Re: VMs: A cryptological assault on Strong's decryption...

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Elmar,

At 19:52 13/08/2004 +0200, Elmar Vogt wrogt:
> And one other thing I don't understand -- why are those who claim to have 
> the solution often so cryptic (pun intended) about their method of 
> decipherment -- like Strong was at places? I mean, being completely open 
> about the algorithm you employed would be the only guarantee for you that 
> nobody else could steal your thunder, right?

Strong particularly thought that he had a perfectly good technical solution 
(which nobody acknowledged), in a perfectly good plaintext language (though 
others disagreed that his plaintext made sense even as an obscure 
Northumbrian and/or Celtic dialect), and telling a perfectly good 
historical story (though Erla Rodakiewicz did remark that the snaky 
wolkenband in the VMs was distinctively 15th Century Italian) - but had 
only two pages from which he could derive his solution. Naturally, he felt 
cheated by (apparently) everyone's desire to keep him from extending his 
solution beyond those pages, by preventing his accessing the VMs itself. 
And by the time he could have gone to the Beinecke to see it (say, 
1970-1975), he had long lost interest in it. Perhaps once he believed he 
could read it, it ceased to be quite so beguiling - and the story of how 
his work was suppressed by vested interests came to be a better tale to tell.

As a side-issue, if you read the first part of William Eamon's (1994) 
"Science and the Secrets of Nature", you'll see how the kind of tension 
between secrecy and disclosure (at which you hint) lay behind the 
transition from medieval books of secrets (quintessentially, the "secretum 
secretorum") to 16th century printed books of secrets (such as Herman 
Ryff's 1542 "Kleine deutsche Apotheke"). To disclose or not to disclose, 
that is the question, right? The answer: some do, and some don't.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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