Imaging Offers Options

Technology shifts paradigms, and the recent laser imaging featured on the pages of the New York Times is no exception. The Scottish team's imaging has provided a means to virtually reconstruct damaged edifices and measure the unmeasurable. It is, supposedly, superior to all the technology that was use before it.

However, I am a cynic, and I am specifically cynical that the laser technology is not plagued by some of the same challenges that apply to more traditional methods of envisioning and measuring historic structures. After all, the first measurements derived from observation were derived hundreds of years ago, and those can be highly accurate. Yet they still depend on a standard of measurement based in physical objects, which of course do decay. Likewise, laser technology isn't divorced from the physical realm. Light decays, and its measurements are based on physical standards, which also decay. And of course these machines are operated humans, and humans err.