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Making The Case That Voynich Is A Hoax
DeadVulcan writes "The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious book of uncertain age, is widely believed to be written either in an unknown language or a long-lost encryption scheme. Nature reports that computer scientist Gordon Rugg has demonstrated that it's possible to generate a text like the Voynich manuscript -- containing language-like regularities, despite being potentially meaningless -- using cryptographic techniques of the time. This lends some support to those who claim that the book is a hoax."
...but it's another thing to prove it.
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
Saying that just because something could be a hoax then it is a hoax is just plain stupid. Like Fermat's Last Theorem, it may be many years before Voynich is proved to be geniune or accurate, but the absence of proof of the former doesn't provide proof of the latter. Remember, even though TLF has been proved, we still don't have the "simple proof" that Fermat himself discovered.
Saying that the manuscript is more likely to be a hoax than not just because computer scientists have theorised that it could have been faked in the 16th century is like a 25th century scholar saying that the Wright Brothers flight, the atomic bomb and the Apollo missions are more likely to be hoaxes than not just because they could have been faked with 20th century technology.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
actually very few people could write on any known topic (such as a topic for which we have a contemporaneous book in a known language) in a consistent but made-up language without being easily decipherable. We couoldn't figure out ancient egyptian because we had no idea what topic they were even talking about.... ALL it took to figure out ancient egyptian was being told (in ancient Greek, which we knew) what topic a couple of sentences of egyptian were talking about...we had no idea, having almost NO idea what various examples of the writing could POSSIBLY have stood for.
Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.
The 'true' examples of lost written languages/cyphers (do a google search) are mysteries because there exist few examples of brief length usually bereft of context (of grammar, history, linguistic evolution etc.).
The sheer volume of the Voynich manuscript, plus its origin in relatively modern Europe is what makes it so interesting to amateur cryptographers.
The Nature Paper is too brief to know how good Rugg's analysis is (and the Cryptologia site has been slashdotted), but if it holds up it is an interesting result, even if it is a conclusion that many "very smart cryptographers"(TM) have suspected for a long time
No actually "evidence" THIS broad lends no weight whatsoever. I saw this wholeheartedly as someone who has never even heard of the particular manuscript in question.
Here is what I know, partly assuming what you've said is accurate. Nobody knows when the manuscript was produced, the only evidence that indicates it's existance at a particular point may be suspect (although this is the case with much of the dates we've fixed for events in history and even the basis for several things we believe happened to the degree we call and teach them as facts). Yet this discovery claims at the time the manuscript was produced it was possible to produce fake meaningless gibberish that appears to have meaning.
Am I the only one who finds a problem with that in itself? How can you claim something was possible at the creation date when you don't know the creation date?
Next, giving that magically the date looked into did happen to coincide with the creation date that nobody knows. How exactly does a process being theoretically possible at a date get considered as evidence that is what was done in a particular instance?
Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.
I wouldn't even call that circumstantial evidence. That isn't EVIDENCE at all. Hell if there were two sticks in the lawn right under the tree, then it would become the most ridiculous circumstantial evidence that should obviously be tossed aside. But it would be the sticks that are the evidence there, not the fact that it's possible to create fire by rubbing two sticks together and the technology existed at the time. However there isn't even that much here.
"He has classic symptoms of numerous mental disorders"
;)
Without intention of implying Nostradamus was or was not one of them. The same can be said of pretty much EVERY truely great mind in human history.
Those who believe being "normal" which is equivelent to "average" is a GOOD thing aren't likely to ever join their ranks
Making up a language, that isn't just a scrambled version of an existing one, is very, very hard. It takes someone like Tolkien (a professor of Old English who could translate Norse on the fly) to do that convincingly, and I doubt that anyone in the period could have done it in a way that would still defy detection.
The problem with Occam's Razor is that I don't remember seeing it being used in any manner other than subjectively; other posts have claimed that the principle supports the notion that the manuscript is a hoax.
I'm not going to make any claims one way or the other, but please remember that Occam's Razor cannot be used based on a subjective notion of plausibility, it should only be used when two alternative theories differ in objectively enumerable ways.
If you and other purport it having a meaning then you should come forward with it. Unless you have compelling evidence, thern what you are presenting is no more no less than wishfull thinking or belief.
Indeed right now it isn't prooved at all that this manuscript has any meaning (encrypted or not) and a researcher prooved that you can reproduce most of the feature of the manuscript by using an encryption technic born a few year earlier. Furthermore the person selling it to the first known possessor was a forger. Yes not all feature are repdroduced. But this is a step forward.
The burden of proof is with you and "Then again, there's no real way of knowing." isn't an answer. At least none a scientific and a person interresed into knowing moer hold for enough. And, yes "Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble" Well I have news for you. 3.5 Kilogram gold (a prince wealth for the time) make it more likely than you wish to hold it.
You might have included a lot of link making people see your post as informative, but frankly it isn't especially your dubious use of Occam's Razor (The explanation needing the LESS number of new entity is the most probable). Sorry but to purport that the manuscript hold meaning is having one unknown new entity (from where that language come ?) more than purporting that using the clever trick aforementionned (available at that time) which hold no unknown new entity.
My final point is, Occam's razor only say you what is the most likely explanation. NOT WHAT IS THE CORRECT ONE.
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The manuscript was produced in a time when alchemy was the only science in town. Knowledge of herbal cures would've been a goldmine during that period, and studies to discover how to turn base metals into gold were the arms race of its day. Given that alchemist commonly encrypted their notes, this manuscript would've made a tempting purchase.
One overlooked thought is the amount of effort that went into encryption and decryption at the time. It's possible the manuscript was designed to intrigue the political masters who would then throw all of their decryption resources at the manuscript, at the expense of apparantly more mundane, though more important, documents and cryptographic research being ignored.
Fake, maybe. Fake what? That's another question.
An interesting conjecture, but you'd have to provide some sort of evidence to back it up. The "famous" bible codes are clearly nonsense - you can tweak the algorithm to extract just about anything from any text (see here for an example). Do you have some alternative code that stands up better to scrutiny?
Also, at the time the books in the bible were written, accurate transcription wasn't considered nearly as important as it is today. The stories were part of an oral tradition anyway, and would have evolved in the telling before ever being committed to paper. Early scribes were aware of this and would not have thought twice about "correcting" parts of the story that didn't, to them, seem to be right.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow