Decoding the Voynich Symbols

[Mark Knowles]

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.  

Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes.

From my recollection it is not uncommon for people to imply that behaviour relating to the Voynich manuscript is unusual whereas it seems to me to be part of a general phenomenon. This is why it is often argued that whilst prizes might be appropriate for solving other problems Voynich research attracts crazies where other problems don't.

There were two schoolgirls in America who recently discovered a trigonometric proof of pythagoras theorem. If someone were to stumble upon by chance a document in an archive or library that had great significance for the understanding of the Voynich manuscript then that would not surprise me. There have been many independent researchers who have made significant contributions over many years. Ramanujan comes to mind.

Then one asks how long one has to be studying the Voynich for before one can make such a breakthrough? Months/Years/Decades? It took me months to construct my theory of the rosettes folio and that was when I first started to research the Voynich, a number of years ago, was that sufficient time? Of course, I have built on this theory over a number of years through research primarily into early 15th century cryptography and my initial theory took as a start Nick Pelling's theory of the rosettes folio.