Cult of Dan Brown: The Voynich Manuscript

Ah, but that's precisely the issue, isn't it? What Dazzle provided was an illustration of the point I'd made about uncertainty. How do you know you're looking at something meaningful, versus gibberish?

Here you have the luxury of a living author to ask, and if he's willing to tell you one way or the other--and you trust him--you might get the resolution you're after in a reasonably short time. But if he were to keel over dead before answering you, how would you know whether his "code" was genuine?

Statistical analysis (e.g. using Zipf's laws) might be used to identify word patterns found in Western languages, and provide some encouragement that you're looking at something with sentence structure, but that makes some dangerous assumptions about the source material--and the encryption method used. Zipf's laws are useful only with codes and transliteration ciphers (which are effectively codes), not ciphers in general. Any cipher that obscures word boundaries would render Zipf's laws useless for this purpose. Just changing the plaintext from "Hello there" to "Hellothere" is enough. Modern (computer-based) encryption techniques muddle things up even further, defying statistical analysis.

So what you're left with is a puzzle with no hints, and no one able to provide any when you get stuck. Solving such a puzzle would likely take you many years, if not a lifetime. So ask yourself:

(1) What would motivate me to devote so much time to trying to solve this puzzle?

(2) What indications do I have that the author is serious and not just playing me for a fool?

There has to be a very compelling reason for people to bother trying to figure out such a puzzle, beyond simple intellectual curiosity. If it's going to take years out of someone's life, the author had better be promising something really valuable or important at the end.

Then there's the credibility issue. What do you know about the author? Is he known to be a witty fellow who plays practical jokes on his friends, or is he sober, serious type who does his work with meticulous professionalism? Given his background and other available evidence, does it seem credible that he could even possess the information he's promising, or the ability to encrypt it effectively?

Another famous example from the world of mathematics is Fermat's "Last Theorem", which states that x^n + y^n = z^n has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. In the margins of his notebook, Fermat wrote, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain." The bugger then proceeded to die without ever writing down his remarkable proof. Since then (1630), many mathematicians have devoted their entire lives and careers to trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and while some have gotten "close", no one yet has a complete proof.

Was Fermat being a smartass, or did he genuinely have a proof in mind? Was his proof even well thought-out, or were his journal musings just the product of an early inspiration that he never got to verify on paper? In this case, mathematicians have staked their careers on Fermat's reputation and previous work, all of which certainly suggested that he could have produced such a proof (if indeed the theorem is valid), and that it probably wasn't a hoax. There would be a lot fewer people working on the problem, though, if it weren't for the large cash prizes awaiting the first complete proof

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