
The death of his mother marked a turning point in Bartholomew’s life. What kept him going was a determination to understand what his life was about. Why was he here on earth in this here and now? He had no ready answer.
In the depths of his crisis, he railed against God for taking from him the only person in his life who truly understood him. As he grieved his loss, he realized he had gone into physics in an attempt to find God, and now, with the despair he felt with his mother gone, he was ending up with nothing. Regardless of how brilliant he had been in science, having received his Ph.D. from Princeton when he was only twenty-five years-old, the death of his mother made him realize that God could not be found in a particle accelerator or a quantum equation. The head of the physics department was shocked when Bartholomew came into his office and announced he had decided to resign from the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study.
“What do you mean you want to resign?” asked Dr. Horton Silver, himself a renowned physicist and Bartholomew’s most trusted advisor at the university. “Your appointment at the Institute is an appointment for life. Your particle physics work has broken new ground internationally. You can’t resign.”
Dr. Silver was right. Bartholomew was on the verge of a major theoretical breakthrough dealing with one of the most important unanswered mysteries that had eluded the most brilliant minds in physics since Einstein had been at the very same institute. Bartholomew had spent the last three years developing a series of equations that Silver felt were the most promising approach he had yet seen to explain the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a quantum physics problem: if the position of a particle were known, its momentum could not be determined