Shroud of Turin

1750 words, 8 minute read

The piece of cloth known as the Shroud of Turin allegedly bears the image of Jesus of Nazareth. However, carbon dating suggests the item is only 700 years old and for 500 of those years it has been kept under lock and key. Yet in the course of testing the cloth, researchers found that it was now, or once had been, home to a virtual Noah’s Ark of life forms native to various spots on the globe.

But this article has nothing to do with the Shroud of Turin! Rather it’s about the way influences propagate in our world. A March 30, 2026 article in New Scientist summarized recent findings:

“The sources of genetic material include domestic cats and dogs, farm animals including chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and horses, and wild animals such as deer and rabbits. The team also found traces of some fish species, including the grey mullet, Atlantic cod and ray-finned fishes. 

“Marine crustaceans, flies, aphids, and arachnids like dust and skin mites and ticks were also identified. Some of the most common plant species whose DNA was preserved on the shroud are carrots and various wheat species, as well as peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes – plants probably brought to Europe after explorers began travelling to Asia and the Americas… 

“The team also found human DNA from many individuals who have handled the shroud, including the 1978 sampling team… (but) nearly 40 per cent of the human DNA found on the shroud is from Indian (Indian subcontinent) lineages…” Astounding!

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We imagine ourselves living on a grid. Blame Descartes for this - his system of rectilinear coordinates, etc. Also,  the Apostle John for his concept of logos (pattern, scaffolding, weir). Hold Homer accountable for Penelope’s endless weaving (Laertes’ shroud), and praise Mondrian for Broadway Boogie Woogie - all manifestations of life on the grid!  

We must blame ourselves too! We have worked the notion of grid into every nook and cranny of contemporary culture. The football field is a grid iron. A superannuated hippie is said to ‘live off the grid’ and we are concerned today about the strain that AI is putting on the electrical grid. 

Grids are useful. They allow us to keep track of process by imposing a strict order of operations, designating (arbitrarily or otherwise) certain events as causes and others as effects. When we need to write (or re-write) history, the grid hands us a pre-recorded tape. When we need to fix a problem, the grid provides a schematic that lets us quickly zero-in on the trouble spot.  

But all this convenience masks a serious problem: this is not how the real world works…not even close. But we’re used to that! We manipulate the material world based on patterns given to us by Euclidean Geometry…even though there are no straight lines or smooth curves in nature. 

This is not mere sophistry. It has a critical relevance to contemporary civilization. The Cartesian grid may be an appropriate model for the repetitive, atomized motions of an industrial Technosphere, but it breaks down utterly in today’s information rich, holistically inclined Cybersphere. 

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The Shroud of Turin turns out to be a better model of real process than anything Descartes or Newton could have imagined. Just look at the record it has kept of its journey through spacetime. The cloth we have today includes traces of the many humans who have touched it and the multiple life forms that have been touched by it, across continents and over centuries.

Change does not occur in uniform increments, and it is rarely vectored; more often, it bursts forth like dye packs in a robber’s satchel, tainting everything in its reach. Heraclitus (5th century BCE) is celebrated for linking being with process, process with flow, and flow with water. But even water has viscosity; it resists its own flow.

When your favorite rugrat spills milk on the kitchen floor, it does not immediately cover the surface and flow into the adjoining rooms. Instead it creeps along, running in rivulets, inexorably but gradually carrying out its annoying mission. It begs for Bounty (or Brawny)! But paper towels, no matter the ply, are useless in the face of dye packs exploding into a medium of low, no, or below zero viscosity.

Below? Below zero? So, negative viscosity! Is that a thing? Turns out, it is, and it applies here. “Show me!” you say? Ok, how about RCW 86, the remnants of a white dwarf star that exploded c. 180 CE. It has expanded with a velocity highly atypical of supernovae.  The current consensus: RCW 86 is exploding into an ultra-low density (viscosity) ‘cavity’ in space. 

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What kind of world do we live in? Does change evolve at a measured pace, like spilt milk, allowing us to anticipate and manage its course? Or does change erupt, often violently, without warning, and in ways we could not possibly have predicted? 

The Shroud of Turin is many things; among them, it’s its own historical record. We’re not unfamiliar with this phenomenon. According to accepted physics, all the information associated with a Black Hole resides on its surface. That is one book you can only judge by its cover! The cover is the book…well-suited perhaps to today’s short attention spans. 

Same for the Shroud. Its entire record as an historical artifact lives on its surface. And when we take the time to look, we realize that the cloth is not an object, subject to a chain of custody (chain = grid), but a whirlwind (negative pressure) attracting influences from every corner of the world.

Anthropocentric as we are, we have arbitrarily set the viscosity of water to be 1.0. On that scale, the viscosity of olive oil is 80: it is 80 times more resistant to flow than water. Best wean Junior off milk: “Let him drink oil!”

At the other end of the spectrum acetone is 70% less viscous than water: an acetone spill spreads even faster than water from Junior’s sippy cup.

But we’re not done yet! Exotic materials like liquid Helium and Quark-gluon Plasma have viscosities approaching 0. And when viscosity is negative, the rate of dispersion accelerates over time. According to most current models, the phenomenon we’ve labeled Dark Energy exhibits negative viscosity. If confirmed, that negative viscosity will ultimately…and literally…rip apart the universe and every particle in it. 

Of course, the Second Law of Thermodynamics must be obeyed; therefore, an input of energy from an external source is generally required. According to (Anthropic) Claude, “True negative viscosity is forbidden in equilibrium systems. But effective negative viscosity — where an energy-driven system behaves as if its viscosity were negative — is a real, experimentally confirmed phenomenon… and it tends to produce the same striking signature: order and large-scale structure spontaneously emerging from chaos.” 

It is as though you were watching your dad’s 1950’s home movies…backwards. Surprisingly, there are a number of real world phenomena that appear to exhibit negative viscosity. The two dimensional event horizons of black holes (above) exhibit negative viscosity, as does the turbulence within Jupiter’s GRS. (The latter feeds off energy injected by smaller ‘storms’ in the planet’s atmosphere.)

Closer to home, imagine some bacteria suspended in a drop of water. They swim around like kids in a backyard pool; nothing to see here! But now add more bacteria to the same volume of water. When the density of bacteria in the water reaches a critical tipping point, the random motions of the individual bacteria coordinate…like synchronized swimmers at the Olympics. 

Once synchronized, the individual bacteria inject their proprietary energy into the ensemble. Result: the bacterial suspension itself behaves as if the viscosity of the medium was negative.

And speaking of the Olympics, how about those cyclists? Cyclist B camps out in the wake of Cyclist A. Cyclist A experiences the medium (air) as resistance while that same medium delivers acceleration to Cyclist B, allowing the latter to conserve energy.

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Our models of the everyday world assume substantial positive viscosity (resistance): Ideas disseminate subject to the resistance of various unexamined assumptions (sacred cows); empires expand and revolutions spread subject to the resistance of existing geo-political structures (institutions). 

But what if, on a more fundamental level, micro-influences spread unimpeded? What if the foreign particles that litter the surface of the Shroud and record its history have effectively disseminated in a medium of ultra-low (< 1, 0 or even < 0) viscosity? Is that possible?

Answer #1: Yes, the Shroud itself functions as an ‘accelerator’? The travels of the cloth inject additional ‘outside’ energy into the system so that overall, influences disseminate as they would in a medium of ultra-low viscosity.

As micro-influences propagate, they become enmeshed in various macro-objects which themselves travel through spacetime. The combined rate of dissemination is indicative of an environment with ultra-low viscosity. 

Answer #2: Yes, we are not interested in the remnants of cats or carrots per se. We are concerned only with what they signify: specific spacetime locations. Building on John Wheeler’s great insight (“it from bit”), we can treat the Shroud and its contaminants as pure information and we hypothesize that information naturally spreads as it would in an ultra-low viscosity medium.

And so the saga of the Shroud of Turin takes a new and unexpected turn. Now we understand the cloth and its contaminants as, among other more important things, a vehicle for recording and propagating history, i.e. information, and we understand that the information per se flows as if in a medium of ultra-low viscosity.  

So what! Who cares? Well, you do because the shift from an algorithmic grid to a chaotic explosion undermines the whole notion of causality. Mondrian becomes Jackson Pollack. Hume’s preference for multi-dimensional correlation vs. linear causality seems ever more prescient as we recognize and explore more ultra-low viscosity environments.

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Image: The Holy Shroud by Giovanni Battista della Rovere

This 17th-century oil painting depicts the Shroud of Turin being held aloft by a group of saints, presenting the cloth as a sacred object of public veneration. The composition focuses on the physical presence of the relic, using the dramatic lighting and rich detail typical of the Baroque period to emphasize its spiritual importance. By surrounding the Shroud with religious figures, the artist highlights the connection between the physical remains of the past and the enduring faith of the community.