Fascinating story and topic. Infra-red photography is the pinnacle of tech in the forensic photo arena, but it is cumbersome, touchy and very time consuming. It is so fascinating to bring "hidden" details to light.
When our lab got a digital Ricoh IR SLR camera I thought we'd leaped ahead by centuries!! What used to take hours or even days would take minutes plus produce a far superior product.
The story reinforces what we know, that the scribes copying process really did work to preserve the ancient Jewish texts.
One area this high tech would be a great help is those funerary masks in Egypt from the late Roman period. The death masks were made like paper mache except they used papyrus sheets for the base material. There has been an archeologist who's been recovering parts of NT manuscripts from these masks. But its a painstaking process with the very real possibility of ruining the papyrus. If this new tech could uncover text withing those masks it would be awesome, but probably irritating to those who don't want further evidence of early NT scripture.
All this is in the realm of what's called the Electro-Magnetic Spectrum. What the human eye can see is roughly in the middle of the spectrum.
There is so much that exists, right in front of our faces, that the human eye cannot visualize. So when people say "I don't believe what I can't see", they are really saying I can't see what is right in front of my face.
There's spiritual lesson and/or a sermon in that statement.
