Cipher Mysteries

Though the Voynich Manuscript has many unusual and interesting sections, arguably the most boring of the lot is Quire 20 ('Q20'). This comprises a thick-ish set of six text-only bifolios (though with a central bifolio missing), where just about every paragraph has a tiny drawing of a star/flower/comet shape attached to it. Tally all these up, and you find that Q20 as it now is has between 345 ...

A recurring motif running through my own Voynich research is trying to grasp what happened to the manuscript over time. If you examine it carefully, you'll find plenty of good reasons to think that its original ('alpha') state was significantly different to its final ('omega') state. My strong hunch is that if we were able to reconstruct how the manuscript looked in its original state, we would take a very ...

The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman's "First Study Group" of WWII cryptologists: but I've recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days ...

(I'll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don't have star ratings & I'm not one to hide what I'm thinking, so this connection shouldn't ...

As a Voynich Manuscript marginalia cognoscente, I'm always alert for new angles on the various incidental marks apparently added by its later owners. So, when Tim Tattrie left a comment about the "chicken scratch" marginalia on my recent Voynich-frontiers-circa-2010 post, I thought it was probably time to revisit them here. Tim's query was whether anyone had pursued the initials scribbled ...

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand... * * * * * * The Brazilian girl's plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely ...

I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an "easy in". Just saying "code" conjures up... Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really) Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of 'The Secret') A central McGuffin that is ...

As I mentioned here recently, I've been trying to grasp the structure of the humanist community of astronomers / mathematicians orbiting around Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome... but so far haven't found any definitively useful books on the subject. Thony Christie has a nice article here, and there's a book on 15th century Viennese ...

The Internet is a strange thing, a virtual photographer's jacket crammed with countless pockets of enthusiasts. For example, you beautiful cipher mysteries fans circulate within one bijou (but nicely-appointed) pocket, while the massed legions of Slashdot fans have a Tardis-style hyperzoom lens pocket all of their own. But... what would happen if these two worlds collided? A chance to find out came in December 2009, when ...

"The Chaocipher" is a devious cipher system invented in 1918 by John F. Byrne: allegedly, it was so complex that nobody could crack his challenge ciphertexts (even with the plaintext to refer to!), yet was so simple that its mechanism was claimed to comprise only two rotating disks small enough to fit in a cigar box, and could be operated by a ten-year-old (admittedly a ...