The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[proto57]

For instance, two samples of the Voynich ink contain titanium...

I suppose you mean samples 17 and 20.  But the titanium signal is weak. 

Titanium is a common contaminant of iron minerals.   Its presence in sample 17 does not imply forgery.  The Vinland Map was exposed as forgery because its ink contained not just titanium, but a titanium white -- a specific synthetic mineral of titanium that only became available in the last 200 years or so.

The (weak) signal of titanium on sample 20 is more intriguing, since that sample is from the "iron-free iron-gall ink" of a Latin letter "a" in the washed part of f1r. But that page has gone though so much that this analysis is not very significant.

By the way, the McCrone report is, how shall I say, unsatisfactory in many ways. 

All the best, --stolfi

Hi Jorge: Yes the Titanium found in the Vinland Map is (said to be) a modern, processed form of anatase, but it was even more modern than you say, and newer than (about) 1917. The process to form the observed crystals was invented a few years earlier.

But as to 'Titanium is a common contaminant of iron minerals", I don't think so, at least not as found in Medieval inks, and not in the levels found in the Voynich, although small. If you look at the Richard Hark graph, you will see that he found measurable Titanium in only one or two samples, of 120 samples, from 50 Medieval manuscripts. That is very rare. But it is also possible that those samples ARE the Voynich, which would mean that except for our favorite manuscript, none was found in the 120 manuscript sampling.

But of course the amount and type of Titanium in the forged Vinland Map and the suspected Voynich is very different, as you point out. I was only using that example to point out the use, by Hark of Yale, of "absence of evidence" AS actual evidence, which is proper and scientific. That is what he was doing here: My point was really about the watermarks (and so, "on topic"!), by demonstrating that, if we find no other examples of the same "three tasseled hat" watermark in the other (known genuine) papers of Marci, even though we cannot see every scrape of paper of his, nor the imagined "scribe" (previously used to explain observed problems with the 1665/66 letter), it is still evidence that that letter maybe inauthentic.

"Absence of evidence" can be used, and is properly used, and should be used, in the case of watermarks, exactly as it was used by Richard Hark, and often used in any scientific testing, and law, and many other intellectual endeavors. And those who propose just about any theory of the VMs, all of us, commonly use absence of evidence as evidence. It would be no different in the case of the watermarks... we don't find it where we should, and that tells us something, and that something should not be ignored or worse, dismissed.