The Yale University Rare Book Depository contains a manuscript called "the most mysterious in the world." Dozens of books and thousands of articles are devoted to the famous "Voynich manuscript", but so far no one has been able to read it. Numerous incomprehensible drawings in it only add to the mystery
"Nymphs" in the pipes
The book, 22.5x16 cm in size, consisted of 262 parchment pages, 14 of them are now lost. It is written with a quill pen in five colors. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but mostly they are characters not found in any other book. 212 pages contain drawings, thanks to which the text can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, medical and astrological. Botanical, the largest section, includes more than a hundred images of various plants and herbs. Most of them are unknown to science or fantastic. The second, astronomical, section is also designed, containing about 20 circular diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations.
Many nude female figures ("nymphs") adorn the biological section. Almost all of them are immersed in a green liquid or connected to some kind of pipes. It seems that it explains life processes, the secrets of the interaction of soul and body. The astrological section is replete with drawings of magical medallions, zodiacal signs and stars. The medical part probably contains recipes for the treatment of diseases and magical advice.
One of the pages of the biological section of the manuscript. Nude "nymphs" bathe in green liquid.
FREE EFFORT
Attempts to decipher the manuscript using the latest technological advances began in 1912, when the American second-hand bookseller Wilfrid Voynich (husband of Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of The Gadfly) bought it in Italy from the monks of the Jesuit school of Mondragon. Wanting to read the text, he provided photocopies to everyone who took on the decryption.
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At first glance, it seems that reading a manuscript that looks like a medieval herbalist is not a problem. The handwriting is even, the signs are written as if the scribe was copying a clear text. It seems as if it is written in a known language or its dialect. However, experts, philologists, could not identify him.
The case got off the ground only in 1944. Then the expert on military cryptography William Friedman suggested that the text is not only encrypted, but also written in an artificially created language. But I couldn't understand this language.
It will soon be a hundred years since the manuscript is being researched, but there is still no translation, despite the power of modern cryptanalysis and supercomputers. There are no answers to any of the questions about the origin of the text - who, where and when wrote it. But this does not mean that the task is impossible. “Supercomputers don't break codes by themselves. We need people who can guide them on the right path,”said one of the text researchers, cryptanalyst Jim Reeds.
It got to the point that patrons from the United States and Western Europe appointed huge prizes for those who decipher the manuscript. But even the leading cryptographers have not yet coped with the task.
PARCHMENT AND INK - GENUINE
It got to the point that a version appeared that the rarity was a fake, which either Voynich himself made, or those from whom he acquired it. And it is not a cipher text, but a meaningless set of characters. Recently, this version has been dominant. But at the end of 2009, at the same time at the University of Arizona (USA) and at the Research Institute of Chicago, a radiocarbon analysis of parchment and all five types of ink used in writing the manuscript was carried out. It turned out that they were about the same age and were made in 1404-1438. This means that the manuscript is about 500 years old.
And now the current owner of the rarity - Yale University announced the start of a new program to decipher it.
GENETICS HELPED
A professor of computer science from the University of Washington, Rajesh Rao, took up the job. According to him, a special computer program has already been created that makes it possible to parse ancient texts, the meaning of which has long been lost. As a basis, he took the programs that geneticists work with, trying to make DNA chains from individual genes.
"The program operates on a sequence of characters, so it can be used to study a statistical model of any set of unknown or known texts," Rao said.
The professor claims that in every language and every literary work there are necessarily words that are found more often than others, and on the basis of them one can understand the approximate meaning of the text, even without knowing it entirely.
To test his theory and the operation of the program, Rajesh Rao analyzed Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, by machine. The result was predictable: the computer showed that the main words in this work are: "species", "selection" and "islands".
The Voynich manuscript was analyzed in the same way. All the icons in the text were entered into the computer - there were 28 of them. And the computer analyzed where and in what combinations they appear in the text.
The result was unambiguous. The manuscript is not a meaningless set of icons, but real text. Moreover, its structure is similar to the European languages of the Middle Ages. The key words of the text have also been identified.
Now the matter is small. It remains to understand what these words mean. Then, according to Rao, we will be able to find out the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, even without knowing the language in which it is written.
Letter to the Fermi Laboratory. Delirium of a madman or a coded formidable message?
BTW
Nuclear physicists also received a mysterious letter
Last year, the authoritative Fermi Laboratory (USA), whose employees specialize in nuclear physics, received an unusual letter by fax. A sheet of paper with strange, incomprehensible icons. Neither the employees themselves, nor the cryptographers they turned to, nor the visitors to the laboratory's website could decipher it. The number from which the fax was sent was also not identified.
Fermi Lab is known, for example, for supplying scientific equipment for the Large Hadron Collider. And supporters of all kinds of conspiracy theories stated that this letter is a kind of warning to a scientific organization so that it does not participate in a project that could destroy the Earth.