A case for Gibberish

[farmerjohn]

I have a general comment about the "gibberish/autocopying" theory of the Voynich ms text and the debate about it:

If we compare the decryption of the Voynich ms text to the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics, then the "gibberish/autocopying" theory would be comparable to the claim that the Riemann Hypothesis is false. But the many failed attempts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis do not at all mean that the hypothesis is false, nor do they actually constitute any serious evidence that it is false. They simply show that it is very, very hard to prove. In mathematics it is understood that one needs just as rigorous evidence to prove a hypothesis is false as one needs to prove that it is true. The same standard should apply to the gibberish/autocopying theories.

I don't think that proving gibberishness is similar to proving/disproving a mathematical theorem (Riemann Hypothesis in particular), because in case of theorem we at least know what to expect. It is either proof (which is well-defined concept ) or counterexample (in case of RH it's just a number).

What the proof of gibberishness will look like is very hard to imagine. One might think that developing the algorithm that prints the text of VMS does the thing, but it's not because one should also prove that there is no other way to generate it.