Latest / Stuff You Should Know / How The Voynich Manuscript Works

Transcript

How The Voynich Manuscript Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, friend House Stuff Works
0:05
Speaker 1: dot Com, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and uh Noel's over there,
0:18
Speaker 1: and this is Stuff you should know. Which episode I'm
0:21
Speaker 1: not a percent sure yet. Let's do this one. Okay,
0:28
Speaker 1: how's it going. It's going pretty well, man? Yeah, yeah,
0:31
Speaker 1: how over with you? I'm pretty excited about both the shows. Yeah,
0:36
Speaker 1: these are gonna be blockbusters if we can get them right.
0:40
Speaker 1: Let's right, they're gonna break the box office. Yeah. Uh so, Chuck,
0:45
Speaker 1: where you ever? Um? Have have you ever heard of
0:48
Speaker 1: the Voytage Manuscript before? Prior to this? It's it's fairly famous. Yeah,
0:53
Speaker 1: but just a few years ago, like through working here. Yeah,
0:57
Speaker 1: thanks to the stuff they don't want you to know
0:59
Speaker 1: boys today. I'm sure they covered this already. Certainly, there's
1:02
Speaker 1: just no way. It may have been their first episode.
1:04
Speaker 1: You know. You just say the words ancient codex and
1:07
Speaker 1: guys come flying. Yeah, they're like, what do you want?
1:10
Speaker 1: When they open their trench coats and they got ancient
1:13
Speaker 1: codices aligning it. Um. Well, for those of you who
1:16
Speaker 1: don't know what the Voyage Manuscript is It is a
1:19
Speaker 1: what appears to be a legitimate medieval codex, which is
1:24
Speaker 1: stuff that was formerly a loose leaf manuscript that's been
1:29
Speaker 1: bound later on. That's what a codex is. Um. That
1:34
Speaker 1: is written in a language that no one has any
1:37
Speaker 1: idea how to read. It's never read it, it's never
1:40
Speaker 1: been seen before. Um. It doesn't appear in any other
1:43
Speaker 1: type of writing that's known to survive. And it's also
1:47
Speaker 1: illustrated with some really bizarre pictures, like otherworldly plants, women
1:54
Speaker 1: doing things that you are aren't readily identifiable. They're hears
2:00
Speaker 1: to be a recipe section, yes, pharmac pharmacological section. Yeah.
2:05
Speaker 1: It's almost like a a farmer's almanac of sorts from
2:11
Speaker 1: medieval times, written in language and depicting plants and things
2:17
Speaker 1: that have never existed. And the reason why it's it
2:21
Speaker 1: seems legitimate is that it bears a striking resemblance two
2:25
Speaker 1: similar books at the time. But those books are written
2:27
Speaker 1: in things like Old English or Italian or things that
2:31
Speaker 1: people can read, and they have pictures of plants in
2:34
Speaker 1: them that you point to and say, oh, well, that's
2:37
Speaker 1: a holly bush or something. This is not the case.
2:40
Speaker 1: The thing is a mysterious otherworldly tome that clearly made
2:45
Speaker 1: an appearance. Somehow it crossed over from a parallel multiverse
2:49
Speaker 1: into this one accidentally. Yeah, I've got my theory, which
2:51
Speaker 1: I'll just go ahead and tease the listener with it.
2:54
Speaker 1: I'll throw out later. Okay, that's it. That's your teeth.
2:59
Speaker 1: I'll throw out my you've got the theory, but I
3:01
Speaker 1: just laid mine on the table. Which is what that
3:03
Speaker 1: it's it's a book from a parallel multiverse to ours. Dude,
3:07
Speaker 1: it's slipped into this. It's like that. Have you heard
3:09
Speaker 1: that barren Stain bears theory? Yeah? Sure, I don't remember
3:13
Speaker 1: it is barren Stein. I always remember, is Barren Stain.
3:16
Speaker 1: Oh really, huh you're the only one. No, that's not true.
3:20
Speaker 1: You're one of the few. I was really surprised to
3:23
Speaker 1: hear people thought it was barren Stein. But apparently as
3:26
Speaker 1: far as that theory goes, and if you don't know
3:28
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, just like a barren Stain Bears theory,
3:30
Speaker 1: I guess. Yeah. I mean I was convinced that barren
3:34
Speaker 1: Stein Berenstein, Yeah, but not a e instead Berenstein Bears
3:40
Speaker 1: always always Barren Stain. For me, it's so weird, and
3:43
Speaker 1: I'm one of those that was so convinced. I was like, no,
3:45
Speaker 1: this is clearly some weird hoax because it's the Berenstein Bears.
3:49
Speaker 1: Everybody knows that that's so funny. And I'm not alone,
3:52
Speaker 1: like it seems like the majority of people are definitely,
3:55
Speaker 1: they're very You're one of the few barren Stainers. Well,
3:58
Speaker 1: its supposedly, according to this this hypothesis, I actually managed
4:03
Speaker 1: to slip over from a multiverse into this one without
4:06
Speaker 1: realizing it from the baron staying in the universe. So um, anyway,
4:11
Speaker 1: Let's get back to the Voyage Manuscript, shall we, because
4:13
Speaker 1: it is a real deal thing, um, and it apparently
4:18
Speaker 1: it has a certain amount of providence to it. We
4:21
Speaker 1: know about when it first popped up thanks to a
4:25
Speaker 1: seventeenth century letter that identifies it as having been purchased
4:30
Speaker 1: by one Rudolph the Second, who was the Holy Roman
4:34
Speaker 1: Emperor for a while. Um. And Rudolph loved curious things, right,
4:41
Speaker 1: he collected um little people apparently. Uh, he had a
4:46
Speaker 1: cabinet of curiosities of sorts, and he was very interested
4:50
Speaker 1: in this Voyage manuscript, so much so that he paid
4:52
Speaker 1: six hundred gold dukits for it, which is apparently about
4:56
Speaker 1: the same as ninety thou dollars today for this book
4:59
Speaker 1: because he a lot and he supposedly was the first
5:02
Speaker 1: owner of the Voyage manuscript. That's right. It has been
5:07
Speaker 1: dated um with carbon dating to the early fourteen hundreds. Uh,
5:12
Speaker 1: And it has a very strange it's not written on
5:15
Speaker 1: parchment or any kind of regular paper. It's written on
5:18
Speaker 1: calf skin, which is not a it's sort of is
5:23
Speaker 1: a somewhat of a giveaway or at least a big
5:26
Speaker 1: clue what that it dates it. Yeah, well, we'll talk
5:31
Speaker 1: about whether or not it's a hoax if someone found
5:34
Speaker 1: this this vellum, and that'd be very strange to create
5:38
Speaker 1: a hoax and dig up hundreds of year old calf skin.
5:42
Speaker 1: So it's not likely that's a hoax. No, there's all
5:45
Speaker 1: sorts of reasons it's it's not a hoax, but that
5:47
Speaker 1: that rumor still persists. So in six nine, this antique
5:52
Speaker 1: collector and progue named George Bresch he uh sent a
5:55
Speaker 1: letter to this dude uh a fantasist I think so,
6:01
Speaker 1: a fantasyist cuature. He was a scholar in Rome. And
6:04
Speaker 1: he basically said, and this is so weird to me.
6:07
Speaker 1: He's he teases this guy, It's like, I've got this thing.
6:10
Speaker 1: It's really weird. It's got all these crazy symbols and
6:13
Speaker 1: images and this alphabet that is uh, unknown to anyone.
6:18
Speaker 1: But I'm just not gonna send it t Im, just
6:20
Speaker 1: gonna tell you about it. Well, he loved it himself.
6:23
Speaker 1: He tried to crack the code himself, the guy who
6:26
Speaker 1: was the owner of it at the time. But I
6:28
Speaker 1: send that letter, just teasing the guy and be like,
6:30
Speaker 1: have a nice day, because he wanted him. He he
6:32
Speaker 1: wanted him to crack it for him, but he didn't
6:34
Speaker 1: want to give up the book. Well how can you
6:36
Speaker 1: crack it if you don't send it. Well, you can
6:38
Speaker 1: send like, um, facsimiles of it that kind of stuff.
6:41
Speaker 1: So he did that, I believe. So I know he
6:44
Speaker 1: was cracking it himself. But this guy UM an atheist
6:47
Speaker 1: Kirk creature. He uh. He was supposedly very well known
6:52
Speaker 1: at the time for having cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, even though
6:55
Speaker 1: it later turned out he had gotten it wrong. But
6:58
Speaker 1: that's why I wonder why I didn't send it to
6:59
Speaker 1: the guy. Well, the lesson has learned because um what
7:03
Speaker 1: was the dude's named barsh the original guy who wrote
7:07
Speaker 1: the letter. Yeah, George boresh So, um, he dies and
7:11
Speaker 1: he's he dedicated his life to cracking the Voynage Manuscript,
7:16
Speaker 1: which wasn't called the Voyage Manuscript by that point. No,
7:19
Speaker 1: I should point out I don't think I had a
7:20
Speaker 1: name at the time. I actually called this something. Um, well,
7:24
Speaker 1: they definitely didn't call it the Voyage Manuscript. We'll see
7:26
Speaker 1: in a minute. But um, George boresh Uh, he died
7:30
Speaker 1: and he gave it to a friend of his, Jan
7:33
Speaker 1: Mark Marcy. And Marcy is pretty good reason or supports
7:38
Speaker 1: the idea that Borresh didn't want to give up the
7:40
Speaker 1: book for good reason, because he actually did contact um
7:45
Speaker 1: the Jesuit living living in Rome Kircher and said, hey,
7:49
Speaker 1: here's the book, figure it out, and the guy never
7:53
Speaker 1: got it back. So if Borsch wanted to keep his book,
7:56
Speaker 1: he was very smart to not send it to Kircher. Well,
7:59
Speaker 1: and when he sent it, when Marcy sent it to Kircher,
8:02
Speaker 1: he said, by the way, um, I know a little
8:05
Speaker 1: bit about the background. It looks like it was of
8:07
Speaker 1: the work of Roger Bacon. Yeah, even though there was
8:10
Speaker 1: no nothing to back that up. Well there there isn't
8:13
Speaker 1: anything to back it up. And that's actually it turns
8:15
Speaker 1: out Rudolph the Second believed that it was a work
8:18
Speaker 1: of Roger Bacon when he bought it. That's right. Roger
8:21
Speaker 1: Bacon was this. Um, he was basically a proto scientist
8:25
Speaker 1: from the thirteenth century in England. And we've talked about
8:29
Speaker 1: him before, I think in the Scientific Method episode, like
8:32
Speaker 1: he really helped lay the groundwork for science in the
8:34
Speaker 1: Western world. Yeah, he's credited with a lot of things
8:36
Speaker 1: he didn't do too. Oh is that right? Yeah? Um, well, anyway,
8:41
Speaker 1: this is possibly one of them. They there's still a
8:44
Speaker 1: persistent legend that it was Roger Bacon's work, that it
8:46
Speaker 1: did come from England. But um, the prevailing ideas about
8:51
Speaker 1: the voyage manuscripts providence, um kind of drifted a little
8:55
Speaker 1: further east, as we'll see. But um, when Rudolph the
8:58
Speaker 1: Second bought the thing, uh, he thought it was Francis
9:01
Speaker 1: Bacon and all this were we know, second hand, Chuck, like,
9:05
Speaker 1: we don't. Like, there's no documents showing that Rudolph the
9:07
Speaker 1: Second purchased this book. There's not a sales receipt, no
9:11
Speaker 1: but there's something close that does kind of back it up.
9:14
Speaker 1: Rudolph the Second had a dude um named Jacobus the
9:19
Speaker 1: temper Nets I believe it's how you pronounced that, And
9:23
Speaker 1: this was his um court pharmacists, basically his court botanist um.
9:29
Speaker 1: And he was actually a really rich man. And Rudolf
9:32
Speaker 1: the Second, out of an appreciation to this guy for
9:35
Speaker 1: saving his life, gave him the Voyage Manuscript as a gift.
9:39
Speaker 1: And this dude's watermark or seal or signature appears very
9:43
Speaker 1: faintly in the Voyage Manuscript. So it definitely backs up
9:46
Speaker 1: the idea that Rudolf the Second own this book at
9:49
Speaker 1: one point in time, and it's entirely possible that he
9:52
Speaker 1: did think Roger Bacon created it, but that doesn't mean
9:55
Speaker 1: that Roger Bacon did create it. Uh So, for a
9:59
Speaker 1: couple hundred years, it kind of, you know, wasn't on
10:03
Speaker 1: the forefront of anyone's mind, basically disappeared until when here
10:09
Speaker 1: we go, Wilfrid Voynage bought it in Italy, uh and
10:13
Speaker 1: get said, I guess let's name it after me. Yeah,
10:17
Speaker 1: Well they he in the manuscript became like very uh
10:21
Speaker 1: pretty famous because he was tireless in trying to get
10:25
Speaker 1: this thing cracked. This book has this really neat um
10:31
Speaker 1: trait of like bringing people under its sway. You know,
10:34
Speaker 1: it's well, it's a mystery, it is, and everybody loves
10:37
Speaker 1: a mystery. It seems like it's possibly an impenetrable mystery,
10:40
Speaker 1: which I think makes people want to crack it even
10:43
Speaker 1: more sure because you get to be the one, you know, Yeah,
10:45
Speaker 1: and you could change the name to the Josh Clark
10:47
Speaker 1: Manuscript and say Voynage. Get bit, who's that? Do you
10:52
Speaker 1: remember some company like bought the Sears Tower and tried
10:55
Speaker 1: to change the name to their company's name for the tower,
10:59
Speaker 1: and she, howgo do you learn that a few years ago?
11:02
Speaker 1: Is it not the serious tower anymore? They tried to
11:04
Speaker 1: change Everybody's like, no, we're still calling it the Sears Tower.
11:07
Speaker 1: Oh Like even if they did change it, people are
11:09
Speaker 1: still going to call it that. Yeah, gotcha. So I
11:11
Speaker 1: think the same thing would happen with the Voyage Manuscript
11:14
Speaker 1: even if I cracked it, right. That's like with a
11:16
Speaker 1: lot of professional sports stadiums, I'll still refer to it
11:20
Speaker 1: as the original cool name and not you know, right,
11:23
Speaker 1: the r c A Dome or whatever. Although the new
11:26
Speaker 1: stadiums are are they just don't even bother naming them.
11:28
Speaker 1: They just go ahead and say who's got the most money? Right? Uh?
11:33
Speaker 1: So voyage Uh, this manuscript he worked tirelessly. Uh and
11:38
Speaker 1: it eventually ended up in modern times at Yale University
11:41
Speaker 1: in nine where it still resides today. Right. So that's
11:45
Speaker 1: just the story of it. And there's a lot more
11:47
Speaker 1: detail to who have had their hands on this thing
11:49
Speaker 1: over the years. Yeah, we'll talk about that, um right
11:52
Speaker 1: after this break. Big announcement, folks. It's called a podcast
12:07
Speaker 1: event called The Message, that's all right. Thanks to ge
12:11
Speaker 1: Podcast Theater and Panoply, there is an eight part series
12:14
Speaker 1: out right now called The Message, and you can get
12:17
Speaker 1: it wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and you know what,
12:19
Speaker 1: it's gonna blow your collective scientific minds because it's currently
12:23
Speaker 1: rocking our worlds. So The Message follows the story of
12:27
Speaker 1: Nicki Tomlin, who's a PhD in linguistics, right, that's right
12:30
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago, if I'm not mistaken, that's right.
12:33
Speaker 1: And she's following a team of cryptologists, which really, if
12:36
Speaker 1: you say cryptology, you've really got me hooked already. Their
12:40
Speaker 1: research thank tank called Cipher and they're trying to dacode
12:42
Speaker 1: a message received from outer space from seventy years ago. Yeah,
12:46
Speaker 1: it's from outer space, we think. And if you're not
12:48
Speaker 1: familiar with the story, well then I guess you'd better
12:50
Speaker 1: go listen to the message. You can get it on iTunes,
12:53
Speaker 1: you can get it on any of your podcast apps.
12:55
Speaker 1: Just go search for the message and subscribe today. So
12:58
Speaker 1: thanks to g E Podcast Theater and panopally for pushing
13:01
Speaker 1: the boundaries of the medium. You guys are doing a
13:03
Speaker 1: great job. Go subscribe to the message and listen today.
13:15
Speaker 1: So Chucky, you're saying that um Voyage, it went from
13:18
Speaker 1: Voyage ultimately to Yale, but in between that, like, Voytage
13:23
Speaker 1: really kind of brought this manuscript into the four. Like
13:27
Speaker 1: he he identified people who were professionals at cracking codes
13:31
Speaker 1: and said, can you can you do this? The first
13:35
Speaker 1: guy he went to was a University of Pennsylvania philosopher
13:39
Speaker 1: UM and he had a really weird idea of what
13:43
Speaker 1: the Voyage manuscript is really all about. Yeah, so if you, um,
13:50
Speaker 1: if you look at the Voyage manuscript, the script is
13:53
Speaker 1: like this weird really ornate lettering, right and it's actually
13:58
Speaker 1: called gallows because a lot of it were like looks
14:01
Speaker 1: a bit like a hangman's gallop, and um this uh.
14:06
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania professor philosophy professor decided that it wasn't
14:11
Speaker 1: the text itself that mattered. It was the little tiny
14:15
Speaker 1: microscopic figures that the ink made inside each letter that
14:21
Speaker 1: was the actual code. And I think Voytage like just
14:25
Speaker 1: took his manuscript back and slowly backed out of the
14:28
Speaker 1: room when the guys told him, man, yeah, he said,
14:30
Speaker 1: they corresponded to Greek letters. Uh. And he actually said,
14:35
Speaker 1: there's a message in here that confirms that it's Roger
14:37
Speaker 1: Bacon inside the inc with these Greek letters. Uh. And
14:41
Speaker 1: not only that, but Bacon well just some other theories
14:46
Speaker 1: that's not even worth getting into, other theories that Bacon
14:49
Speaker 1: hid in this inc. It was all untrue though, right.
14:54
Speaker 1: Other people went back and said, oh, let us look
14:56
Speaker 1: at these little weird um letters, microscopic letters that you're
15:01
Speaker 1: seeing in the ink. Oh, well, that's just the ink
15:04
Speaker 1: cracking as it dries, So you're nuts. Yeah, he I mean,
15:08
Speaker 1: he tried to decrypt some of it, and it held
15:10
Speaker 1: water for a little while, but it was only like
15:12
Speaker 1: a very small part that was that even matched what
15:16
Speaker 1: his decryption uh theory. So yeah, it didn't hold any water.
15:21
Speaker 1: So that was the first guy who took a real
15:23
Speaker 1: crack at it UM. The second people who did were
15:26
Speaker 1: actually world War two codebreakers UM and the guy who
15:29
Speaker 1: founded the n S a William Friedman who gets a
15:33
Speaker 1: lot of the credit, but his wife is actually at
15:36
Speaker 1: least as equal, if not as better, in in cryptography,
15:39
Speaker 1: his wife Elizabeth, and they actually UM as World War
15:43
Speaker 1: Two was waning, These people like broke the Japanese code right,
15:47
Speaker 1: the Purple Code, I think is what it was called.
15:48
Speaker 1: So they weren't like slouches as far as cryptography went. UM,
15:52
Speaker 1: but they got together as the war was waning and
15:55
Speaker 1: winding down and they weren't as needed any longer. They
15:59
Speaker 1: got a bunch of their fellow cryptographers together and said,
16:02
Speaker 1: let's work on the Voyage manuscript. And I guess they
16:05
Speaker 1: probably figured that they would have it handled in short order.
16:08
Speaker 1: That's not at all how it worked out. No, he
16:11
Speaker 1: did not figure anything out. He gave up I think
16:13
Speaker 1: he spent like thirty years working on it and then
16:16
Speaker 1: finally declared that the thing was impossibly couldn't do it
16:18
Speaker 1: and surrendered. I think it's how it was put. And
16:21
Speaker 1: so after that this thing, once this guy and his
16:25
Speaker 1: group said we can't do this, it kind of got
16:29
Speaker 1: relegated to Yale for a while, and then the internet came.
16:33
Speaker 1: That's right, So you want to talk about the book
16:36
Speaker 1: itself a little bit, man, I would love to. The
16:39
Speaker 1: book itself is two hundred and forty six pages, although
16:42
Speaker 1: they think it is missing up to uh, you know,
16:46
Speaker 1: fifty fifty five pages. Uh. I mean they don't know,
16:52
Speaker 1: but they're guessing right, it could have been up to
16:54
Speaker 1: two hundred and seventy three pages long. It's about nine
16:57
Speaker 1: inches uh tall by six inches wide, and um, like
17:02
Speaker 1: we said, it's on calf skin, which lends credence to
17:05
Speaker 1: the fact that it's from the fourteen hundreds. It it
17:09
Speaker 1: matches up with the carbon dating, so that makes some sense,
17:13
Speaker 1: it does. They think that up to eight people worked
17:17
Speaker 1: on the righting itself, and it is written from left
17:21
Speaker 1: to right, which also lends credence to the fact that
17:25
Speaker 1: could be European in nature. Makes sense, of course, uh,
17:31
Speaker 1: although there are other theories that it is from the
17:34
Speaker 1: eastern side of the world. But I don't know what
17:36
Speaker 1: evidence they have on that. There's also the theories that
17:38
Speaker 1: it's from the far west as well, if like Mexico
17:41
Speaker 1: or Central Americas. Some people say that's right. Um. And
17:44
Speaker 1: then so with the actual words themselves, the letters, there's
17:48
Speaker 1: I think forty to forty characters in this weird alphabet
17:54
Speaker 1: and understand, and that depends on who you ask. I've
17:56
Speaker 1: seen as low as fifteen. Yeah, the highest I saw
17:59
Speaker 1: is forty, but average I saw was thirty. Is what
18:01
Speaker 1: people typically cite. Um, and these things, these letters are
18:06
Speaker 1: put together to form what we would think of his words,
18:10
Speaker 1: and then the words are put together without any punctuation,
18:14
Speaker 1: and then occasionally are put into paragraphs. But for the
18:18
Speaker 1: most part, it's just like world World World word, World
18:20
Speaker 1: World Word. And then on almost every single page of
18:24
Speaker 1: the codex itself, Um, there's an illustration of some sort
18:28
Speaker 1: or another. Yeah, about two and twenty illustrations. Um. The
18:32
Speaker 1: fact that it didn't have punctuation isn't a big deal.
18:35
Speaker 1: Apparently that was pretty normal for the time, so that
18:37
Speaker 1: doesn't really give anything away. Um. And it's also not
18:42
Speaker 1: divided into chapters via text, but via illustrations. They believe
18:47
Speaker 1: it might be divided into six different chapters, which are
18:51
Speaker 1: a botanical this is where you're gonna find your weird
18:55
Speaker 1: unknown plants, um astronomical which uh zos, adiacal signs, and
19:01
Speaker 1: celestial bodies stuff like that, which are and we should
19:04
Speaker 1: say the zodiac symbols and um drawings of the zodiac
19:07
Speaker 1: are the only things that are unquestionably recognizable in the
19:10
Speaker 1: whole book, which makes it even stranger that it's not
19:14
Speaker 1: just completely fantastic. There's also some stuff that's recognizable. There's
19:19
Speaker 1: a biological chapter with naked ladies doing weird things and
19:25
Speaker 1: bathtubs um or possibly water slides. It kind of looks
19:30
Speaker 1: like in at least one a water slide. Yeah, I
19:34
Speaker 1: don't know what you would call it a water slide.
19:35
Speaker 1: Maybe it would be uh No, there's one there's a
19:38
Speaker 1: Roman aqueduct or something. There's another one though that's like
19:41
Speaker 1: it's a vertical drawing straight up and down. Uh And
19:45
Speaker 1: there's like three women that are clearly like together in
19:49
Speaker 1: the way that that three people would go down a
19:51
Speaker 1: water slide at once. There's one a little further down
19:54
Speaker 1: and she's like on her back going downward, and then
19:58
Speaker 1: there's another woman at the bottom who's like basically splashed
20:00
Speaker 1: down the almost spitting image of a water slide, a
20:04
Speaker 1: green water slide. Uh. There's cosmological um with just these
20:09
Speaker 1: weird circular patterns. It almost looks like um, like crop circles,
20:15
Speaker 1: just weird designs that make no sense. Uh. And then
20:18
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical this is where they have like different parts of
20:22
Speaker 1: plants broken down and these like jars and things that
20:25
Speaker 1: doctors you know, may have put things in right, which
20:29
Speaker 1: they did at the time in the medieval era. This
20:32
Speaker 1: is what it like a pharmacist, a doctor would have
20:35
Speaker 1: stored their pharmacological herb zoom, which is why they're like,
20:39
Speaker 1: this is the pharmacological section. And then finally, um, no
20:43
Speaker 1: illustrations in the recipe section. Uh, it's just nothing but deliciousness.
20:48
Speaker 1: I don't know how they know it was a recipe section.
20:50
Speaker 1: Even so, they divided the book up into these six
20:53
Speaker 1: chapters and they actually think that, um, remember the book
20:57
Speaker 1: was loose pages at one point, what was it, I
21:00
Speaker 1: think a hundred and twenty folded pages, um. And they
21:05
Speaker 1: think that when the whoever bounded because it was bounding
21:08
Speaker 1: goat skin of a younger age than the actual manuscript,
21:14
Speaker 1: that whoever bounded, got the pages out of order here
21:17
Speaker 1: or there, so that there's some pages that are in
21:19
Speaker 1: the wrong chapter, but that roughly it's in the right order. Yeah, uh,
21:25
Speaker 1: they have. Um. Another reason it might be Europeans because
21:29
Speaker 1: the average length of the word is four or five letters,
21:31
Speaker 1: although there are no two letter words and nothing with
21:36
Speaker 1: more than ten characters, which is just more confounding. It
21:41
Speaker 1: is because none of it is there's no consistency that
21:44
Speaker 1: points exactly in one direction basically. Well, even more confounding
21:47
Speaker 1: is there are examples of the same word used in
21:52
Speaker 1: succession two or three times. Here there up to five times,
21:56
Speaker 1: so that's very odd. You don't see that very often,
21:59
Speaker 1: and say English. Maybe they were just trying to make
22:01
Speaker 1: a point. Times they're like I like this recipe very
22:06
Speaker 1: very very very very much. You never know. Yeah, it
22:11
Speaker 1: was written by Chainsaw and Dave from Summer School, who
22:16
Speaker 1: remember that movie Summer School. They had to write like
22:19
Speaker 1: a five word essay, so they used like the last
22:21
Speaker 1: forty words where they like texas Chainsaw mask are very
22:24
Speaker 1: very very battle trick. Yeah. So check. We've laid out
22:28
Speaker 1: a lot of details here and we're not the first
22:31
Speaker 1: person in the first people who notice these details, right,
22:34
Speaker 1: Other people have and they really like studied them, especially
22:38
Speaker 1: as the use of computing and linguistics has come together
22:44
Speaker 1: in the twenty first century. And we will talk about
22:46
Speaker 1: all that jazz right after this. So chuck, there's weird
23:15
Speaker 1: things like the same word being used up to five
23:18
Speaker 1: times in a row. There's no punctuation, which apparently is
23:22
Speaker 1: fairly normal, no word over ten letters. All this stuff
23:26
Speaker 1: like it seems weird. But if you put that into
23:28
Speaker 1: a computer with what we know about language these days,
23:31
Speaker 1: you can spit out some pretty interesting conclusions about the
23:35
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript. One of the things that people have long said,
23:39
Speaker 1: especially after William Friedman and his wife Elizabeth threw up
23:44
Speaker 1: their hands and said we're done after thirty years of
23:47
Speaker 1: studying this thing, a lot of people said, it's just
23:49
Speaker 1: a hoax. It doesn't mean anything. It's gibberish. The reason
23:52
Speaker 1: that no one will ever be able to crack it
23:55
Speaker 1: is because it doesn't mean anything. And um, that's still
23:59
Speaker 1: a longstanding theory. Like you can find plenty of journal
24:03
Speaker 1: articles in um, you know, respectable pure of your journals
24:07
Speaker 1: about how this thing is hoaxed. And in fact, there
24:09
Speaker 1: was one a few years back that said, we found
24:12
Speaker 1: a Renaissance cipher key, which is used for encoding anything,
24:17
Speaker 1: but it was Renaissance era, and that if you took
24:19
Speaker 1: gibberish and put it into it, you could conceivably come
24:23
Speaker 1: up with what's in the Voyage manuscript. And everybody said,
24:26
Speaker 1: that's great, you proved that it's possible, but you didn't
24:29
Speaker 1: actually show how they did that to produce the Voyage manuscript.
24:33
Speaker 1: So the thing is still a mystery. It doesn't really
24:34
Speaker 1: prove anything, but it does support this idea that is,
24:38
Speaker 1: it's possible, and no one involved in looking at the
24:41
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript will disagree. It is possible that it is
24:45
Speaker 1: just a hoax and that it is just gibberish. So
24:48
Speaker 1: the hoax, there's a hoax theory, right, But there are
24:52
Speaker 1: plenty of other theories as to this thing, and a
24:54
Speaker 1: lot of them say, no, this thing is real. Uh yeah, Well.
24:58
Speaker 1: One theory is that it's just a language that we
25:00
Speaker 1: don't know and haven't seen. I don't buy that, no,
25:04
Speaker 1: I mean, how could this possibly be the only surviving
25:07
Speaker 1: evidence of that language you know exactly? Another theories that
25:12
Speaker 1: it's just it's so well coded that it's impenetrable. But
25:18
Speaker 1: that raises a good question too. So if you wanted
25:21
Speaker 1: to code something, especially if it were safe for art
25:26
Speaker 1: or a hoax or to show what an incredible mind
25:29
Speaker 1: you had, why would you make it so impenetrable that
25:33
Speaker 1: no one can ever possibly crack it. Yeah, it seems
25:36
Speaker 1: like you would eventually be doing that for some sort
25:38
Speaker 1: of recognition. Sure, so that kind of kicks a little bit,
25:42
Speaker 1: kicks the legs out of that theory to me, or
25:46
Speaker 1: that it's so important and secretive, like the meaning of
25:51
Speaker 1: life is contained here in and it doesn't look like
25:54
Speaker 1: it from looks like the illustrations. It doesn't because I
25:57
Speaker 1: mean you say you're correct, the illustrations are kind of
26:00
Speaker 1: hockey a little. Um, it's not the most Uh, it's
26:04
Speaker 1: not the most gorgeous book you've ever seen. If it's
26:06
Speaker 1: the Secrets in the Universe, then I'm pretty disappointed. Yeah. Yeah,
26:11
Speaker 1: what's the third theory? Uh, there's another one that, um, well,
26:17
Speaker 1: now that basically that it's gobbledygook, that that's sort of
26:21
Speaker 1: the hoax thing. There's two different parts. One that it's
26:24
Speaker 1: just gobbledygook and it was someone having fun, and another
26:26
Speaker 1: one is that it was a hoax trying to fool
26:29
Speaker 1: people into thinking something right, So that's sort of split
26:32
Speaker 1: into two parts. Uh, mental illness is another theory. Yeah,
26:36
Speaker 1: like um, Franciscan monk locked away in a room with
26:41
Speaker 1: autism who like just really went to town. Yeah, that's
26:45
Speaker 1: a that's actually a theory as well, or that it
26:48
Speaker 1: might be religious like speaking in tongues transcribed. Yeah, you
26:56
Speaker 1: want to hear my theory. Yeah, you think it's drugs. Yeah, man,
27:01
Speaker 1: so kind of like where you'll find like the doodles
27:03
Speaker 1: in a college textbook margin. I think someone uh got
27:08
Speaker 1: ahold of a lot of really good hallucinogenics and over
27:11
Speaker 1: the course of a few months did them and did this. Yeah,
27:16
Speaker 1: so went on like a three month bender and ended
27:18
Speaker 1: up spitting out the voyage spanning script or a lifelong bender.
27:21
Speaker 1: And this was just one of the things they produced.
27:22
Speaker 1: I mean, that's pretty interesting, to tell you the truth.
27:24
Speaker 1: I don't think it's pretty druggy to me. It does
27:27
Speaker 1: also again, the quality of the um the illustrations themselves
27:31
Speaker 1: kind of suggest like this is really awesome, but I
27:34
Speaker 1: don't have full control over my my motor cortex right now. Yeah.
27:38
Speaker 1: Plus it it would solve the problem of like it
27:41
Speaker 1: has meeting, or it can be transcribed, or this person
27:44
Speaker 1: was trying to get famous. Yeah, they're just making it. Yeah,
27:48
Speaker 1: so that's a pretty good theory. Um, let's go back
27:51
Speaker 1: to the hoax theory, right, Yeah, there's a lot of
27:53
Speaker 1: people who shout down the hoax theory because they say,
27:57
Speaker 1: do you know how much time this thing took? Sure, like, yeah,
28:01
Speaker 1: that's a that's one. So the hoax people would say back, well,
28:05
Speaker 1: people still made hoaxes in the Renaissance, which is the
28:08
Speaker 1: time this book first popped up. They made fraudulent medieval
28:12
Speaker 1: documents because that's when antiquarian book collecting really started and
28:15
Speaker 1: you could make some money from some suckers like Rudolph
28:17
Speaker 1: the Second. Right, So I mean there's like a there's
28:21
Speaker 1: definitely teeth in both arguments as to whether it's a
28:24
Speaker 1: hoax or whether it's not. But as we've gotten a
28:27
Speaker 1: lot better with um using computers to figure out things
28:31
Speaker 1: like statistical distribution and stuff like that, and have applied
28:34
Speaker 1: it to things like language. When looking at the Voyage manuscript,
28:38
Speaker 1: it actually follows a lot of the patterns that a
28:42
Speaker 1: natural language does, which leads a lot of people to
28:45
Speaker 1: believe that no, there's actually real meaning in the Voyage
28:49
Speaker 1: Manuscript that we just haven't unlocked. Yeah. So for example,
28:53
Speaker 1: like um, the different sections have their own vocabulary. There's
28:57
Speaker 1: words that show up and say like the pharmacological sect
29:00
Speaker 1: and do not appear anywhere in the cosmological section, which
29:03
Speaker 1: again is something that you would find in natural language.
29:06
Speaker 1: If you're reading a chapter of a textbook on cosmology,
29:10
Speaker 1: and you pick up a book on far pharmacology, like,
29:15
Speaker 1: there's gonna be words in each one that would not
29:17
Speaker 1: appear in the other one, right, And that's how the
29:20
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript is. That's a big one. There's this thing
29:23
Speaker 1: called Zip's law, which is probably a podcast episode in
29:27
Speaker 1: and of itself. But Zip's laws this weird statistical law
29:30
Speaker 1: that says that, um, say, the second most common word,
29:37
Speaker 1: the second most frequently used word, will be used twice
29:41
Speaker 1: as much as the third most frequently used word, The
29:45
Speaker 1: third most frequently used word will be used three times
29:48
Speaker 1: as much as the fourth most frequently used word. It's
29:51
Speaker 1: a really weird thing, and it appears to be a
29:53
Speaker 1: natural law, and apparently natural languages follow this kind of distribution,
29:58
Speaker 1: so does the Voyage Manuscript. So to come up with
30:00
Speaker 1: Zip's Law, which wasn't discovered until the nineteen thirties. I think,
30:06
Speaker 1: so to create this text understanding that Zip's Law was
30:10
Speaker 1: eventually going to be discovered, and then going to the
30:13
Speaker 1: trouble of predicting the frequency of these words that you're
30:16
Speaker 1: going to use and then spreading them out accordingly. Again,
30:20
Speaker 1: it's not impossible, but it's mind boggling the amount of
30:25
Speaker 1: work that would have been put into this being a hoax. Yeah,
30:28
Speaker 1: here's my deal too. Let's say it is a cipher um.
30:34
Speaker 1: From from looking at the thing, it would just end
30:36
Speaker 1: up being you know, this is this plant, this is
30:39
Speaker 1: this recipe. It just seems kind of boring to begin with.
30:44
Speaker 1: And for that reason, a lot of people hope that
30:46
Speaker 1: the Voyage Manuscript has never cracked that one was. Yeah,
30:48
Speaker 1: they don't want to discover that they Yeah, I mean
30:51
Speaker 1: like because ultimately it is there's pictures of plants there
30:54
Speaker 1: and they look weird and everything. But if we cracked
30:57
Speaker 1: this code, it would as as this one. I, um,
31:01
Speaker 1: what is his name? He a dude named Read Johnson
31:03
Speaker 1: wrote a New Yorker article on it. I don't think
31:06
Speaker 1: there's been a podcast this year where we didn't mention
31:08
Speaker 1: a New Yorker article that that magazine is banging read
31:14
Speaker 1: read Johnson said he'd put it that right now, the
31:17
Speaker 1: Voyage manuscript is in this quantum state where it's in
31:20
Speaker 1: all positions at once. But once we crack it, they'll
31:23
Speaker 1: be forced to take this collapse into this one single
31:26
Speaker 1: position and it'll lose all of its mystery or aura.
31:30
Speaker 1: It'll just be the farmer's almanact. Yeah, and that it's
31:33
Speaker 1: as it is right now. It's in basically it's perfect
31:35
Speaker 1: form to stop working people. Right. But that's not the
31:40
Speaker 1: case at all, because, as I said before, the Internet
31:42
Speaker 1: is on this and there are a lot of people
31:44
Speaker 1: who think that they have cracked it, but I haven't. Necessarily. Yeah,
31:48
Speaker 1: there's this one guy, Um Stephen Backs. He's a professor
31:52
Speaker 1: of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England,
31:56
Speaker 1: and he said he claims he's deciphered fourteen characters. The
32:00
Speaker 1: reason that this is somewhat believable because he's not saying, hey,
32:04
Speaker 1: I know what the whole thing means. He's he's being
32:07
Speaker 1: very modest and saying, of cipher deciphered only fourteen characters
32:12
Speaker 1: based on what he thinks are matching plants Juniper coriander
32:18
Speaker 1: and Hella bore uh specifically and Taurus an illustration um,
32:25
Speaker 1: basically the constellation Taurus. So he thinks, I would if
32:29
Speaker 1: you can identify those pictures, then you should be able
32:32
Speaker 1: to correspond the letters saying those names next to them. Right.
32:36
Speaker 1: He went on a hunt for like proper nouns in
32:39
Speaker 1: the text, Yeah, which is pretty good approaches. Yeah. Yeah,
32:41
Speaker 1: I think he said he identified fourteen right, fourteen characters
32:44
Speaker 1: only Oh I thought it was fourteen words, no ten words. Um,
32:50
Speaker 1: And he's the first to say, like, I might be right,
32:52
Speaker 1: it might be wrong. This is certainly not a closed case.
32:55
Speaker 1: But here's my best crack at it. Well, there's a
32:57
Speaker 1: live science article on our podcast page for this episod
33:00
Speaker 1: so that has um kind of a rundown of his discovery.
33:03
Speaker 1: And I think embedded in it is a YouTube video
33:06
Speaker 1: that he made demonstrating how he found this. Yeah, and
33:09
Speaker 1: he's not a crackpot. He seems like a good guy.
33:12
Speaker 1: He's at Bedfordshire. There's another dude, is that the latest
33:16
Speaker 1: theory is from guy named Nick pelling um Britain. Nick Pelling,
33:22
Speaker 1: I guess that's his name. I thought two thousand six. Uh,
33:27
Speaker 1: he came up with this theory. That was an Italian
33:28
Speaker 1: architect name Antonio Abolino um as the author and he says,
33:34
Speaker 1: you know what, I think this guy tried to escape
33:36
Speaker 1: a Tanbul around five and before he left recorded his
33:41
Speaker 1: knowledge of said place. UM. But basically that's been shot
33:46
Speaker 1: down for various reasons. So there are a lot of
33:49
Speaker 1: people believe that northern Italy is where it was made
33:54
Speaker 1: where it's from um. So that part's not entirely like
33:57
Speaker 1: out of the realm of possibility, but um. And the
34:01
Speaker 1: reason why they think it was actually in the Tyrolean
34:04
Speaker 1: Alps is the predominant view of where the Codex was made. UM.
34:08
Speaker 1: But if you look at some of the pictures just
34:11
Speaker 1: drawing on the margins of castles, the architecture depicted is
34:15
Speaker 1: peculiar to the Northern Alps from that time, in northern
34:19
Speaker 1: Italian Alps from that time, and usually write about in
34:22
Speaker 1: pain about what you know? Yes plus around uh trent
34:26
Speaker 1: to I believe, um, there there are some healing waters
34:30
Speaker 1: and I think possibly that's what's depicted with the women
34:33
Speaker 1: bathing and water sliding and water sliding. Uh. So I
34:39
Speaker 1: think I do agree that let's well, I mean, keep
34:41
Speaker 1: on trying, but I don't think anyone's gonna correct this thing.
34:44
Speaker 1: So I think the mystery will remain, which is kind
34:46
Speaker 1: of neat. But you do think that there's actual language
34:49
Speaker 1: encoded in it? No, I think it's drugs, Okay, So
34:52
Speaker 1: you think it's just total gibberish. Yeah, or or you know,
34:57
Speaker 1: this dude and his drug friends made up a language
34:59
Speaker 1: that exists that within their turret. But again it's following
35:04
Speaker 1: almost unpredictable, just so unbelievably complex statistical distribution of of
35:13
Speaker 1: words and letters that it's like that the genius it
35:17
Speaker 1: would take to fake that or even accidentally make it up,
35:20
Speaker 1: as I'm saying, maybe they did have have their own
35:24
Speaker 1: little language, Well they were, there were some smart burnouts. Yeah,
35:28
Speaker 1: there were a lot of smart burnouts back then. I
35:30
Speaker 1: wonder if they would be blown away to know that
35:32
Speaker 1: people were still trying to crack that code that they
35:35
Speaker 1: made in high school listening to Van Halen. Or maybe
35:38
Speaker 1: there's some other discovery yet to be made of another text,
35:43
Speaker 1: a legend, perhaps you know, a Rosetta stone as it were. Yeah,
35:47
Speaker 1: maybe they just haven't found it yet, and there maybe
35:50
Speaker 1: there's a whole series of things. Um, you would think
35:53
Speaker 1: it would have popped up by now, but you never know,
35:55
Speaker 1: or maybe that has lost the time forever. I'm sticking
35:58
Speaker 1: with the multiverse idea. Yeah, it's fun to theorize if
36:01
Speaker 1: you want to fall down a rabbit hole. I also
36:04
Speaker 1: want to say, before we sign off, go to Voynage
36:07
Speaker 1: dot nu. There is a dude named Renee zanderberg In
36:11
Speaker 1: who is a pre eminent voyage scholar. Uh, and he
36:16
Speaker 1: actually discovered a letter. It was like the the only
36:18
Speaker 1: the second letter associated with the Voyage manuscript ever discovered.
36:22
Speaker 1: The first one was discovered with the voyage manuscript. Um.
36:25
Speaker 1: So he's like hardcore knows what he's doing when it
36:28
Speaker 1: comes to the Voyage manuscript. And he's compiled this really
36:30
Speaker 1: amazing website where it's like, here's all the information we have,
36:33
Speaker 1: here's what we know. Not slanted, not like I'm right
36:37
Speaker 1: or anything. That's just a really interesting website to go
36:40
Speaker 1: check out. Does he have did you have everything pasted
36:44
Speaker 1: on his wall with like yarn at the scratched out
36:49
Speaker 1: on all the pictures. I think it's pretty neat. I
36:52
Speaker 1: mean I just like things that are unknown and you
36:55
Speaker 1: can speculate all day, and it's not one of these
36:57
Speaker 1: unknowns where, uh, you know, where skeptics can come in
37:02
Speaker 1: and say, you know, this doesn't even exist, like it's
37:06
Speaker 1: a real thing. Yeah, they're like it's a hoax. They
37:08
Speaker 1: just got their hands on some velum. But really, and
37:11
Speaker 1: they predicted that we would be carbon dating fifty years later.
37:15
Speaker 1: I don't think so, Buddy goes down. It's nice like
37:19
Speaker 1: it's a genuine bona fide mystery residing in the Yale Library.
37:25
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about the Voyage Manuscript,
37:27
Speaker 1: like I said, go to voytage dot and you. You
37:29
Speaker 1: can also visit our website at um how stuff works
37:32
Speaker 1: dot com by typing voyage in the search bar. And
37:35
Speaker 1: since I said dot and you, it's time for listener
37:39
Speaker 1: mail or the Yale Library is it on display or
37:42
Speaker 1: is it chucked away? They actually, I'm glad you brought
37:44
Speaker 1: that up. There's another um uh, the Yale Collection. They
37:49
Speaker 1: did high resolution scans of every single page. You can
37:52
Speaker 1: go on to the Yale Library site and basically browse
37:55
Speaker 1: the Voyage Manuscript. You have to have a an appointment
37:59
Speaker 1: and get permission first, which I imagine would be the
38:02
Speaker 1: result of like an extensive letter writing campaign. You have
38:04
Speaker 1: to make an appointment to go see the actual thing, yes,
38:07
Speaker 1: but I mean not just like. I'll be there at
38:09
Speaker 1: five Tuesday. How's our for your Like you have to
38:11
Speaker 1: get permission and submit your credentials and all that stuff.
38:15
Speaker 1: But you could conceivably see it. You have to be
38:17
Speaker 1: a friend of John Hondgman he holds the keys um
38:23
Speaker 1: all right, Uh okay, So the answer is they don't
38:26
Speaker 1: have it on display prominently. That's another way of saying
38:30
Speaker 1: what I said. All right, I'm gonna call this. Uh,
38:34
Speaker 1: my baby won't sleep. Hey, guys, I'm sure you get
38:37
Speaker 1: a handful of thanks every day, Actually not as many
38:40
Speaker 1: as you'd think, But I just want to offer up
38:43
Speaker 1: my thanks for my wife, my daughter, and I. My
38:45
Speaker 1: wife and I recently had a baby, Madeline. At times
38:48
Speaker 1: we find ourselves up all hours of the night attending
38:51
Speaker 1: to a sleepless baby. I think she was born on
38:53
Speaker 1: a twelve hour jet lag, and for that we take
38:56
Speaker 1: the Red Eye every night until she ad just. Uh.
39:00
Speaker 1: When we have tried every method in the book to
39:01
Speaker 1: try and get her to sleep, it just seems like
39:03
Speaker 1: nothing will do. However, we've come to find that she
39:06
Speaker 1: loves car rides. So whether it's one am, two am,
39:09
Speaker 1: or four in the morning, there's a good chance we
39:11
Speaker 1: are in the car driving around the neighborhood, listening to
39:13
Speaker 1: stuff you should know that sounds really creepy, hearing our
39:18
Speaker 1: voices echoed down empty streets. Yeah, while we're trying to
39:22
Speaker 1: get our daughter to fall asleep. And now it's cute
39:24
Speaker 1: again when I can assure you that I don't fall
39:26
Speaker 1: asleep in the cars, being the one driving, I can say.
39:28
Speaker 1: I can't say the same for my daughter. It's not
39:31
Speaker 1: to say that you guys put her to sleep, but
39:33
Speaker 1: I think it's the combination of a car seat or
39:35
Speaker 1: running engine and the background background noise of two podcasters.
39:39
Speaker 1: So thank you for keep us, keeping us up listening
39:42
Speaker 1: to your show at the same time putting my daughter
39:44
Speaker 1: to sleep. You may have the youngest stuff you should
39:46
Speaker 1: know fan at only a month old, and that is
39:49
Speaker 1: sleepless and hat Field p a wow. So we've been
39:54
Speaker 1: told by plenty of adults that we put them to sleep,
39:57
Speaker 1: so it's nice that there's just a little cute to
40:00
Speaker 1: be now. So our one month old Fan is not
40:03
Speaker 1: our youngest. We have one that's even younger one born
40:07
Speaker 1: on October. We want to wish a huge, huge hearty
40:11
Speaker 1: congratulations to our buddy Adam and serena huge congrats the
40:18
Speaker 1: utes couple. Cute baby yes uh right out of the
40:22
Speaker 1: womb cute, which is yes, not often the case, he
40:25
Speaker 1: really is. His name is Henry Hollis, so do you guys.
40:29
Speaker 1: Congratulations Henry, Welcome to the Stuff you Should Know family,
40:33
Speaker 1: and UM. Way to go, dude, agreed. Um. If you
40:37
Speaker 1: want to get in touch with us, you can tweet
40:39
Speaker 1: to us at s y s K podcast. You can
40:41
Speaker 1: join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know.
40:44
Speaker 1: You can send us uh an email to Stuff Podcast
40:48
Speaker 1: at house stuff works dot com and has always join
40:50
Speaker 1: us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should
40:53
Speaker 1: Know dot com. For more on this in thousands of
41:01
Speaker 1: other tappics, isn't Hasta works dot com