[Book] Prof. Eleonora Matarrese * Nymðe - The Unearthing

[N._N.]

Professor, this forum is as serious and scientific as it gets for the voynich manuscript discussions.

Only if one ignores at least half the content, which is not easy.

The problem with the VMS is that 'serious' academics publish attempts to decipher the manuscript which are complete nonsense, nevertheless getting recognised by their institutions and by peer review journals. The way in which Gerard C's results were circulated without any critical assessment was one of the most embarrassing failures of academic standards that I know of. Of course, the media who picked up on the topic did nothing to remedy the issue, but their reliance on inner-academic checks is at least somewhat understandable.

In other words, when this is the state of academic publishing on the matter, it is hard to blame a forum where everyone can just create an account and start contributing for the highly varying quality of posts. I would rather compare it to the coffee table talk at an academic conference, where half-baked ideas are regularly presented with too much confidence as well, and absent third parties are often criticised harshly. While this behaviour can push people with interesting heterodox ideas out of the academic mainstream, it also serves as an important assessment of the validity of new ideas that even peer review often cannot offer. Some kind of informal exchange of scepticism is valuable on its own.

For that reason, i heavily disagree with Prof. E. Matarrese's complaint that this forum lacks civility compared to academic discourse (or, apparently, to my surprise, Facebook?). On the contrary, research on the VMS really needs all the nonsense publications to get called out for what they are. Just to avoid misunderstandings, let me emphasise that I do not claim Matarrese's works are nonsense, I have not reviewed them. I would just reiterate that, no matter what the academic standing of the author, every claim of decipherment should be assessed with the highest degree of scrutiny.