Stuff You Should Know - How The Voynich Manuscript Works

Episode Date: November 12, 2015

Since its re-discovery in the early 20th century, the Medieval codex the Voynich Manuscript has thoroughly puzzled anyone who has tried to unlock its secret language and bizarre drawings. Will it ever give up its secrets? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Even welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Noel's over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

Which episode, I'm not 100% sure yet. Let's do this one. Okay. How's it going? It's going pretty well, man. Yeah? How about with you? I'm pretty excited about both of the shows.

Yeah, these are gonna be blockbusters if we can get them right. That's right, they're gonna break the box office. Yeah. So Chuck, have you ever heard of the Voynich manuscript before, prior to this? I had. It's fairly famous.

Yeah, but just a few years ago, like, through working here. Yeah, thanks to the stuff they don't want you to know, boys. How did they, I'm sure they covered this already, huh? Certainly, yeah. There's just no way. It may have been their first episode, you know? You just say the words, ancient codex, and these guys come flying.

Yeah, they're like, what do you want? They open their trench coats, and they've got ancient codices lining it. Well, for those of you who don't know what the Voynich manuscript is, it is what appears to be a legitimate medieval codex, which is stuff that was formerly a loose leaf manuscript that's been bound later on.

That's what a codex is. Yeah. That is written in a language that no one has any idea how to read. It's never been seen before. Yeah. It doesn't appear in any other type of writing that's known to survive.

Yeah. It's also illustrated with some really bizarre pictures. Yeah. Like other worldly plants, women doing things that aren't readily identifiable. Yeah. There appears to be a recipe section. Yes.

Pharmacological section. Yeah, it's almost like a farmer's almanac of sorts from medieval times written in language and depicting plants and things that have never existed. Right. And the reason why it seems legitimate is that it bears a striking resemblance to similar books at the time.

But those books are written in things like Old English or Italian or things that people can read and they have pictures of plants in them that you point to and say, oh, well, that's a holly bush or something. Right. This is not the case. This thing is a mysterious otherworldly tome

that clearly made an appearance. Somehow it crossed over from a parallel multiverse into this one accidentally. Yeah, I've got my theory, which I'll just go ahead and tease the listener with it. I'll throw out later. Oh, okay. That's it.

That's your tease? Yeah. I'll throw out mine. You've got a theory. My theory? Well, I just laid mine on the table. Which is what? It's a book from a parallel multiverse to ours.

Dude, I like it. It's slipped into this. It's like that. Have you heard that Barron Stain Bears theory? Yeah, sure. I don't remember it as Barron Stain. I always remember it as Barron Stain. Oh, really?

You're the only one. No, that's not true. You're one of the few. I was really surprised to hear people thought it was Barron Stain, but apparently, as far as that theory goes, if you don't know what I'm talking about, just look up Barron Stain Bears theory, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I was convinced.

That was Barron Stain. Barron Stain, yeah. But not A, E, instead. Barron Stain Bears. There's always Barron Stain for me. It's so weird. And I'm one of those that was so convinced. I was like, no, this is clearly some weird hoax,

because it's the Barron Stain Bears. Everybody knows that. It's so funny. And I'm not alone. It seems like the majority of people are definitely, they're one of the few Barron Stainers. Well, supposedly, according to this hypothesis, I actually managed to slip over from a multiverse

into this one without realizing it, from the Barron Stain universe. I love it. So anyway, let's get back to the Voynich manuscript, shall we? Because it is a real deal thing. And apparently, it has a certain amount of provenance to it. We know about when it first popped up, thanks to a 17th century letter that

identifies it as having been purchased by one Rudolph II, who was the Holy Roman Emperor for a while. And Rudolph loved curious things, right? Yes. He collected little people, apparently. He had a cabinet of curiosities of sorts. And he was very interested in this Voynich manuscript so much so that he paid 600 gold dukets for it,

which is apparently about the same as $90,000 today for this book, because he liked it a lot. And he supposedly was the first owner of the Voynich manuscript. That's right. It has been dated with carbon dating to the early 1400s and has a very strange, it's not written on parchment or any kind of regular paper.

It's written on calfskin, which is not a, it sort of is somewhat of a giveaway, or at least a big clue. What? That it dates it. But that it's bona fide. Yeah, well, we'll talk about whether or not it's a hoax. If someone found this vellum, that'd be very strange, to create a hoax and dig up hundreds of year-olds calfskin.

Right. So it's not likely that it's a hoax. No, there's all sorts of reasons it's not a hoax, but that rumor still persists. So in 1639, this antique collector and prog named George Berech, he sent a letter to this dude, Athanasius? I think so.

Athanasius Kiercher, he was a scholar in Rome, and he basically said, and this is so weird to me, he teases this guy. It's like, I've got this thing, it's really weird. It's got all these crazy symbols and images and this alphabet that is unknown to anyone. But I'm just not going to send it to you. I'm just going to tell you about it.

Well, he loved it himself. He tried to crack the code himself, the guy who was the owner of it at the time. Yeah, but I sent that letter just teasing the guy and be like, have a nice day. Because he wanted him to crack it for him, but he didn't want to give up the book. Well, how can you crack it if you don't send it to him?

You can send like facsimiles of it, that kind of stuff. Oh, he did that? I believe so. I know he was cracking it himself, but this guy, Athanasius Kiercher, he was supposedly very well known at the time for having cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, even though it later turned out he had gotten it wrong.

Yeah, that's why I wonder why I didn't send it to the guy. Well, the lesson is learned, because what was the dude's name, Buresh? The original guy who wrote the letter? Yeah, George Buresh. So he dies, and he dedicated his life to cracking the Voynich manuscript. Yeah, which wasn't called the Voynich manuscript

by that point. No, we should point out. I don't think it had a name at the time. I bet you they called it something. Well, they definitely didn't call it the Voynich manuscript, because we'll see in a minute. George Buresh, he died, and he gave it to a friend of his, Jan Marek Marcy.

And Marcy is pretty good reason or supports the idea that Buresh didn't want to give up the book for good reason, because he actually did contact the Jesuit living in Rome, Kiercher, and said, hey, here's the book. Figure it out. Right. And the guy never got it back. So if Buresh wanted to keep his book,

he was very smart to not send it to Kiercher. Well, and when Marcy sent it to Kiercher, he said, by the way, I know a little bit about the background. It looks like it was the work of Roger Bacon. Yeah. Even though there was nothing to back that up. Well, there isn't anything to back it up. And that's actually, it turns out,

Rudolph II believed that it was a work of Roger Bacon when he bought it. That's right. Roger Bacon was this, he was basically a proto-scientist from the 13th century in England. And we've talked about him before. I think in the Scientific Method episode, he really helped lay the groundwork for science

in the Western world. Yeah, he's credited with a lot of things he didn't do, too. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Well, anyway, this is possibly one of them. There's still a persistent legend that it was Roger Bacon's work that did come from England. But the prevailing ideas about the Voynich Manuscript

Providence kind of drifted a little further east, as we'll see. But when Rudolph II bought the thing, he thought it was Francis Bacon. And all of this, we know secondhand Chuck. Oh, yeah. Like, we don't, like, there's no document showing that Rudolph II purchased this book.

There's not a sales receipt? No, but there's something close that does kind of back it up. Rudolph II had a dude named Jacobus de Tepernets, I believe is how you pronounce that. And this was his court pharmacist, basically. His court botanist. And he was actually a really rich man. And Rudolph II, out of an appreciation to this guy

for saving his life, gave him the Voynich Manuscript as a gift. And this dude's watermark or seal or signature appears very faintly in the Voynich Manuscript. So it definitely backs up the idea that Rudolph II owned this book at one point in time. And it's entirely possible that he did think Roger Bacon created it. But that doesn't mean that Roger Bacon did create it.

Right. So for a couple of hundred years, it kind of, you know, wasn't on the forefront of anyone's mind, basically disappeared until 1912 when, here we go, Vilfrid Voynich bought it in Italy and said, I guess, let's name it after me. Yeah. Well, he and the manuscript became, like, very pretty famous

because he was tireless in trying to get this thing cracked. Sure. Like, this book has this really neat trait of, like, bringing people under its sway. Yeah, well, it's a mystery. It is, and everybody loves a mystery. It seems like it's possibly an impenetrable mystery, which I think makes people want to crack it even more.

Sure. Because you get to be the one, you know? Yeah, and you could change the name to the Josh Clark manuscript and say, Voynich, get bent. Who's that? Do you remember some company, like, bought the Sears Tower and tried to change the name to their company's name for the tower in Chicago?

Do you remember that a few years ago? Is it not the Sears Tower anymore? They tried to change it. Everybody's like, no, we're still calling it the Sears Tower. Oh, like, even if they did change it, people are still going to call it that? Yeah. Gotcha.

So I think the same thing would happen with the Voynich manuscript, even if I cracked it. Right, that's like, with a lot of professional sports stadiums, I'll still refer to it as the original cool name and not, you know, the RCA dome or whatever. I know what you mean. Although the new stadiums are, they just don't even bother naming them.

They just go ahead and say, who's got the most money? So Voynich, this manuscript, he worked tirelessly, and it eventually ended up, in modern times, at Yale University in 1969, where it still resides today. Right. So that's just the story of, and there's a lot more detail to who had their hands on this thing over the years. Yeah, we'll talk about that right after this break.

Big announcement, folks. It's called a podcast event called The Message. That's right. Thanks to GE Podcast Theater and Panoply. There is an eight-part series out right now called The Message, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and you know what?

It's going to blow your collective scientific minds because it's currently rocking our world. Yeah, so The Message follows the story of Nicky Tomlin, who is a PhD in linguistics, right? That's right. At the University of Chicago, if I'm not mistaken. That's right. And she's following a team of cryptologists, which really,

if you say cryptology, you've really got me hooked already. Sure. There are research think tank called Cypher, and they're trying to decode a message received from outer space from 70 years ago. Yeah, it's from outer space, we think. And if you're not familiar with the story, well, then I guess you better go listen to The Message.

You can get it on iTunes. You can get it on any of your podcast apps. Just go search for The Message and subscribe today. So thanks to GE Podcast Theater and Panoply for pushing the boundaries of the medium. You guys are doing a great job. Go subscribe to The Message and listen today. So Chuck, you're saying that it went from Voynich ultimately

to Yale. Yeah. But in between that, Voynich really kind of brought this manuscript into the fore. He identified people who were professionals at cracking codes and said, can you do this? Yeah. The first guy he went to was a University of Pennsylvania

philosopher. And he had a really weird idea of what the Voynich manuscript was really all about. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So if you look at the Voynich manuscript, the script is like this weird, really ornate lettering. And it's actually called gallows,

because a lot of it looks a bit like a hangman's gallow. And this University of Pennsylvania professor, a philosophy professor, decided that it wasn't the text itself that mattered. It was the little tiny microscopic figures that the ink made inside each letter that was the actual code. And I think Voynich just took his manuscript back and slowly backed out of the room when the guys told him that.

Yeah, he said they corresponded to Greek letters. And he actually said there's a message in here that confirms that it's Roger Bacon inside the ink with these Greek letters. And not only that, but Bacon, well, just some other theories. That's not even worth getting into. Other theories that Bacon hid in this ink. It was all untrue, though.

Right. Other people went back and said, oh, let us look at these little weird letters, microscopic letters that you're seeing in the ink. Oh, well, that's just the ink cracking as it dries. So you're nuts. Yeah, I mean, he tried to decrypt some of it and it held water for a little while.

But it was only like a very small part that even matched what his decryption theory. So it didn't hold any water. No, it didn't. So that was the first guy who took a real crack at it. The second people who did were actually World War II code breakers and the guy who founded the NSA, William Friedman, who gets a lot of the credit.

But his wife is actually at least as equal, if not as better, in cryptography, his wife, Elizabeth. And they actually, as World War II was waning, these people broke the Japanese code, right? The purple code, I think, is what it was called. So they weren't like slouches as far as cryptography went. But they got together as the war was waning and winding down and they weren't as needed any longer.

They got a bunch of their fellow cryptographers together and said, let's work on the Voynich manuscript. And I guess they probably figured that they would have it handled in short order. That's not at all how it worked out. No, he did not figure anything out and gave up. I think he spent like 30 years working on it. And then finally declared that the thing was impossible.

He couldn't do it and surrendered, I think is how it was put. And so after that, this thing, once this guy and his group said, we can't do this, it kind of got relegated to Yale for a while, and then the internet came. That's right. So you want to talk about the book itself a little bit, man? I would love to.

The book itself is 246 pages, although they think it is missing up to 50, 55 pages, 20 to 25. I mean, they don't know, but they're guessing. It could have been up to 270 to 300 pages long. It's about nine inches tall by six inches wide. And like we said, it's on calf skin, which lends credence to the fact that it's from the 1400s. It matches up with the carbon dating.

Right. So that makes some sense. It does. They think that up to eight people worked on the writing itself. And it is written from left to right, which also lends credence to the fact that could be European in nature. Makes sense.

Of course. Although there are other theories that it is from the eastern side of the world, but I don't know what evidence they have on that. There's also the theories that it's from the far west as well, from like Mexico or Central America, some people say. That's right. And then so with the actual words themselves,

the letters, there's, I think, 30 to 40 characters in this weird alphabet that no one understands. And that depends on who you ask. I've seen as low as 15. Really? Yeah. The highest I saw was 40. But the average I saw was 30, is what people typically cite.

And these things, these letters, are put together to form what we would think of as words. And then the words are put together without any punctuation. And then occasionally are put into paragraphs. But for the most part, it's just like word, word, word, word, word, word, word. And then on almost every single page of the codex itself, there's an illustration of some sort or another.

Yeah, about 220 illustrations. The fact that it didn't have punctuation isn't a big deal. Apparently that was pretty normal for the time. Yeah. So that doesn't really give anything away. And it's also not divided into chapters via text, but via illustrations. They believe it might be divided into six different chapters,

which are botanical. This is where you're going to find your weird unknown plants. Astronomical, which zodiacal signs and celestial bodies, stuff like that. Which are, and we should say, the zodiac symbols and drawings of the zodiac are the only things that are unquestionably recognizable in the whole book. Right.

Which makes it even stranger. That it's not just completely fantastic. There's also some stuff that's recognizable. There's a baneological chapter with naked ladies doing weird things and bathtubs. Or possibly waterslides, it kind of looks like, and at least one. A waterslide.

Yeah, I don't know. You would call it a waterslide. Maybe it would be a. No, there's one. There's a Roman aqueduct or something. There's another one, though, that's like it's a vertical drawing straight up and down. And there's like three women that are clearly

like together in the way that three people would go down a waterslide at once. There's one a little further down, and she's like on her back going downward. And then there's another woman at the bottom who's like basically splashed down. It's almost a spitting image of a waterslide, a green waterslide.

There's cosmological with just these weird circular patterns. It almost looks like crop circles. Just weird designs that make no sense. And then pharmaceutical. This is where they have different parts of plants broken down and these jars and things that doctors may have put things in. Right, which they did at the time in the medieval era. This is what a pharmacist or a doctor

would have stored their pharmacological herbs in, which is why they're like this is the pharmacological section. Right. And then finally, no illustrations in the recipe section. Just nothing but deliciousness. I don't know how they know it was a recipe section even. So they divided the book up into these six chapters. And they actually think that, remember, the book

was loose pages at one point? Yeah. What was it, I think, 120 folded pages? And they think that whoever bound it, because it was bound in goatskin of a younger age than the actual manuscript, that whoever bound it got the pages out of order here or there, so that there's some pages that are in the wrong chapter,

but that roughly it's in the right order. Yeah. They have another reason it might be European is because the average length of a word is four or five letters. Although there are no two letter words and nothing with more than 10 characters, which is just more confounding. It is. Because none of it is, there's no consistency that points

exactly in one direction, basically. Well, even more confounding is there are examples of the same word used in succession two or three times here or there. Yeah, up to five times. So that's very odd. You don't see that very often in, say, English. Maybe they were just trying to make a point five times.

They're like, I like this recipe very, very, very, very, very much. Yeah. You never know. Yeah. It was written by Chainsaw and Dave from summer school. Who? You remember that movie, Summer School? Oh, yeah.

They had to write like a 500 word essay. So they use like the last 40 words where they like Texas Chainsaw and Esker very, very, very. That old trick. Yeah. So Chuck, we've laid out a lot of details here. And we're not the first person in the first people to notice these details, right?

No. Other people have. And they've really studied them, especially as the use of computing and linguistics has come together in the 21st century. And we will talk about all that jazz right after this. OK. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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So Chuck, there's weird things like the same word being used up to five times in a row. There's no punctuation, which apparently is fairly normal. No word over 10 letters. All of this stuff, like it seems weird. But if you put that into a computer with what we know about language these days, you can spit out some pretty interesting conclusions about the Voynich manuscript.

One of the things that people have long said, especially after William Friedman and his wife, Elizabeth, threw up their hands and said, we're done. After 30 years of studying this thing, a lot of people said, it's just a hoax. It doesn't mean anything. It's gibberish. The reason that no one will ever be able to crack it is

because it doesn't mean anything. And that's still a longstanding theory. Like you can find plenty of journal articles in respectable peer-reviewed journals about how this thing is hoax. And in fact, there was one a few years back that said, we found a Renaissance cipher key, which is used for encoding anything. But it was Renaissance era.

And that if you took gibberish and put it into it, you could conceivably come up with what's in the Voynich manuscript. And everybody said, that's great. You proved that it's possible, but you didn't actually show how they did that to produce the Voynich manuscript. So the thing's still a mystery. It doesn't really prove anything. But it does support this idea that it's possible.

And no one involved in looking at the Voynich manuscript will disagree. It is possible that it is just a hoax, and that it is just gibberish. So there's a hoax theory. But there are plenty of other theories as to this thing. And a lot of them say, no, this thing is real. Yeah, well, one theory is that it's just a language that we

don't know and haven't seen. Right. I don't buy that. No, I mean, how could this possibly be the only surviving evidence of that language, you know? Exactly. I'm with you on that. Another theory is that it's just so well-coded that it's

impenetrable. But that raises a good question, too. So if you wanted to code something, especially if it were, say, for art or a hoax or to show what an incredible mind you had, why would you make it so impenetrable that no one could ever possibly crack it? Yeah, it seems like you would eventually be doing that for some sort of recognition.

Sure. So that kind of kicks a little bit, kicks the legs out of that theory to me. Or that it's so important and secretive like the meaning of life is contained herein. And it doesn't look like it from the looks of the illustrations. It doesn't, because I mean, you're correct.

The illustrations are kind of hokey. A little, it's not the most gorgeous book you've ever seen. If it's the secrets in the universe, then it's pretty disappointed. It's depressing. Yeah. Yeah.

What's the third theory? There's another one that, well, basically that it's gobbledygook. That's sort of the hoax thing. There's two different parts. One that it's just gobbledygook and it was someone having fun. And another one is that it was a hoax trying to fool people

into thinking something. So that's sort of split into two parts. Mental illness is another theory. Yeah, like a Franciscan monk locked away in a room with autism who just really went to town. Yeah. That's actually a theory as well. Or that it might be religious, like speaking in tongues

transcribed. Yeah. You want to hear my theory? Yeah, I think it's high time. You think it's drugs? Yeah, man. So kind of like where you'll find the doodles in a college textbook margin?

Yeah, I think someone got ahold of a lot of really good hallucinogenics and over the course of a few months did them and did this. Yeah. So went on like a three-month bender and ended up spitting out the Voynich manuscript. Or a lifelong bender. And this was just one of the things they produced.

I mean, that's pretty interesting to tell you the truth. It looks pretty druggy to me. It does. Also, again, the quality of the illustrations themselves kind of suggests like this is really awesome, but I don't have full control over my motor cortex right now. Yeah, plus it would solve the problem of like it has

meeting or it can be transcribed, or this person was trying to get famous. Yeah, they were just making it. Yeah. So that's a pretty good theory. Let's go back to the hoax theory, right? Yeah. There's a lot of people who shout down the hoax theory

because they say, do you know how much time this thing took? Sure, like, yeah. That's one. So the hoax people would say back, well, people still made hoaxes in the Renaissance, which is the time this book first popped up. They made fraudulent medieval documents because that's when antiquarian book collecting really started, and you could

make some money from some suckers like Rudolf II, right? Yeah. So I mean, there's definitely teeth in both arguments as to whether it's a hoax or whether it's not. But as we've gotten a lot better with using computers to figure out things like statistical distribution and stuff like that and have applied it to things like language, when looking at the Voynich manuscript, it

actually follows a lot of the patterns that a natural language does, which leads a lot of people to believe that, no, there's actually real meaning in the Voynich manuscript that we just haven't unlocked. Yeah. So for example, the different sections have their own vocabulary. There's words that show up in, say, the pharmacological

section that do not appear anywhere in the cosmological section, which again is something that you would find in natural language. If you're reading a chapter of a textbook on cosmology and you pick up a book on pharmacology, there's going to be words in each one that would not appear in the other one, right? And that's how the Voynich manuscript does.

That's a big one. There's this thing called Zip's Law, which is probably a podcast episode in and of itself. But Zip's Law is this weird statistical law that says that, say, the second most common word, the second most frequently used word, will be used twice as much as the third most frequently used word. The third most frequently used word will be used three

times as much as the fourth most frequently used word. It's a really weird thing, and it appears to be a natural law. And apparently, natural languages follow this kind of distribution, so does the Voynich manuscript. So to come up with Zip's Law, which wasn't discovered until the 1930s, I think, so to create this text, understanding that Zip's Law was eventually going to be

discovered, and then going to the trouble of predicting the frequency of these words that you're going to use and then spreading them out accordingly, again, it's not impossible, but it's mind boggling the amount of work that would have been put into this being a hoax. Yeah, here's my deal, too. Let's say it is a cipher. From looking at the thing, it would just end up being,

this is this plant, this is this recipe. It just seems kind of boring to begin with. And for that reason, a lot of people hope that the Voynich manuscript is never cracked. Yeah, they don't want to discover that. Because ultimately, there's pictures of plants there, and they look weird and everything. But if we crack this code, it would, as this one guy, what

is his name, a dude named Reed Johnson wrote a New Yorker article on it. I don't think there's been a podcast this year where we didn't mention a New Yorker article. That magazine is banging. It is banging. Reed Johnson said, he put it that right now, the Voynich manuscript is in this quantum state where it's in all

positions at once. But once we crack it, it'll be forced to take this collapse into this one single position, and it'll lose all of its mystery or aura. It'll just be the farmer's almanac. Yeah, and as it is right now, it's in, basically, its perfect form. To stop working people.

Right, but that's not the case at all. Because as I said before, the internet is on this. And there are a lot of people who think that they have cracked it, but haven't necessarily. Yeah, there's this one guy, Stephen Bax. He's a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England. And he said, he claims he's deciphered 14 characters.

The reason that this is somewhat believable, because he's not saying, hey, I know what the whole thing means. He's being very modest in saying I've deciphered only 14 characters based on what he thinks are matching plants, Juniper, Coriander, and Hellebori specifically, and Taurus, an illustration, basically, of the constellation Taurus. So he thinks, if you can identify those pictures, then

you should be able to correspond the letters saying those names next to them. Right, he went on a hunt for proper nouns in the text. Yeah, which is a pretty good approach. Yeah, I think he said he identified 14, right? 14 characters only. I thought it was 14 words.

No, 10 words. I got you. And he's the first to say, I might be right, I might be wrong. This is certainly not a closed case, but here's my best crack at it. Well, there's a live science article on our podcast page for this episode that has kind of a rundown of his discovery.

And I think embedded in it is a YouTube video that he made demonstrating how he found this. Yeah, and he's not a crack bot. He seems like a good guy. Oh, he's at Bedfordshire. There's another dude that said that the latest theory is from a guy named Nick Pelling. Britain Nick Pelling?

I guess that's his name, I thought. British Nick. 2006, he came up with this theory that it was an Italian architect named Antonio Avalino as the author. And he says, you know what? I think this guy tried to escape Istanbul around 1465. And before he left, recorded his knowledge of said place. But basically, that's been shot down for various reasons.

So a lot of people believe that Northern Italy is where it was made, where it's from. So that part's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. But the reason why they think it was actually in the Tyrolean Alps is the predominant view of where the Codex was made. But if you look at some of the pictures just drawn on the margins of castles, the architecture depicted is

peculiar to the Northern Alps from that time, the Northern Italian Alps from that time. Yeah, and usually write about and paint about what you know. Yes, plus around Trenta, I believe, there are some healing waters. And I think possibly that's what's depicted with the women bathing. And watersliding.

And watersliding. So I think I do agree that let's keep on trying. But I don't think anyone's going to crack this thing. So I think the mystery will remain, which is kind of neat. But you do think that there's actual language encoded in it? No, I think it's drugs. OK, so you think it's just total gibberish?

Yeah, or this dude and his drug friends made up a language that existed within their turret. But again, it's following almost unpredictable or just so unbelievably complex statistical distribution of words and letters that it's like the genius it would take to fake that or even accidentally make it up is pretty staggering. I'm saying maybe they did have their own little language. Well, they were some smart burnouts.

Yeah, there were a lot of smart burnouts back then. I wonder if they would be blown away to know that people were still trying to crack that code that they made in high school listening to Van Halen. Or maybe there's some other discovery yet to be made of another text, a legend perhaps. Oh, yeah. A Rosetta Stone, as it were.

Yeah, maybe they just haven't found it yet. And maybe there's a whole series of things. Yeah. You would think it would have popped up by now, but you never know. Or maybe that has lost to time forever. I'm sticking with the multiverse idea. Well, yeah, it's fun to theorize.

If you want to fall out on a rabbit hole, I also want to say before we sign off, go to Voynich.nu. There is a dude named Renee Zandebergen, who is a preeminent Voynich scholar. And he actually discovered a letter. It was like the only the second letter associated with the Voynich manuscript ever discovered. The first one was discovered with the Voynich manuscript.

So he's like hardcore and knows what he's doing when it comes to the Voynich manuscript. Compiled this really amazing website where it's like, here's all the information we have. Here's what we know. Not slanted, not like, I'm right or anything like that. Just a really interesting website to go check out. Does he have everything pasted on his wall,

with like yarn attaching like different things? With the eyes scratched out on all the pictures? I think it's pretty neat. I mean, I just like things that are unknown. And you can speculate all day. And it's not one of these unknowns where, you know, where skeptics can come in and say, you know, this doesn't even exist.

Like it's a real thing. Yeah, they're like, it's a hoax. They just got their hands on some vellum. Oh, really? And they predicted that we would be carbon dating 50 years later. I don't think so, buddy. Go sit down.

So either. It's nice. Like it's a genuine bonafide mystery residing in the Yale library. Yep. If you want to know more about the Voynich manuscript, like I said, go to voynich.nu. You can also visit our website at howstuffworks.com

by typing Voynich in the search bar. And since I said.nu, it's time for listener mail. Or go to the Yale library. Is it on display or is it tucked away? They actually, I'm glad you brought that up. There's another, the Yale collection. They did high resolution scans of every single page. So you can go onto the Yale library site

and basically browse the Voynich manuscript. Oh, yeah. You have to have an appointment and get permission first, which I imagine would be the result of an extensive letter writing campaign. You have to make an appointment to go see the actual thing? Yes. But I mean, not just, like, I'll be there at five Tuesday.

How's that work for you? Like, you have to get permission and submit your credentials and all that stuff. Yeah. But you could conceivably see it. You have to be a friend of John Honichman. Right. He holds the keys.

Yeah, he leaves. All right. OK, so the answer is they don't have it on display, prominently on display. Right. That's another way of saying what I said. All right, I'm going to call this, my baby won't sleep. Hey, guys, I'm sure you get a handful of thanks every day.

Actually, not as many as you'd think. But I just want to offer up my thanks for my wife, my daughter and I. My wife and I recently had a baby, Madeline. At times, we find ourselves up all hours of the night attending to a sleepless baby. I think she was born on a 12-hour jet lag. And for that, we take the red eye every night

until she adjusts. When we have tried every method in the book to try and get her to sleep, it just seems like nothing will do. However, we've come to find that she loves car rides. So whether it's 1 a.m., 2 a.m., or 4 in the morning, there's a good chance we are in the car driving around the neighborhood listening to stuff you should know. That sounds really creepy.

It does. Hearing our voices echo down empty streets. Yeah. While we're trying to get our daughter to fall asleep, and now it's cute again. When I can assure you that I don't fall asleep in the car as being the one driving, I can say, can't say the same for my daughter.

It's not to say that you guys put her to sleep, but I think it's the combination of a car seat, a running engine, and the background noise of two podcasters. So thank you for keeping us up, listening to your show, at the same time putting my daughter to sleep. You may have the youngest stuff you should know fan at only a month old.

That is sleepless and Hatfield PA. Wow. So we've been told by plenty of adults that we put them to sleep. So it's nice that there's just a little cute baby now. So our one month old fan is not our youngest. We have one that's even younger. When born on October 25th, we want

to wish a huge, huge hearty congratulations to our buddy Adam and Serena. Huge congrats. The totes couple. Cute baby. Yes. Right out of the womb cute, which is not often the case. He really is.

His name is Henry Hollis. So you guys, congratulations, Henry. Welcome to the Stuff You Should Know family and Way to Go, dudes. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you

should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey, Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and say, hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine

Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey, Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. And we live it. Listen to Hey, Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

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