From there, Gabrielli was peppered with questions for half an hour. No, he answered, he was not an atheist. “I’m a Roman Catholic,” he asserted. “Just not a very devout one.”
He stated that he did not hate the Vatican and that he did not want to hurt Christianity. “My goal is not political,” he argued. “I’m a professional chemist who teaches here at one of Italy and Europe’s oldest and most prestigious universities. I expose fraud. My goal is to prevent gullible people worldwide from being deceived even today by a forger who had a plan to get rich in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.”
Gabrielli stated that his goal was not to get rich by his efforts.
Asked whether he produced the shroud because of the recent fame of Father Paul Bartholomew in the United States, Gabrielli admitted that the attention generated by the American priest was his inspiration. “Yes,” he said. “And I understand that Father Bartholomew has been brought to Rome by the Vatican and I am looking forward to meeting him. Maybe after that I can give you a report on how I believe Father Bartholomew is producing the illusion of his stigmata.”
That Father Bartholomew had been brought from the United States to Italy by the Vatican was news to all in the room, except of course for Dr. Castle and the contingent that had traveled with them from New York.
Fernando Ferrar spoke up.
“I’m Fernando Ferrar, a television reporter from New York,” he said, introducing himself. “I can confirm that Father Bartholomew is in Rome. My news crew and I traveled with him on the Vatican-chartered airplane that left JFK Airport for Rome this Tuesday evening.”
Heads in the audience turned, as various reporters decided they would interview Ferrar as well as Gabrielli before they rushed out to file their stories.
“My question, Professor Gabrielli, is this.” Ferrar continued: “Just because you can duplicate the Shroud of Turin does not mean the original isn’t authentic.”
“What do you mean?” Gabrielli asked, puzzled at the supposed question.
“Maybe somebody could duplicate Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t prove Leonardo didn’t paint the original.”
“What’s your point?” Gabrielli shot back.
“My point is simple.” Ferrar pressed on. “It’s a lot easier to duplicate something than to create it in the first place. I don’t see that you produced the ‘positive’ from which your negative image with the white highlighting was taken. How did a medieval painter think to create a negative that would not have been recognized as such until Secondo Pia first photographed the Shroud for the 1898 exposition?”
“This is just my first effort,” Gabrielli said defensively. “I will be refining my techniques in the future and producing more examples to show how the Shroud of Turin could have been forged. Remember, I can’t prove the Shroud was forged. I can only prove the Shroud could have been forged.”
“Isn’t that a lot like trying to prove that the Declaration of Independence could have been printed on a modern copying machine?” Ferrar asked, hoping he might get an answer. “Maybe you could get from a copy machine a document that would be indistinguishable from the original, but what would it prove? Just because you can copy a document doesn’t mean the original isn’t authentic.”
“If you recall, I stressed that I used only medieval materials and techniques,” Gabrielli said, smiling in a condescending way. “Copy machines were obviously not around in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.”
Then, looking to Dr. Castle and seeing him nod with satisfaction, he decided it was time to bring the press conference to an end. “Thank you for coming,” Gabrielli announced. “That concludes the formal part of our news conference for today. Press packages will be handed out in the back of the room as you exit.”
But before Gabrielli could leave, reporters circled him and blocked his escape in their determination to ask him one more question before he got away.
The still photographers roamed about, taking close-up shots of Gabrielli surrounded by the gaggle of reporters, of d’Agostini, who was more than willing to pose alongside Gabrielli’s shroud, and of Gabrielli’s shroud itself. The video crews moved through the crowd with their handheld cameras, getting the fill-in footage they would need to give the press conference some background context. Almost immediately, one of the reporters with a cell phone camera scooped the television reporters by posting a video of the press conference on the Internet.
Within the hour, video of Gabrielli’s news conference was being seen by millions worldwide, both on the Internet and on television.
The headlines from a largely nonbelieving and predictably cynical world press were much as expected: ITALIAN SCIENTIST REPRODUCES SHROUD OF TURIN AND SCIENTIST PROVES SHROUD OF TURIN IS A MEDIEVAL FORGERY seemed to capture the general tenor of the stories going forth that afternoon from the conference room in Bologna.
On the airplane ride back to Rome, Castle was amused at how right Gabrielli was. He had two Shroud supporters with him in the persons of Fathers Morelli and Middagh. Despite Archbishop Duncan’s initial effort to sell Father Morelli to him as a devil’s advocate Jesuit, Morelli admitted he had crossed over long ago, convinced the scientific evidence weighed in favor of the Shroud’s authenticity, despite the carbon-14 dating.
Middagh and Morelli did nothing to hide their displeasure at having to listen to an hour or more of talk from Gabrielli, who they thought lacked expertise in Shroud research.
“The Shroud of Turin Research Project discredited Walter McCrone,” Middagh said.
“Gabrielli all but admitted today that the traces of iron oxide on the Shroud are minimal,” Morelli added in an irritated tone. “Besides, the straw yellow color of the body image on the Shroud doesn’t match the color of any forms of ferric iron oxides that are known to exist.”
“Science by press release,” was how Middagh summed up Gabrielli’s performance before the international media. “He’s a publicity hound, nothing more and nothing less. If he were a true scientist, Gabrielli would have presented his findings to a peer-reviewed academic journal. Otherwise, it’s just show business.”
Listening to Fathers Middagh and Morelli grouse, Castle was convinced he was in the first stages of hearing the Vatican’s unofficial rebuttal, even though Castle was certain Pope John-Paul Peter I would never take any official position on the Shroud.
“How many times do we have to prove that the Shroud was not painted,” Morelli wondered. “Red ochre is an earth pigment that would have washed off when water was thrown on the Shroud in the 1532 fire. McCrone was an old fool who was the only member of the Shroud of Turin Research Project to think the Shroud was painted. That was his opinion going into the research project and that was the prejudice he held until he died.”
“Besides, there’s the issue of the blood on the Shroud blocking the formation of the image,” Middagh said. “How many times do we have to explain that there were two distinct steps in which the image was formed: first the blood was deposited by direct contact, then the body image was formed by a process nobody so far has explained satisfactorily. I’m sure all Gabrielli did was throw blood here and there on top of an image he already created. Look closely and I’m sure you will find a body image under the globs of blood Gabrielli painted on his shroud. If that’s what Gabrielli did, he missed an important point and his duplicate shroud will end up doing nothing to discredit the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.”
When they landed in Rome, Morelli got a call from the Vatican.
“The Vatican says we should all rest up tonight,” Morelli told Castle.
“Why?” Castle wondered.
“The pope has chartered the plane for us once again tomorrow morning,” Morelli explained. “They have scheduled us a trip to Geneva. Seems there is a scientist at CERN the pope wants us to meet.”
“Are we invited?” Ferrar asked, not wanting to be excluded.
“Yes,” Morelli said, “and the pope suggests you will want to bring along your video c
rew. The Vatican has requested for you to videotape the interview.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ferrar said.
“One more thing,” Morelli said to Castle. “The pope wants Professor Gabrielli to go along. Do you think you can arrange that? The pope will schedule an airplane to take Gabrielli directly to Geneva and return him home at the conclusion of the day.”
“I don’t know,” Castle said, not entirely surprised at Pope John-Paul Peter I’s decision to include his chemist friend on the field trip to CERN. “I will telephone him and find out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Friday
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Day 23
The name CERN derived from the acronym in French for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research. CERN was formed in 1952 as a provisional body charged with building a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. The guts of CERN were underground, consisting primarily of the Large Hadron Collider, a twenty-seven-kilometer-circumference circular tunnel built below the surface of the earth in the area between the Geneva airport and the Jura Mountains. CERN physicists use the Large Hadron Collider to smash protons together in an attempt to understand the “big bang,” which many modern physicists and astronomers believe was the origin of the universe.
Within minutes of Dr. Castle’s arrival from Rome, a limo delivered Professor Gabrielli from Bologna. Once the group was together, they were escorted down a central elevator to the office of Dr. Ruth Bucholtz, an internationally renowned particle physicist. In the past year, Dr. Bucholtz had the personal pleasure of presenting the results of her decade-long research on the Shroud of Turin to Pope John-Paul Peter I in a personal two-hour audience in the Vatican. In a conference room adjoining her office, Dr. Bucholtz set up the equipment she would need to demonstrate her conclusions about the Shroud.
Dr. Bucholtz greeted them with her thick German accent. Castle judged her to be in her early sixties. He had to admit she looked attractive in the gray pinstriped pantsuit she wore for the occasion, instead of her more customary white lab coat. Her shoulder-length silver hair blended nicely with her distinctive gray eyes. By training, Dr. Bucholtz was a Ph.D.-level physicist who studied at the Technische Universität München, or Technical University in Munich, one of Germany’s most highly acclaimed research universities in chemistry, engineering, physics, and mathematics. After graduation, she joined the physics faculty at the University of Heidelberg, where she remained until 1990, when she accepted a full-time senior research position at CERN.
Dr. Castle took the opportunity to introduce the others to Dr. Bucholtz as they took their seats in the conference room to watch her presentation.
“Do you mind if we video your presentation, Dr. Bucholtz?” Fernando Ferrar asked.
“No,” she answered. “I have no objection whatsoever. The Holy Father when he spoke to me yesterday from the Vatican expressly asked my permission.
“Thank you for coming here today,” she began, addressing Castle and others. “After Professor Gabrielli’s most interesting presentation yesterday in Bologna, the Vatican called and asked me if I would be willing to share with you the results of the research I have been doing on the Shroud of Turin for the past ten years. It may surprise you that a physicist like myself with a specialty in advanced particle physics should take an interest in the Shroud of Turin, but I estimate that after you view my presentation you will understand what drew my interest.”
Castle was not surprised. Father Bartholomew was also a particle physicist. Castle assumed Bartholomew and Bucholtz shared a lot of scientific perspectives and conclusions.
With this, an assistant in the back of the room lowered the lights. Bucholtz had projected from the computer a photograph of the Shroud of Turin displayed in the specially built vacuum-sealed display case in the Chapel of the Shroud in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin. “As you know, the Shroud is a relatively ordinary piece of linen, but what I want to explain to you here today is why I have concluded that the Shroud contains a quantum message that we can only begin to decipher with the advance equipment we have here at a world-class particle physics research laboratory such as CERN. You will have to trust me for now when I claim that the Shroud is a blueprint to a completely new understanding of our universe, an understanding for which we will have to invent a completely new science of physics.”
This got everyone’s immediate attention, particularly Castle’s. What did Dr. Bucholtz mean by a “quantum message”? What type of advanced equipment had Dr. Bucholtz used to decode the message she claimed to have read in the Shroud? What new “blueprint” could this ancient relic possibly contain? Castle was not sure. Neither was any of the other guests in the room.
“I want to start by showing you some images that were developed by Dr. John Jackson and Dr. Eric Jumper in 1976. Dr. Jackson, then an air force officer, was working as a physicist at the U.S. Air Force Academy while Dr. Jumper was an air force captain working as an assistant professor of aerodynamics with Dr. Jackson. At that time, they were utilizing a NASA-developed VP-8 Image Analyzer that was designed in the 1960s to create relief maps of the moon from astronomical photographs. Their goal was to produce topographic images that would be useful to NASA and to the U.S. astronauts preparing for moon landings. Dr. Jackson, as I am sure most of you know, went on to be a primary organizer and scientific leader of the thirty or so scientists he assembled to make up the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project. At present, Dr. Jackson heads the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, with his wife, Rebecca, in Colorado Springs.”
Next, Dr. Bucholtz displayed on the screen a copy of the 1931 photograph Giuseppe Enrie had taken of the Shroud of Turin.
“When Jackson and Jumper placed this famous 1931 photograph of the Shroud of Turin into the VP-8 Image Analyzer, they were startled to see a three-dimensional image. What jumped out was the face of the man in the Shroud of Turin in the accurate 3-D detail they would have expected to find from the 3-D topographic images the machine was design to create for moon craters. By comparison, when Jackson and Jumper analyzed a normal photograph taken of a person, the result was not a three-dimensional image, but a rather distorted jumble of light and dark shapes. The two-dimensional photograph lacked the necessary information coded within the image to produce a 3-D picture of the person, unlike the image of the Shroud.”
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 the interference pattern generated by multiple lasers hitting the object allows us to produce a three-dimensional image of the object.”
The Shroud Codex Page 23