In that paper, I think Rogers only shows one micro photo of what he says is a darkened colouring in some of the few fibres he got from Gonella. To me, as someone who has looked at thousands of crystal samples through high power univ. microscopes, my first reaction to Rogers photo is that it’s really far too vague to say anything much about the image at all…
… when you look through a microscope at minute samples like that, what you see in terms of colours is highly dependent on the angle, strength and type of lighting that you are using (without the lighting you would not see anything!). I suspect that on just a few tiny fibres like that, Rogers could have easily taken a dozen very different looking photos merely by moving the slide around … so if I had to guess then I think it’s a very strong bet that what Rogers actually did was to shift the slide around and re-angle the light until he saw an image which was roughly what he hoped to see in terms of a very vague darkening on some of the strands … and then he took a photo of that, whilst ignoring the views that he got when the slide and lighting were in other positions.
Although that is of course guess, what I’m saying is - when I was looking at colour effects in crystals through a high power microscope, that sort of changing colour effect was always possible to achieve merely by altering the lighting angle and the position of the sample slide.
So in summary - the first problem with those fibres and with Rogers microscope image, is that Rogers does not actually know where those few fibres came from, and for all that Rogers knows those fibres may have absolutely nothing at all to do with the shroud. That’s really part of what I think Dinwar was pointing out to you about “Chain of Custody” … ie Rogers really has no idea where the fibres came from. Also on that point, afaik Gonella himself has never explained or said anything about where he got those fibres from.
And the second problem is that - I really don’t see anything convincing in that microscope image at all, and certainly the mere appearance of what looks like darker stains/marks on a few of tiny strands seems to me so tenuous and vague as to be not even worthy of reporting.
No it’s not “trace analysis”. Without bothering to look up a “definition”, what most chemists mean by “trace analysis” or “elemental analysis”, is making a quantitative test for the main elemental components of a samples. Eg, perhaps the sample might turn out to be 50% Iron, 10% Strontium, 5% Fluorine, 22% Oxygen etc.
All that Rogers was doing was using a standard “colour reagent test”, whereby you take your unknown sample in a test tube (in this case Rogers few Gonella fibres) and try to dissolve that unknown sample in some solvent, eg distilled water or Acetone, and then add the wet colour reagent … then if you see a visual colour reaction, you can conclude that a certain chemical was present in your unknown sample ... in this case the test was for Vanillin, and Rogers says he saw a positive test result, ie he says he saw the expected colour reaction.
But just from that brief description you should find that alarm bells ring immediately in the case of Rogers making a test like that …
… first problem is that Rogers was doing this in his own home kitchen! That is absolutely awful practice, and it’s quite astounding that the editor of Spectrochimica Acta would allow that sort of amateurishness to be ever be published …
… the reason is that you cannot have (Rogers could not have had) proper procedures to clean his glassware in just a home kitchen. That’s why these tests are done in properly equipped chemistry research labs, where there are highly dangerous but very effective cleaning reagents such as Chromic Acid used to make sure that the glassware (eg test tubes) are truly free from any tiny trace contaminants …
…. Again, in my time, I must have done many thousands of colour reagent tests like that, and frankly unless you have a fair sized sample, then the possibility of either getting a false positive just from minute contaminants, or conversely failing to see a positive reaction when in fact it should have been there (and would be seen by more careful repeated tests), is enormous.
In Rogers case, his sample was just a few microscopic insoluble cloth fibres. So that is not really a suitable sample for that sort of very crude colour reagent test in the first place … insoluble samples are no use at all, and microscopically tiny samples are fraught with danger of false positives from glassware contamination.
What Rogers was trying to do, was presumably to dissolve soluble vanillin crystals that he assumed were adhering to the surface of the fibres. But now we are getting down to samples that are order of magnitude smaller even than the microscopically small fibres themselves … and he’s trying to test for that in his own home kitchen merely by adding a wet colour reagent. OK, well I should not need to say any more about how hopelessly weak, vague and wide open to error that sort of procedure is.
Afaik, those were the only two tests that Rogers actually did, ie the microscope view and the wet vanillin test. Both of which, as I’ve tried to explain above, seem to me fraught with danger when done on such minute samples, and especially when trying to do that in his own home kitchen … frankly that sounds less like science and more like and absurd joke.
It does not matter how you think “invisible repairing” is actually done. What matters, as Flury-Lemberg has explained in print (several times) is that such “invisible” repairs are in fact always visible even to the naked eye (if you know what to look for, as she clearly does), and in any case always visible under microscope magnification, and in particular always visible from the reverse side of the repair … and especially so in the case of the shroud where there would be no need to conceal any such repair on the reverse side because the reverse was entirely covered by a backing cloth anyway.
Frankly, you should realise from all the various replies above, that the claim of an invisible repair, invisible even in any of the many hundreds and thousands of high-power microscopic photos, is nothing short of laughably absurd …
… as I have pointed out many times - if they were ever going to attempt an invisible repair, then they would surely have done that where the very obvious burn damage is right next to the image. However, those burn holes are repaired, not by anything “invisible”, but by huge great patches stitched very roughly onto the shroud.
I don’t see any plausible reason why anyone, hundreds of years ago, would have attempted an apparently impossible repair on a completely unimportant small corner of the cloth … and I don’t think you can you suggest any plausible reason for that either.
In fact, the very notion of anyone trying to claim an “invisible” repair is clearly clutching at quite hopeless straws anyway. Because what they are really now claiming is nothing less than saying that whenever parts of the shroud are scientifically tested, those parts magically become NOT actually parts of the shroud after all, and that any evidence for that is so fantastic as to be completely undetectable.
This is really just like a continued belief in unseen gods, devils and miracles … theists believe they all exist, even though whenever anyone makes a genuinely objective test to find them, it always turns out they are invisible and undetectable … usually claimed to exist “Outside space and time” … perhaps the Shroud is also “outside space and time” … when you truly test it, it appears to be very clearly a typical 13th-14th century “painted” artefact (one of very many), but if you don’t test it, or better still if you get a Christian propaganda group like STURP to test it, then of course it always turns out to be the genuine burial cloth of Jesus. The same thing always happens with holy water and miracles at Lourdes.
What have Lourdes and the Shroud got in common? No prizes for the obvious answer that they are both big commercial money spinners for the Catholic church
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