“Weird or What?”‘s Desperate Housewives Cocaine Mummies episode came and went in its own breathless, deathless way, a strangely mismatched mixture of gravelly voiceover (exuding Danikenesque enthusiasm) and static talking heads (with more than a frisson of frozen-in-the-headlights). Purely for review purposes, I grabbed my copy from a terrrrribly slow torrent (the 13-minute Voynich segment started at 19:45), but frankly you might want to conserve your bandwidth for something slightly more edifying (was it really waiting 20+ hours for it to arrive? I suspect not).
The main subject of the show’s producers’ interest turned out to be, ummm, Gordon Rugg. Ably assisted by “three world-class calligraphers”, Rugg proceeded to demonstrate the fullest, absurdest consequence of his ideas: that, just as he predicted, three people with carefully constructed tables and grilles could indeed have simulated something resembling Voynichese at reasonable speed… some 150 years after it was in fact written. As a piece of conceptual proto-computer science, his work remains admirable: but as a piece of history (or indeed common sense), it was nothing less than a load of nonsense. His continued insistence on defiantly proving the possibility of something which manifestly did not happen is arguably even less use than straight ‘if-Hitler-hadn’t-been-born’ counterfactuality (and that’s saying something).
At the risk of sounding like the Daily Mail, ‘when oh when’ is someone of substance going to pull the rug from under Rugg? As a career programmer myself, I would be utterly unsurprised if computer science rides to our rescue further down the line: but given that Voynich studies are nothing short of drowning in a perpetually high tide of possibilistic nonsense, Rugg’s contribution has arguably hindered discourse far more than it has helped it. As I pointed out at the time, the fact that his account didn’t square with the palaeography and the codicology right from the start was a Really Bad Sign. And now that it doesn’t square with the radiocarbon dating either, perhaps the best you can say is that it is at least consistently inconsistent. Oh well…
Really, I was far more interested to find out from “Weird or What?” that the design of contemporary running shoes may well cause more shock to the human body (by encouraging people to run with heel-strikes) than less. But as for the Voynich Manuscript? Didn’t learn a thing, sorry. 🙁
A really bad segment of a bad gee-whiz program. I predict its demise soon.
Although cocaine-snortin’ Bubba Hotep was amusing…
Also, simply could not finish The Radish. Simply bad as well. Too bad, but a mishmash and ill-written at that.
Don
Radish?
As in not the onion?
Hi, Nick:
That is correct up until the “…some 150 years after it was in fact written.” He has shown that, as you say, it “could indeed have” been made by this method, but “when” is something that we all are welcome to surmise from the historical context of such a system. I mean, the “150 years” is not Rugg’s figure, but yours… and it is open to debate.
The value of Rugg’s method is that it provides a workable technical way Voynichese can be produced. I see you and I agree on that. Perhaps it could not have been made soon after the C14 dates this way, and if so, so be it. Conversely, Rugg’s method could be the antikythera mechanism of cipher, an anachronism of history, and likewise came that much earlier than we presently believe. And both those possibles ignore the chance that the vellum was used “such and such” number of years after creation… as we do not yet know that figure.
In any case, we are welcome to dismiss Rugg’s work only at the risk of understanding the construction of the Voynich that much less… because whether or not it is “the” method, knowing how it works can stimulate other avenues of investigation. I can back that up, and will in future posts on my blog… there are things which never occurred to me, to him, to anyone that I’ve read… that can only came about with patience and understanding, and discussion of his experiments.
I will add: it seems your use of “150 years” for “too early” actually leapfrogs backwards over your own theory’s dating. I mean, can we go back to the latest C14 date of 1438 when discussing the theories of others, but move forward again, the appropriate amount, when discussing our own? Rich.
Rich: Ohhhhkayyyy… when we have some better data perhaps I’ll edit this page to tighten up the figure: but without a Philosopher’s Stone to prolong it, life is surely too short to fill it with such marginality? *sigh*
I fully appreciate Gordon’s statement that so many people have failed to find the solution because they were making unsubstantitated assumptions in their approach. We see this all the time, when people are trying out single substitution methods, but it also applies beyond this trivial example.
Perhaps, indeed, the text of the Voynich MS is meaningless, and one needs to search for a relatively simple method for producing it. Of course, only the fewest people follow this approach. If there is no meaning to the MS, or it has been lost in the process of its creation, the answer will never e found by those who ignore this possibility.
At the same time, I am fully convinced that the MS was not created using the method proposed by Gordon. There are three reasons. One of these is the C-14 dating but I don’t consider it the strongest of the three.
Another one is the style of Edward Kelley. The Voynich MS just does not fit with his personality, his interests and his other activities.
Most important, however, is that the samples generated by Gordon’s method do not really reproduce the Voynich MS text. The similarity is only superficial. If one had to set up tables to cover all words in the Voynich MS, the method would have also generated lots of words which don’t occur. This is a purely statistical problem.
Rene: Gordon’s decision to sideline the (complex and layered) codicology and (15th century) palaeography is arguably an even worse choice, because they sit atop solid bodies of well-established, well-proven historical methodology. Ultimately, because historical knowledge is incomplete, historians have to exercise considered judgement and careful reasoning to fill in the gaps, so there will necessarily be inferences running through any historical account / explanation: but this does not warrant discarding the basics if they do not sit well with your speculative narrative. In fact, the irony is surely that Gordon’s account is built upon possibly the biggest unsubstantiated assumption of the lot – Wilfrid Voynich’s claimed link between the VMs and Dee/Kelley. That Rugg’s tables only resemble rather than reconstruct Voynichese is merely the symptom of his wrongheadedness, not its cause.
Just on the historical aspect of this (which interests me even more than the cryptological aspect), Voynich was primarily interested in Dee as the bearer of Bacon manuscripts.
Kelley, however, was quite prominently present in Bohemia for a long time, both close to Rudolf and close to the Rosenbergs, and interacting with a large cirlce of important people. It is not at all unthinkable that at some point in time he may have seen or even handled the Voynich MS….
But I think we both agree he had nothing to do with its writing.
Rene: I suspect this is just clutching at (long blown away) straws. The absence of any mention of our extraordinarily odd manuscript in Tadeas Hajek z Hajku’s correspondence probabilistically pushes the VMs’ earliest arrival date in Prague back to after 1600, which (unless you happen to believe some of the more fanciful accounts of Kelley’s final few years) was probably several years after Kelley’s death. Yes, it’s not “unthinkable”… but it’s pretty unlikely.
Nick, I do think that there is a point here. *Nobody* has apparently referred to the MS until our earliest references in 1639, or at least such references have not been found yet. We know that the MS is much older than that, so perhaps it wasn’t regarded as quite as mysterious as it is now.
I suspect people were far more interersted in readable books about the secrets they were after. To put it flippantly, it wasn’t yet the book that has ‘defied interpretation for centuries’ and ‘resisted attempts from the most expert WW-II codebreakers’.
Anyway, whether or not Kelley ever saw it is not particularly relevant for me, and that Hajek never (apparently) mentioned it is. I do have reasonable hope that we will still find out more about this period of time, from possibly obscure references to it in archived material, which has only been seen by a few specialists. For this, it is necessary that more of these specialists are familiar with and interested in the Voynich MS.
Rene: for me, the biggest suspicion is that the VMs arrived in Prague very late in Rudolph’s time – my understanding is that a lot of the structure of the Golden Court had collapsed by 1610, and that most of the historiography focuses on the (frankly much easier to grasp) pre-1600 period. In fact, I’d suspect the VMs went pretty much straight to Sinapius, who was much more into distilling than writing: I agree that it must have caused ripples at court, but the issue of where best to look for those ripples remains very much open. We’ve looked under most of the lamp-posts… =:-o
Could well be very late. For example in 1609 Rudolf acquired the library of the physician and alchemist Oswald Croll, who had just died. This is as good a collection as any to have included the Voynich MS. (On a side note: Croll briefly met Kelley not long before the latter’s death 😉 ).
To search the area between the lamp posts, we need the guys with the IR goggles 🙂
Rene: …so how many ducats did Rudolph pay for Oswald Croll’s library? The only reference I’ve seen was on a Romanian VMs webpage which seems to say that Rudolph eagerly seized the trunk containing Croll’s papers. If you don’t happen to know, doubtless Rafal Prinke would… 🙂
Amazing, this Romanian site!
I don’t know how much Rudolf paid in this case. It is possible that Rafal does.
By some curious coincidence, I have a Romanian colleague who is very much interested in the Voynich MS. I definitely need to ask her what this all says…
Why didn’t anybody debunk Rugg’s hypothesis at the time he made it, by simply demonstrating that the statistical properties of his simulated Voynich are completely unlike the real thing? That’s what I’d like to know.
Julian: Jorge Stolfi did some analyses, and found that the statistical properties he looked at were actually not all that unlike the real thing…
The difference is at the syllable-to-word composition level. Your genetic algorithm is actually most suited to look at this. Given a sample of Rugg-generated Voynichese, it should easily recover the individual syllables, and at the same time this should not work nearly as well as for real Voynichese.
(I even think I once suggested this to you).
Julian & Rene: to that kind of criticism, Gordon can always say “well, if it’s not accurate enough I’ll just add some more tables”, but my real point was that he was categorically wrong before he even began, and this error would not be lessened by any number of extra tables – basically, he was putting his finger in a dyke that was already submerged on both sides. Clever CompSci, but lousy history. 🙁
Many books found their way to Prague (from both London, and the famous collections in Heidelberg) with Elizabeth and Frederick V, who were both avid collectors and readers. Almost their entire collection was left behind after the fall of Prague at the Battle of White mountain. Many thousands of books (I think the estimate is 80,000) were seized by the victorious Catholics from Prague and Heidelberg, and made a famous journey to the Vatican in a 200 mule train. Of these books, since that time, only approximately 38 have been restored.
I had written to both the Heidelberg library, and the Vatican, to see if there were any catalogs of books in either collection, or in the list of books which were seized… responses from both told me “no”. Considering that the Voynich would be the sort of thing the Palatinate would have appreciated and collected, and that the Voynich does not “appear” until 1639, but possibly existed in Prague around 1618 to 1620, that it was found in Catholic hands after this, and also, that it’s trail of provenance was dead by the time it did… I think that this possible trail could use some investigation, also. Rich.
http://proto57.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/another-path-to-prague/
Nick, this may amuse you
at some time after you noticed the silence about anything like the Vms in Tadeas Hajek’s correspondence, speculation from the blue was embedded in the wiki biography:
..Besides his work, Tadeáš Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolph II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript…
(modified 6 May 2013 at 10:03.)
By a remarkable co-incidence, that is the day (allowing for timelines) that I posted the ‘Rudolf never owned it’ post.
One suspects little boys being made to save vested interests, but synchonicity does happen.
it would be an interesting excercise to see how many other Rudolf-related bio-wiki’s have been seeded lately, but who would be bothered… very idea is yawn-worthy.
that ‘lttle boys’ comment originally ran ‘little boys having to put fingers… etc. But these days you have to be so careful.. so I changed the ending. Doesn’t read so well, either. Sorry.