The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [102]
Everyone in the room understood the point when Bucholtz projected onto the screen the three-dimensional green-tone image of the face of the man in the Shroud as produced by the VP-8 Image Analyzer. Instead of seeing the face as a flat, two-dimensional image, the man in the Shroud appeared almost alive. The nose, cheeks, hair, beard, and mustache all stood out, while the eyes receded as one would expect.
“The difference is that the lights and darks of normal photographic film result solely from the amount of light reflected by the subject onto the film. In sharp contrast, the image in the Shroud contains precise data that record density in direct relationship to the distance the subject was from the film. In other words, the closer the cloth was to the body, for instance at the tip of the nose or in the cheekbone, the darker the image that was formed on the Shroud. The more distant the body part—for instance, the eye sockets or the neck—the fainter was the image recorded on the Shroud. As you will see in this next slide, we get the same three-dimensionality when we examine the full-length body of the man in the Shroud in the VP-8 Image Analyzer.”
Again everyone in the room was impressed by the lifelike nature of the green-tone image Bucholtz projected on the screen: the man in the Shroud shown in a frontal view from the top of his head to the fingertips of his crossed hands to his feet.
Next, Bucholtz projected onto the screen an image of the shroud that Professor Gabrielli had unveiled the previous day in Bologna.
“Professor Gabrielli, I’m sure you will recognize this as the shroud you produced to prove that medieval materials and methods could have been used to produce a forgery?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “That certainly looks like the shroud I created. Where did you get the picture?”
“The Vatican had it delivered to me yesterday,” she said. “But then for the past twenty-four hours your shroud has been all over the Internet and television, so getting a copy would not have been difficult. I just wanted to use the photograph you yourself produced.”
“Did you examine it in the VP-8 Image Analyzer?” Gabrielli asked, anxious to know the results.
“Yes, I did,” Bucholtz said, as she projected the results on the screen. “There are only one or two functioning VP-8 Image Analyzers yet around. Fortunately, CERN has one of them. As you can see, the results are disappointing, much like when we project a normal photograph through the analyzer. The green-tone result shows a forest of uneven lines with no dimensionality whatsoever. So I would have to say that in this respect, you failed to prove your point.”
Rather than become defensive, Gabrielli decided to concede the obvious. “I’m afraid that up until now, I didn’t really appreciate the three-dimensionality of the Shroud of Turin. Obviously, in my next attempt, I will have to take that into consideration.”
Next Dr. Bucholtz turned to a large apparatus she had set up in the corner of the conference room. Castle could see that the machine was built around a series of lasers.
“I have designed this machine to project holographic images into three-dimensional space,” she explained. “Without giving you a physics lesson, you should know that holograms are a major advancement in our ability to represent three-dimensional objects. Holograms are formed by scattering intense beams of light onto an object, typically by lasers, so that