[Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[eggyk]

I hope it works.  I would loved to see the mystery solved as much as anyone.  But I don't think matching pictures is going to do it.

"matching pictures" is basically how a vast amount of manuscripts are dated and localised. If we can work out where and when the manuscript may have been created (or where and when the content that inspired it was written) certain things may be learned that lead to a breakthrough. 

A genuinely successful image match to a certain specific written text may allow a comparison of voynichese to plaintext somehow. For example, the german manuscript "Coburg, Landesbibliothek Coburg, Ms 5" has a chapter that where the imagery undeniably matches the (decades earlier) Astrolabium planum in Latin. Lo' and behold, the german text is a translation of the original latin. If it had been ciphertext instead of german, you could probably work it out what it said, and how the cipher worked.