Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript | Hacker News Reader

Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript

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FYI: the author of this blog was just featured in an article in The Atlantic about the Voynich Manuscript.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/09/decodin...

It's a good article, and proper scholarly study by this woman is revealing a lot that legions of amateurs never figured out before--such as the strong case that there are five different scribes involved (based on handwriting analysis). That strongly suggests it's not one delusional fanatic's work, but a project of an organization, like a monastery.

Unrelated: So what are the leading theories on Voynich?

As far as I'm aware, there really aren't any firm theories, it's just a completely baffling artifact. Based on dating, it's (probably) not a forgery. It's an incredible amount of effort for the time to be just some person's fancy. There just doesn't seem to be even a theory that fits all the evidence. It's truly bizarre. I love it.

My theory that it was created by Terry Davis in his previous birth.

Either that, or https://xkcd.com/593/

It's a lot of work, but not particularly more work than a scribe would usually do.

People have always been people, we've always been creative and intelligent, and I really think the best explanation is that this is just an odd creative work. We'll never know the exact details.

My own theory: it's a product of mental illness, or long term extreme boredom - maybe a person bound to their bed?

It could be a medieval D&D game https://xkcd.com/593/

Interesting idea, maybe created a medieval-monk Terry Davis. Had he been born 600 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

Nobody has solved it. There are no leading theories.

The theories various people have had fall into three categories: it's in an unknown language, it's enciphered, or it's meaningless gibberish.

A very plausible argument I read a while back was: it is a manual of exercise and herbology and related things. The symbols in the book aren't in any language. They are like rough music notation; XXX, YY, XX etc. They are custom for the client of whoever wrote it, meaning "stretch, stretch..., bend, bend..." or something similar.

The theory isn't popular because it doesn't reveal anything but once you look at the book it seems likely. The notably thing is the symbols don't have the variation of a language - they are less complex and more locally repetitive.

The leading theory seems to be that it's meaningless gibberish, in part because asserting that it isn't requires some degree of specificity as to what it could be, and there's little agreement on that aspect. Which is to say, it's the plurality theory but far from the majority theory.

It's also known that the text makes no sense as an encipherment known in the 17th century of any known natural language. Statistical analysis of features suggests it's not random gibberish... but also distinguish it from natural language. It's also prone to a high degree of repetition or near-repetition (think phrases like "burgle bugle bugie", with one-letter changes between successive words).

Personally, I think it's gibberish that was constructed to have some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst. Or maybe even something as prosaically simple as calligraphy practice, given the unnaturally repetitive nature of a lot of the text.

Morse, ASCII and military phonetic transcribed literally (just to cite a non-machine one) all look like repetitive gibberish if you don't know what to look for.

Morse, ASCII, and military phonetic are all pretty recognizable as single-unit substitution ciphers. We've pretty much ruled out any possibility of it being a single-unit substitution cipher of any known language.

> some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst

But that's a very ahistorical theory, isn't it? The manuscript was written hundreds of years before cryptanalysts were invented. For its author to anticipate that would have required an impossible degree of foresight. Rather, whatever features give it cryptographically interesting properties must have been motivated by something other than a desire to confuse/intrigue cryptanalysts, with that just being a coincidental side-effect.

Of course not, there were scholars focused on analyzing and decrypting encrypted texts in Roman Empire and probably earlier.

Monoalphabetic ciphers are commonly referred to as "Caesar ciphers"... because Caesar used them.

Presumably the concept of a coded message followed pretty rapidly after the invention of the written message.

The last papers I read on the subject clearly stated that it appears to be a real language given the word and character distributions but it can only be a tonal language, like Sino-Tibetan or Meso-American.

Which in my opinion makes the old Marco Polo delegate theories the most probable, but all through the lenses of European culture.

One theory I never seen considered is that the text means nothing, it's a distraction or later addition unrelated or loosely related to the main content, which is all on the pictures.

In other words, the pictures are the original thing and main content. I would guess they're not about bothanical stuff, but instead use names of bothanicals and other alchemical ideas from the era it was written.

My guess is based on the idea that plant names and alchemical ideas last a long ass time. They're perfect for encoding something meant to not be changed by common text-altering techniques (adding punctuation or accents to non-puncuated or non-accented languages, deriving letter-casing from non-cased letters and so on).

There is no leading theory, just that it's legit, and most likely some healthcare related text about plants. Or related to maternal health.

Someone was able to translate portions of the Voynich Manuscript but has unfortunately removed his videos. I found a bit more info here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/voynich/comments/ev9h5v/does_anyone...

This gist is that nomadic Romani people settled around Syria and wrote it. The language and writing is a blend of several languages and cultures. The evidence in the videos backs this up pretty well.

Edit, found the videos here: https://www.reddit.com/r/voynich/comments/ev9h5v/comment/joy...

Any idea why they removed the videos? Even the reddit thread you link to is deleted...

A lot of people were speculating he would make his findings official and didn’t want to over share. I do see a comment about his theory being debunked. That would be expected, the language used was a mashup of several existing languages, so it’s possible a lot of what was written is copy-pasta gibberish. However, the video points out of a lot of cultural aspects of the book which support a Romani origin.

I watched some of the videos in the link given by nyc_pizzadev, and recall seeing them when they were first released. He's continuing the work of Stephen Bax. Romani is convenient as it allows him to pick and choose words borrowed from various languages into Romani over a wide area, so if Farsi doesn't fit, maybe Bulgarian or Uzbek might, whichever is the most convenient. But until he translates some of the VMS (a few pages in different parts of the manuscript would suffice), and his translation isn't nonsensical, he hasn't solved it.

Many have claimed to translate parts of it. What makes you find this one particularly convincing?

Thanks for sharing. I don't have the expertise to evaluate the claims, but it's certainly an interesting theory and a compelling story. Just wish he'd continued the presentation of his work.

> Multispectral imaging is a way of capturing a digital image using non-visible wavelengths such as ultraviolet and infrared.

No, it is not. It uses multiple spectrums from UV to infrared, but most of the wavelengths therein are visible. I'm working with multispectral images, and the best ones are still the whites.

Everything about this manuscript is so mysterious, the origins, the language, the plants and other drawings; still not mysterious enough that you would that it would be impossible to find a solution to all of this, I can understand the passion some researchers have for this manuscript, is there anything close to the Voynich manuscript?

There's some interesting examples in the "See Also" section on Wikipedia, e.g. the Rohonc Codex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#See_also

I read about the Rohonc Codex and it seems that most people agree that it's a hoax, the language itself doesn't seem to share the statistical property of a real language it seems, Rohonc Codex is the level of sophistication that I would expect from a hoax, the Voynich manuscript is much more than that.

for shorter form lore, known to have a sol'n, there's always the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendian_problem

Lagniappe: https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/zendiaproblem-call...

There are a bunch of ancient languages that no one can read yet like Linear A or Cretan and the different documents we have written in them. That represents a whole society whose writing we can't read though, not a (as far as we can tell) one off item.

For those who downloaded it:

Aren't those leaves over peoples heads on p.70-71 clearly Cannabis?

Maybe that can tell us something ...

Perhaps noteworthy as well is how he nailed those circles perfectly.

Also what if the work is an attempt by someone to capture for us what he saw on his psychedelic trips?

Just throwing out theories...

I'm surprised that only 10 pages were treated. Given the level of interest to this book I was sure that all the possible scans (UV, x-ray MRI etc) were performed long ago.

I love the plants that are based on sea creatures.

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