The Voynich Ninja

(15-04-2024, 02:46 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the idea that he doesn't listen to the experts just isn't one of them

Well, he listens to them, and then says that they're all wrong.

(16-04-2024, 01:15 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(15-04-2024, 02:46 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the idea that he doesn't listen to the experts just isn't one of them

Well, he listens to them, and then says that they're all wrong.

Hi Rene: That is a mischaracterization of my position on this. I've tried to explain it, maybe I wasn't clear... but your version is not reflective of how I see this issue:

I do not "say they are all wrong". I respect and agree that they have seen all the varied things they observed, and the cultures, eras and styles they all believed they originated from.

And the one way to make sense of the immense disparity they all identified, the one outcome that could explain the disagreement from so many capable and experienced minds, is that the Voynich is a forgery. No genuine item would elicit such confusion among experts, because genuine articles overwhelmingly stick to the time, place and content they were made in. Forgeries make these mistakes very often, because it is difficult to create something that accurately reflects content, materials and construction limited to a "target" era and content. These are too numerous to list, and I believe the Voynich is a prime example of this effect.

No, I can't say they were "all wrong" on the forgery issue, because they were not tasked with the question, and don't seem to have even pursued it to any extent. We would have to dig them up and ask them, "Yes, you think it is Parcelcian, or New World, or by Roger Bacon, etc., but do you think it's REAL?" Well if that was the case, and one of them said, "Yes", and I disagreed... well then you would have the right to claim I said that one was wrong. If I did. But they didn't, and I don't have to.

On the other hand, it is ironic for you to claim I "say they are wrong", when, in order to believe the Voynich is 1420 and genuine, as you do, it is actually you who must actually say "they are all wrong". Which is, of course, the point of my blog post, and 80% of this discussion. I accept almost everything these people told us about the Voynich, but to believe this is real and 1420, one must reject ALL of it.

Put more simply, to be 1910 and a forgery, I can accept the judgement of Singer, Panofsky, O'Neil, and a hundred others, who all disagreed with each other. A believer in the hypothesis that this is 1420 and genuine must discard virtually all of them, representing many lifetimes of research and experience in dozens of fields of scholarship.

But again these discussions have sparked an idea: It would be interesting and enlightening to list the great many cases of which I have learned about, in which "The Experts Got it Wrong". How and why they were fooled... well, actually not "fooled", as most scholars are not looking at things as possible fakes, they are trying to identify them based on what is in front of them.

Like the Voynich. They were trying to identify it, not vet it for authenticity.

Rich.

(removed a duplicate post here)

A bit of an aside but...
In all these discussions of "experts", (and also because I am myself an engineer), I am constantly reminded of a couple of amateurs from Dayton, Ohio.  

Orville and Wilbur Wright had no formal education beyond high-school, yet they are the best examples of truly great engineers that I have ever encountered or read about. But the interesting and relevant thing about their story is the role of the "experts" of the time. One of those experts was Samual Langley who was probably the most highly regarded "expert" of the era regarding the problem of manned flight. 

During the three years that the Wright brothers worked out the problem of flight, they spent a total of $3,000. Langley, financed by the Army, spent $50,000 during that same period.  The Wright brothers efforts resulted in the first manned flights on the beach near Kitty Hawk. Langley's effort ended in the embarrassing film of his aerodrome lumbering off its perch and dropping like a rock into the Potomac River.   Because no one wanted to listen to the Wright brothers before their success (they weren't "experts" like Langley was), they were unable to get any auto-company to risk supplying them with an engine for their experiments. So they had to build their own internal combustion engine from scratch. At a time when internal combustion engines were about as high-tech as a cell phone is today, they calculated the horsepower they needed for their Flyer, designed a single stroke engine, and then got their bicycle shop employee to machine it. It lacked any cooling system (except air flow) and so it would overheat and cease up after running for a couple of minutes. Which is why their first flights were so short. It is thought that if they had had a means of cooling their engine, their first flight would not have ended after 120 ft; they instead would likely have flown the 1/2 mile to the nearby village of Kitty Hawk, if not back again.

Another leading expert of the time was Otto Lilienthal who had compiled tables of lift-and-drag for various wing shapes. Most everyone experimenting with manned flight (and there were many beside the Wright brothers) used Lilienthal's tables as the de-facto best data available. But the Wright brothers got some puzzling results during their experiments when using Lilienthal's data. Instead of figuring that the expert must be right and that they were doing something wrong, they ultimately decided that the Lilienthal was just plain wrong. That led them to spend a whole season designing and building their own wind-tunnel and force measuring devices. They compiled their own data tables from scratch,and then used them to design their propellor blades.  The Wrights' lift-and-drag tables were used by aeronautical engineers for many years after (right up to and after WWI if my memory is correct.)

There are several morals to this story:  
1) Education does not make an expert -- Experience does. 
2) One must know when to "listen to the experts" and when to say "the experts are wrong".
3) Amateurs become experts in retrospect -- after their ideas prove to be correct.

(13-04-2024, 07:17 PM)proto57 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The radiocarbon results were averaged to be made into 1404-1438, based on an assumption the Voynich is genuine, and was made in less than ten years. But the results of the individual samples actually span 60 years or more!

All of this is incorrect.
The radiocarbon results were combined. No assumption was made beforehand (*). The combination was made because the results of the four samples were clustered closely together (all within each other's standard deviation).

However, you are saying here that the time span should perhaps be expanded. Going along with that idea, it moves both Panofsky's second guess and Toresella's only guess closer to the correct answer, so that means we have four or five hits: Salomon, Panofsky (2x), Lehmann-Haupt and Toresella.

What do they have in common? Two things.
First of all, none of them was ever misled by Voynich's Roger Bacon story.
Secondly, at least Panofsky, Lehmann-Haupt and Toresella all had the opportunity to handle the original.

Now, while 1450 is a relatively hard upper limit for the age of the parchment, I would still argue that both Toresella and Panofsky (his second guess), just a few decades later, were 'pretty damn good'.

After all, there is no legible text that gives any clues, and there is no other handwriting to compare to.
Legible text can provide or imply dates, and text variations can imply age. (And in fact can be evidence of forgery).

Plenty of old books are just listed as "14th century", "15th century" etc. showing that dating of manuscripts is sometimes barely possible even for perfectly readable books.

P.S. note the absence of the word 'expert'  in the above. I find it an awkward term.

(*) Edit: it was understood by all involved at the time, including Greg Hodgins and the Beinecke responsibles, that the experiment had the capability of detecting a forgery, for example if the material turned out to be new, or had too varied dates.

(16-04-2024, 03:40 AM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are several morals to this story:  
1) Education does not make an expert -- Experience does. 

What kind of experience are we talking about when it comes to expertise on the Voynich?

(16-04-2024, 08:32 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-04-2024, 03:40 AM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are several morals to this story:  
1) Education does not make an expert -- Experience does. 

What kind of experience are we talking about when it comes to expertise on the Voynich?

What Antonio García Jiménez said. We are trying to get inside the minds of people who lived in a different time and had different ways and different ideas from what we have here in the 21st century.

Experts have been debating the age of manuscripts like The Book of Kells and the Beowulf Manuscript for decades, if not centuries, with estimates spanning hundreds of years. Dating manuscripts is subjective, in part because the science can't give us precision. C-14 dating is helpful, but not precise. Paleographic and art historical evidence are subjective, not scientific. Experts can, and do, disagree. That doesn't mean that the Book of Kells and the Beowulf Manuscript are forgeries. No one would make that argument. 

Scientific analysis cannot prove that something is authentic; it can only prove that something is inauthentic, and none of the scientific evidence has given any hint that the VMS is not an authentic fifteenth-century object. No one who has spent any time with the actual manuscript has found anything suspicious about it...not Rene, not myself, not the curators, not the conservators, etc. etc. There are simply too many things that a forger would have to get exactly right: parchment, ink, pigment, provenance, documentation, sewing threads, evidence of previous bindings, centuries of use and staining, foliation in a later style, annotations by various hands, the erased inscription on 1r, multiple scribes, linguistic patterns, etc. etc. It is unimaginable that anyone could manage that. I have seen and studied many forgeries of medieval manuscripts over the last thirty years, and there is always something clearly suspicious. There were always suspicions about the Vinland Map. There was always a sense that something wasn't right about it, even during the period when it was thought to be geniune. There were always suspicions about The Gospel of Jesus' Wife. There is nothing about the VMS as an actual object that would make anyone with experience in working with medieval manuscripts doubt its authenticity.

You cannot make a determination about the authenticity of an ancient object by studying digital images. These are three-dimensional, multi-valent objects that must be examined in person and in detail in order to issue an expert opinion.

(16-04-2024, 08:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-04-2024, 07:17 PM)proto57 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The radiocarbon results were averaged to be made into 1404-1438, based on an assumption the Voynich is genuine, and was made in less than ten years. But the results of the individual samples actually span 60 years or more!

All of this is incorrect.
The radiocarbon results were combined. No assumption was made beforehand (*). The combination was made because the results of the four samples were clustered closely together (all within each other's standard deviation).

My use of assumption is not at all wrong, I am actually quoting you on this. "Assumption" and "combined are your own words, as is the entire explanation I relate. From your page, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , you wrote,

"The uncertainty in age for each folio is some 50-60 years, and in the case of fol.68 even spans two centuries due to the above-mentioned inversions of the calibration curve. These folios have been bound together into one volume centuries ago, and the book production process is likely to have taken considerably less time than these 50-60 years. Under this assumption, and in particular the obtained result that the dating of the folios is tightly clustered (as shown above), each sheet provides a measurement or observation of the MS creation."

So if it is "incorrect", it is not my doing. I've only repeated the reasoning you have, yourself, given. It was "under this assumption", that the "book production process is likely to have taken considerably less time than these [raw data results of] 50-60 years". That is your prerogative, and Greg's or whomever, but it is a fact that this was done. I still disagree that it should have been done, as manipulating data to fit "assumptions" of any kind is bad science, in my opinion.

(16-04-2024, 08:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, you are saying here that the time span should perhaps be expanded.

No, not "expanded". I say the actual data arrived at should be left intact, and not manipulated based on any assumptions.

(16-04-2024, 08:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Going along with that idea, it moves both Panofsky's second guess and Toresella's only guess closer to the correct answer, so that means we have four or five hits: Salomon, Panofsky (2x), Lehmann-Haupt and Toresella.

What do they have in common? Two things.
First of all, none of them was ever misled by Voynich's Roger Bacon story.
Secondly, at least Panofsky, Lehmann-Haupt and Toresella all had the opportunity to handle the original.

Now, while 1450 is a relatively hard upper limit for the age of the parchment, I would still argue that both Toresella and Panofsky (his second guess), just a few decades later, were 'pretty damn good'.

But respectfully, Rene, you can't have it both ways. Yes, by retaining the actual results of the C14 data, the range is larger, and thus encompasses, or comes closer, to that list of rejected expert opinion, but the fact still remains that those expert dates are still far away from each other. They are still at odds with each other. So whatever the dating range used, mine or your adjusted one, it does not change one iota the important point that expert opinions were "all over the map", as to age, geography, content, etc..

(16-04-2024, 08:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.After all, there is no legible text that gives any clues, and there is no other handwriting to compare to.
Legible text can provide or imply dates, and text variations can imply age. (And in fact can be evidence of forgery).

Plenty of old books are just listed as "14th century", "15th century" etc. showing that dating of manuscripts is sometimes barely possible even for perfectly readable books.

P.S. note the absence of the word 'expert'  in the above. I find it an awkward term.

Again, all this discussion amply makes my overall point here, as your answers are rife with examples of it: To accept the overwhelming bulk of expert opinions, one cannot explain a genuine and 15th century Voynich manuscript. In this one comment, there is excuse after excuse as to why all those opinions should not be accepted. If anything, you have added to the list with a couple... such as now saying how it is "barely possible" to date manuscripts.

(16-04-2024, 08:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(*) Edit: it was understood by all involved at the time, including Greg Hodgins and the Beinecke responsibles, that the experiment had the capability of detecting a forgery, for example if the material turned out to be new, or had too varied dates.

Well it does have "too varied dates", that is exactly my point! No, not "proof of forgery", but there is a suspicious range there, a range which was partically erased from the record, and rarely reported when discussing the Voynich: It is always simply repeated "1404-1438" as though it was fact. What you have done here is to "unvary" the dates, then state the dates are "unvaried", by suggesting they were not "too varied". The evidence was first found, then removed, and now it is wrongly claimed it does not exist! It is like a defense attorney having the bloody knife removed on a technicality, then saying their client is innocent, because there is no bloody knife.

My championing these points, as often as I can, is to make these issues clear to everyone who is listening, so that they can make their own minds up. They need to know what has been done, and seen, and found and not found, every step of the way, so they have a true picture of the Voynich. The squeaky clean image of the manuscript as a proven old and genuine medieval artifact is an invented one. The reality is that it is sick with anachronisms, anomolies, contradictions, and lack of good evidence, which needs such manipulation of what is really "in there" to be seen otherwise. And if it is real, as you believe, it is despite the actual data, not because of it.

Rich

Rich, there's nothing at all suspicious about the C14 results. The imprecision of C14 dating is exactly why it doesn't represent absolute and sole proof and never claimed to. This is the case for every single C14 test ever conducted. The imprecision is expected. It's a feature, not a bug. C14 and all scientific tests, if they DON'T prove inauthenticity, are only one part of the evidence. 

If the parchment had been dated to the modern era, that would've settled the matter. But it wasn't. So the scientific evidence, while helpful, is not conclusive. That's why it has be combined with expert opinion, which is subjective. 

We cannot, currently, prove absolutely that the manuscript is authentic. I am happy to concede that there is a possibility that Rich is correct and that the manuscript is a modern creation. It's possible that every single manuscript is a fake. Anything is literally possible. But where the VMS is concerned, the two options - medieval vs. modern - are not equally possible. The possibility that someone, whether Voynich or someone else, could convincingly craft all of the features I listed above is so remote as to be negligible.