Decoding the Voynich Symbols

[tavie]

There can often be a very significant element of luck involved in breakthroughs. The Voynich manuscript is a very large document with so very many research avenues to explore. It may be that on one of the many pages there is the key to deciphering the manuscript which has either been overlooked or insufficiently studied. Things can often seem obvious when the solution is found, but may not seen so obvious beforehand.

The key is what you mean by the word "obvious". This is almost a semantic question.

My point is that breakthroughs are not down to just luck (and genius) alone.  I'm struggling to think of anyone who made a great breakthrough or any breakthrough when they were entirely or almost new to the field, especially if they avoided reading all previous literature on the subject.  Most Voynich solutions tend to be like that.  The initial breakthrough appears very quick, even if some may hang around for a while developing their system.

When you talk about there being many research avenues to explore that could have been overlooked or insufficiently studied, that's exactly what I meant by medium-high or higher hanging fruit.  I'm sure there are plenty of those still left to discover with both study and a bit of luck.  But that is not what we are talking about here.  We are talking about the kind of breakthrough that is usually made by someone relatively new to the manuscript within hours or at best days of looking at the manuscript.  I can't believe such low-hanging fruits exist.  

The idea that there is a special trap or feature unique to the Voynich manuscript that makes people believe they have made a breakthrough, when they haven't, doesn't make sense to me.

Has anyone said this?  This kind of trap is far from unique to the Voynich.  There were people who wrongly believed they had solved Linear B before Ventris did.  Both the kind of mistakes they made and the passion of their convictions are all too familiar.  

The Zodiac 340 also was known for solveritis, and there are still at least one or two who declare their solution is correct despite it being clearly inferior in every metric to the solution identified by David Oranchak et al.   Fermat's Last Theorem was also prone to solveritis, including or perhaps especially by people who weren't mathematicians - I think I once read that the adjudicators of the prize had to get someone to sort proofs into two categories:  ones that were at least real mathematics (but turned out to be wrong); and ones that were basically nonsense.  I also imagine the Indus Valley script suffers from a similar phenomenon.