Bucholtz grabbed an ordinary credit card she had placed on the table in front of her for this demonstration. “You have all seen holograms, typically on the security elements built into credit cards that show you flying birds or some other three-dimensional object when you hold the credit card at varying angles to the light. When you rotate the card, it looks like you are seeing the three-dimensional image from different angles, even though the credit card itself remains two-dimensional, completely flat, other than the raised letters and numbers imprinted into the card’s face.”
At that point, Bucholtz turned on her laser machine and an image of the man of Turin appeared as if floating in space in front of them, as a three-dimensional hologram. Without saying a word, Bucholtz manipulated the hologram so it rotated 360 degrees, permitting Castle and his guests to see the full frontal and dorsal images of the man in the Shroud. Then Bucholtz adjusted some more gears, and the image appeared to jump right into the room, rotating in front of them as if a holographic Jesus Christ had suddenly come alive in their presence.
Fernando Ferrar had never seen anything like this, unless it was at a theme park back in the United States. He went back to his camera crew to make sure they were capturing the hologram, as best they could, on video. Looking through the lens himself, he was thrilled. The camera captured the hologram floating in space in front of them. It looked almost like Bucholtz had made the man in the Shroud come alive.
“As you can see,” she said, “I have gone one step further from the earlier demonstration on the VP-8 Image Analyzer that established the information on the Shroud was three-dimensional. What I have proved by this demonstration is that the information on the Shroud is holographic, such that you see the results right here before your very eyes. In other words, holographic information is encoded within the image of the Shroud. Until very recently, our technology did not allow us to read this information and interpret it—”
Father Middagh interrupted. “One question, please. The image of the man in the Shroud is lined by the burn marks and the triangle repairs the nuns sowed onto the cloth several hundred years ago. The burn areas destroyed parts of the image, such that we have lost the shoulders of the man in the Shroud and the forearms. Why is it that we see those parts of the body reconstructed in the hologram?”
“An excellent question,” Bucholtz said. “Without giving you the technical explanation, just accept that one of the more interesting characteristics of a hologram is that each part of the holographic image contains information about the whole image. My team here at CERN and I have learned how to take a partial holographic image, such as the Shroud, and reconstruct the whole from the parts that survived.”
“Very impressive,” Middagh said.
“Professor Gabrielli, you will have to be sure your next two-dimensional shroud contains enough information properly coded so that I can lift a three-dimensional holographic image off it.” Dr. Bucholtz made her suggestion gently, careful to mask her skepticism. She seriously doubted Gabrielli would ever be able to produce that result, especially if he was serious about limiting himself to materials and methods available to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century artists.
“So noted,” said Gabrielli, showing no sign of having taken any offense at the suggestion. Gabrielli indeed believed he could do it and his mind was already calculating several possible methodologies he might use in the effort to re-create what he was now seeing for the first time.
“My next challenge was to explain how the image might have been placed on the Shroud,” Bucholtz went on. “I began by noticing an important characteristic of the Shroud image. While the bloodstains on the Shroud may have resulted from direct contact with the body, the body image we see on the Shroud could not possibly have been produced by direct body contact.”
“What do you mean?” Castle wanted to know, not sure he was following her explanation.
“If a cloth lies on top of a person and an image is directly transferred by contact from the body to the cloth, that image would be distorted when the cloth was lifted from the body and stretched taut,” she explained. “Let me show you a series of images that illustrate my point.”
Returning to her laptop computer, Bucholtz projected onto the screen several photographs of models used to produce shroudlike images by direct contact. One of the models, in particular, had been painted head to toe. When the cloth was lifted off his body, the image looked extended and distorted, fatter than the model and out of proportion to his body.
“I came to the conclusion that the image on the Shroud could have been produced only if the body somehow floated in air,” she said. “The Shroud rapped around the man’s head had to have floated above and below the body, such that both the upper and the lower part of the Shroud were pulled completely taut in a horizontal position to the body, so as to prevent any distortion of the image when it was transferred to the cloth.”
Returning to her hologram machine, Bucholtz next generated a three-dimensional hologram of the body of the man in the Shroud floating in midair. His arms could clearly be seen resting on his abdomen and his left leg was bent forward above the right leg; also, both legs showed the bending at the knee that would have resulted from the trauma of the crucified man raising and lowering his body to breathe.
After making a few more adjustments, Bucholtz caused the Shroud itself to appear in three dimensions, wrapped around the man, but suspended above and below the body in parallel lines. Everyone in the room could see the body of the man in the Shroud projected in space before them, as if they were watching a 3-D movie, but without the red-and-blue glasses. The long linen cloth was wrapped around the head of the dead man lying on an unseen plane in space, such that the Shroud stretched taut at a distance of several inches above and below the body, reaching down to the feet on both the upper and lower sections.
Bucholtz rotated the image into the room, so the audience could see from multiple different angles the hologram of the man suspended in the air with the cloth hovering above and below him as if in parallel planes.
“If you think about it,” she said, “the dorsal image could not have been formed so perfectly as it is if the man were lying on a rock bed in a tomb. His back would have been pressed down into the cloth and distortion of the image would have been inevitable. The same is true with the frontal image. Gravity would have pulled the cloth down on the man resting on his back dead in the tomb. Wrinkles and folds would have been inevitable. The amazing thing about the image on the Shroud of Turin is that there are absolutely no distortions. The muscles of the back and buttocks are not pushed in or distended from the man lying on his back. This type of image reflects no effect of gravity whatsoever.”
Looking at the hologram floating in midair as Dr. Bucholtz talked, Gabrielli was becoming more and more convinced he was witnessing just another version of a magic show, with the only difference being that this one was produced by a highly paid physicist with an expensive piece of advanced imaging machinery. Most magicians aren’t so lucky to have the resources of CERN at their disposal.
“The image we see on the Shroud could only have been produced if the image projected up and down simultaneously, from some imaginary plane that ran through the middle of the body of the man himself,” she continued. “You have to see here how the linen burial cloth is stretched out above and below the body as if they were two parts of one artist’s canvases framed and positioned above and below the body ready for painting. Now I will draw a plane through the center of the man lying on his back. From this plane, the image is simultaneously projected upward and downward, with no spillover of the image from front to back, and with no evident distortion caused by gravity.”
“Of course, an artist would not have worried about the physical transfer process,” Gabrielli said in objection. “An artist would have worked on a stretched canvas and painted intentionally without the distortions of a cloth lying on the body at all. It would have been completely natural to have painted a front and a back image separ
ately, each without distortion.”
“Yes, you have a point,” Bucholtz conceded, “but I disagree with you that the image was painted at all. The Shroud image was imprinted on fibers of cloth that are one-tenth the diameter of hairs on your head. The image was created by what at a microscopic level would look like random coloration, much like how newsprint looks like dots when magnified. You would have needed an atomic laser machine that could place the image on the Shroud as we see it. Unfortunately, high-resolution atomic microscopes like we have available here at CERN were not available to artists working in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The very top of the linen fibrils of the cellulose fibers of the Shroud demonstrates colorization from an extremely rapid dehydration and oxidation process. It is almost as if the Shroud fibers aged in an instantaneous process similar to effects we observe with radiation. The reddish brown sepia or yellow-straw image on the Shroud appears almost as if formed in the process of the Shroud being scorched.”
“So how then do you explain how the image was formed?” Gabrielli asked, rapidly losing patience with an explanation he still considered to be nothing more than the ramblings of a theoretical physicist speculating about a religious relic outside her area of expertise.
“I believe the suspended body of Christ in the tomb entered what we call in general relativity an event horizon,” she answered.
“Excuse me if I don’t know what an event horizon is,” Gabrielli replied. “I’m just a simple chemist, not an advanced particle physicist like you.”
“An event horizon is a boundary in space-time where the normal laws of physics no longer apply,” she said. “We observe event horizons, for instance, in the area surrounding black holes in space, where light that is emitted from within the black hole is never able to escape to an observer standing outside the black hole.”
“So you are telling us, then, that Christ suspended like your hologram shows, between the sheets of the Shroud, and entered one of these so-called event horizons where his body radiated into some other dimension. Is that it?” Gabrielli asked, intending to be sarcastic.
“Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to say,” Bucholtz answered, not realizing that Gabrielli was trying to be facetious.
“So, in other words, the Shroud of Turin, in your opinion, is a kind of time machine. Is that it?” he asked.
“In a way, I guess you could say that,” she said. “My conclusion is that Christ’s body entered an event horizon in which his physical body transitioned into another space-time dimension. My hypothesis is that at the moment of transition, the body transitioned into another space-time dimension with an instantaneous burst of radiant energy. The burst of radiant energy at the instant of transition was what seared the linen cloth and formed the image. In other words, what we see today as a brownish red image imprinted on the linen Shroud was created almost as an energy scorch, as Christ’s body transitioned almost as pure energy through an unseen event horizon. Importantly, my theory validates Einstein’s famous equation that energy is a function of mass and the speed of light. In transitioning dimensions, the mass of Christ’s body transformed into a burst of energy that moved through our dimensions of space and time with the speed of light.”
Castle was not sure he comprehended the physics behind what Dr. Bucholtz was saying, but he connected instantly with the discussion at Princeton with Dr. Silver. Dr. Horton Silver and Dr. Ruth Bucholtz were saying the same thing. Deciphering the code built into the Shroud demanded comprehension of a particle physics world defined by multiple dimensions coexisting with our known dimensions of length, height, width, and time. This was what Father Bartholomew had told both of them. The point was that understanding how the Shroud was formed was not possible until advanced particle physics had pushed the envelope beyond Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
“This is why the Shroud is a negative that shows a mirrorlike reversal of the way right and left appear to the naked eye,” Bucholtz said. “When Christ’s body transformed into radiant energy, a negative was burned into the linen of the Shroud, such that the transformation of Christ’s body was a function of mass converting into energy, producing a flash of light that left the brownish red burn marks on the cloth.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Bucholtz,” Fernando Ferrar said from the back of the room. “I want to make sure what you’re telling us. You’re talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, aren’t you? With this burst of radiant energy that burned the image onto the Shroud, aren’t you saying the Shroud image was formed by the energy generated when Christ resurrected from the dead? I want to report this, but I want to be sure I get it right.”
“I guess I am,” she said. “What I am describing is how Christ’s body transfigured, much like we see the New Testament gospel describing Christ after the resurrection. Christ appears to the apostles after the resurrection almost magically, as if he chooses to leave and reenter our normal four dimensions through an unseen fifth, special dimension. The importance of quantum physics is that it allows us to see our world bounded by length, width, height, and time, but it allows us to envision a multidimensional universe that is not bounded by our ordinary understanding of time and space. What the Shroud evidences is that human beings can transform the mass of their bodies into energy so as to make the transition into another dimension with the speed of light.”
“That’s all well and good,” Ferrar said, not sure he really understood a word of what Dr. Bucholtz was saying, “but what does this have to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”
She did her best to explain. “The image of the man in the Shroud, in my judgment as a professional physicist, could only have been created by a phenomenon in which the man in the Shroud passed through into an extraordinary dimension, where, if he had been perceived as dead, he was suddenly seen as alive. In other words, it is completely conceivable to me that the man in the Shroud emerged with a transfigured body that would appear to us in our dimensions, if we could perceive it at all, as being not a physical body, but rather a body that was composed of part spirit and part physical material.”
“Okay.” Ferrar persisted. “Then what you are describing is the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”
“I am a physicist, Mr. Ferrar,” Dr. Bucholtz said, acknowledging her limits. “You are asking a religious question that I am not qualified to answer. But you can interpret what I am saying as consistent with the description of Christ’s resurrection in the New Testament, if you want to.”
Ferrar appeared pleased with that answer.
Listening carefully, Marco Gabrielli decided to interrupt, determined to take the discussion down to a much more practical level.
“Excuse me, Dr. Bucholtz,” Gabrielli began, “but if I understand you directly, a key point you are making is that the image of the man in the Shroud of Turin is three-dimensional. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” she said. “And more importantly, that the three-dimensional image has the characteristics of a hologram. In other words, we can lift a hologram of the man in the Shroud from the information contained in the brownish red image.”
“So, to produce a Shroud by means of artistic forgery, all a painter would have to do is to paint an image that was three-dimensional in nature with holographic characteristics embedded in the two-dimensional information. If I understand you, that is what the Shroud of Turin does. Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, a bit tentatively. “I guess that’s right.”
He pressed on. “So the trick is to convert the three-dimensional holographic information into the two dimensions of a flat drawing, right?”
“Where are you headed, Professor Gabrielli?” Bucholtz asked, wanting him to get to the point.
“Where I’m headed is that a brilliant forger who could think three-dimensionally might have been able to accomplish the two-dimensional image artistically, without the use of any advanced technology or hologram machine,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“What I m
ean is this.” He started carefully. “The Shroud of Turin is two-dimensional. Studying how the image appears on the Shroud of Turin should be the key to learning how to draw three-dimensionally on a two-dimensional surface. It’s kind of like how a camera obscura teaches you to draw with perspective. Once you understand how the principles of perspective work, you don’t need a camera obscura anymore. You learn how to draw a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface with the skill a painter develops by understanding perspective.”
“I see your point, Professor Gabrielli,” Bucholtz said. “But the Shroud was created before the principles of holograms were understood, so a medieval artist such as you are postulating must have been a remarkable genius.”
Gabrielli conceded that. “I agree. But we may differ in that I do not tend to discount the genius of prior ages, as you may be inclined to do.”
Castle could see where Gabrielli was headed.
Rather than being impressed that Bucholtz was in the process of deciphering what Father Bartholomew liked to call the “Shroud codex,” Gabrielli merely understood Bucholtz as establishing a higher bar he would have to hurdle to make his forgery convincing. He would have to learn how to produce two-dimensional images with three-dimensional qualities.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Saturday
The Vatican, Rome, Italy
Day 24
Dr. Castle was ushered into the pope’s office, anticipating his first face-to-face meeting with Pope John-Paul Peter I, the man he had first met when he was Cardinal Marco Vicente.
Also scheduled to be in attendance were two Vatican physicians who had examined Father Bartholomew at Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic since his arrival from New York on Wednesday morning. After their discussion, Father Morelli had arranged to bring Father Morelli from the hospital to visit with the pope and Dr. Castle in person.
The pope’s office was as ornate as Castle had imagined, with expensive paintings on the wall, and an elegant, hand-crafted, gold-embossed wood desk with a red leather desk pad expertly embedded into the writing surface. Looking around, Castle saw gold everywhere: in the side chairs at the pope’s desk—one of which he now occupied—in the woodwork, even in the wallpaper. Thick antique Middle Eastern rugs, hand-woven into intricate patterns, covered the floor.
The Shroud Codex Page 24