Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part One) This is the first installment in a two-part series. The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes… — Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” NOTE: This is a follow-up to my quiz that ran in The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” I would like you to read my essay and then take the quiz. It doesn’t matter whether you have taken it before. If you haven’t taken it before, please take it. If you have taken it before, please take it again. Wikimedia CommonsThe Torino Impact Hazard Scale Here is my confession. I picked a passage from David Deutsch’s second book, “The Beginning of Infinity” — a passage about “unprecedented safety” — and embedded it in my quiz for The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” If a one-kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth on a collision course at any time in human history before the early twenty-first century, it would have killed at least a substantial proportion of all humans.
Don’t get me wrong. G.C. Edmund de waal | potter, ceramic artist & author of the hare with amber eyes. The Voynich Manuscript. The Voynich Manuscript has been dubbed "The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World". It is considered a Manuscript codex and dates to the early 15th century (1404-1438), possibly created in northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Some pages are missing, but there are now about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations.
It's size is 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 centimetres (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in). Much of the manuscript resembles herbal manuscripts of the 1500s, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script and language remain unknown. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. The Journey of the Book The book was bought by H. Herbal. Voynich. John Baez January 30, 2005 The Voynich manuscript is the most mysterious of all texts.
It is seven by ten inches in size, and about 200 pages long. It is made of soft, light-brown vellum. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. It contains pictures of various things, including plants, stars... ... and most strangely of all, nude maidens bathing in what looks like some very elaborate plumbing: An interesting puzzle, no? Its recent history It seems that in 1912, the book collector Wilfrid M. Its earlier history When Voynich found the manuscript, there was a letter in it! The letter was written by Johannes Marcus Marci of Cronland, and addressed to Athanasius Kircher. If you don't know these figures, you probably don't realize how interesting this is. Emperor Rudolph II Rudolph II (1552-1612) was an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire - which by that time was neither holy, Roman, nor even much of an empire. Roger Bacon home. The Voynich Manuscript Decoded? I give examples to show that the code used in the Voynich Manuscript is probably a series of Italian word anagrams written in a fancy embellished script.
This code, that has been confusing scholars for nearly a century, is therefore not as complicated as it first appears. All attempts over the past century to decode this mysterious manuscript have met with failure. This is probably due to the initial error made by Voynich and his followers attributing the authorship of the manuscript to Roger Bacon, the 13th century British scientist, monk and scholar. As I showed in a previous paper on my Website, The Voynich Manuscript, was the author left handed?
, Roger Bacon could not have written this manuscript and I suggested that a young (around 8 to 10 years old) Leonardo da Vinci was a likely author. Determine the language used in writing the manuscript Correlate the Voynich alphabet with the modern English alphabet Decipher the code The Italian alphabet does not use the letter X. Voynich Manuscript. Based on the evidence of the calligraphy, the drawings, the vellum, and the pigments, Wilfrid Voynich estimated that the Manuscript was created in the late 13th century. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages.
It is written in an unknown script of which there is no known other instance in the world. The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher manuscript, sometimes attributed to Roger Bacon. Scientific text in an unidentified language, in cipher, possibly written in central Europe in the 15th century. It is abundantly illustrated with awkward coloured drawings of:: Detail from page 78r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the "biological" section "Tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs" - a fragment of page 70 Copyright: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityPage 70r Image Source >> No one really knows the origins of the manuscript.
A sample of untranslatable text from the Voynich manuscript View Voynich photos and search for "Voynich Manuscript" Dr. Voynich Manuscript. Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.
For a complete physical description and foliation, including missing leaves, see the Voynich catalog record. Read a detailed chemical analysis of the Voynich Manuscript (8 p., pdf) History of the Collection Like its contents, the history of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is contested and filled with some gaps. References Goldstone, Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. 2005. Romaine Newbold, William. 1928. Manly, John Mathews. 1921. Voynich Manuscript. Agonic lines. 12 Devil's Triangles.