Voynich cracked

Who's heard of the Voynich manuscript? No me before this. The Voynich manuscript is a 400-year-old puzzle that's been bothering some pretty smart people for a long time. It is 234 pages, beautifully illustrated, and hand written in an unknown script. Not a single word of manuscript has ever been understood -- even today, with a plausible explanation of the manuscript in hand. The explanation comes from Gordon Rugg, a British psychologist and computer scientist at Keele University, England. Rugg contends and offers proof that the manuscript is total gibberish. It makes no sense -- and it wasn't intended to make any sense. He suspects that the text was written by Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan con-artist, out to make some quick money. Kelley worked with John Dee, Elizabeth I's astrologer, and was supposedly a medium for angels -- apparently he even convinced Dee that they should swap wives, because angels told him so. How did Gordon Rugg do it? He used what he calls the Verifier approach. It relies on the fact that experts make mistakes; or narrowly focus the application of their knowledge, and thereby miss obvious solutions. By looking at what is common between different narrowly focused fields however, new approaches to solving problems can emerge that the individual fields couldn't arrive at on their own. It's an interesting idea. Read more in Wired magazine.