[Article] An Optical Approach for Decoding the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[Anton]

Although trying the mirror was probably the first step for many of us on our Voynich exploration path, I like the approach. And fig. 12a is indeed interesting.

"The mysteries of life becoming clearer
Behind the mirror"

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[Ruby Novacna]

The authors' conclusion is that the best option for decoding the manuscript is to identify meaningful words and sentences.

[Anton]

Yes, although they conclude that it's unlikely that the VMS was created using mirrors and lenses, I like the very idea of their approach - not stumbling over language mappings again & again.

I believe there's something damned simple in there, although perhaps quite elaborate, but not difficult in concept. We're just walking orthogonal to that.

[joben]

I hope I don't hijack the thread by posting this, but it reminded me a bit of this post on the Voynich Subreddit: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I think this approach to simulate the effects of an iceland spar is actually pretty clever.

[-JKP-]

It's a pretty fun article.

I like seeing creative approaches. Obviously some will not yield anything directly relevant, but out of this kind of experimentation, you can sometimes trigger new ideas, new ways of attacking a problem.

[-JKP-]

Joben, I don't know if I kept the experiments (I used Photoshop), but I tried a few things years ago. I don't think I tried doubling the text as in the example you posted (which means I didn't try enough combinations), but I did try combining some of the different tokens and different glyphs upside-down to right-side-up or mirrored and overlaid to see if it yielded anything interesting.

With the VMS I always get the feeling something is missing, but maybe it's there and just needs to be put together in the right way.


I'll look around my files and see if I kept any of it. Sometimes I delete things so that I won't get too hung up on one way of looking at things.

[-JKP-]

Looking through my files, I just realized why I stopped manipulating the text like this. I started making the shapes into little animals (it's quite easy to get little dog-like shapes by flipping tokens around and joining them). My brain always wants to turn them into objects.

[joben]

Joben, I don't know if I kept the experiments (I used Photoshop), but I tried a few things years ago. I don't think I tried doubling the text as in the example you posted (which means I didn't try enough combinations), but I did try combining some of the different tokens and different glyphs upside-down to right-side-up or mirrored and overlaid to see if it yielded anything interesting.

With the VMS I always get the feeling something is missing, but maybe it's there and just needs to be put together in the right way.


I'll look around my files and see if I kept any of it. Sometimes I delete things so that I won't get too hung up on one way of looking at things.

Experimenting with optical effects that could have been used at the time of the VMs seems like a reasonable thing to do imo. So many research hours has been spent attacking the manuscript from other angles without bearing much fruit, so why not, right?

[-JKP-]

I agree. Why not try. Maybe it's a very simple coding system based on a less-obvious process.

[Koen G]

I wonder how a mirror could change the statistical issues we face though. Entropy problems don't go away when mirrored, right?