They're going to need an engine first. They literally don't have one.

I ended up looking through the entire voynich manuscript and reading the whole study. I'm sorry but there's no way to me that this is the answer..in the study the longest comparable encryption was like a page, and there was a suggestion that another work may have also been encrypted with no proof. Every other comparable manuscript only had small parts erased. None of them carried even nearly as much info. I could see some of the text being about the topic but the whole thing?

The work is way too long. There are no comparable works from the time that deal only with female anatomy or women's secrets. The illustrations of the women seem symbolic rather than too encode any information. If it's supposed to be hidden anatomical knowledge there's no need to include naked ladies in the first place. Also, i feel like there's an undeniable "spiritual" or "religious/esoteric" quality to the illustrations.

The plants are undoubtedly not real for the most part, syntheses of different plants. When reading the manuscript it does feel like the illustrator is using their fantasy a lot to construct the illustrations, if these were medicinal plants, there would not be so many of them and such long texts accompanying. It's nothing like similar medical or pharmaceutical treatises of the time in scope.

It's possible to imagine that there's some (maybe anatomic or procedural) information encoded in the illustrations of the interconnecting tubes, but then what are all the repeated illustrations of the women for, and if the purpose is to hide the

In the other examples of encryptions, erasures and censoring, it's always limited passages About certain things the author was too morally concerned to expose. It's hard to imagine that the whole thing contains taboo knowledge.

Isnt it true that right when this was written, was the beginning of curious valuable books that also pushed taboos such as sorcery, alchemy etc. What this seems like to me is someone painstakingly making an esoteric book to sell for a lot of money. The suggestion that the language-like qualities of the voynich can be generated by using a grid and writing syllables, seems so much more likely to me than that someone came up with a code that still hasn't been cracked.

Really my main question would be if you think it's real, why do you think we haven't been able to crack it? Humans are usually great at cracking deliberately encrypted things especially when they are encrypted without the help of technology. the manuscript is undoubtedly of European origin and while it's possible it's not encrypting a European language, you'd expect that we could crack any code someone came up with in the 1400's with this much time and effort going into it.

I can see this being an elaborate fake, it looks to me like an esoteric book of sorcery, which seem to have been popular at the time. And it was sold for a lot of money various times, so it likely worked.

This set me down a rabbit hole. I just looked at every page of the voynich and I can't see it being woman's secrets. As the author of the paper says, the longest suspected encrypted document of woman's secrets would be a maximum of six pages if it was even ever encrypted. The thing is, anything that could be said about the topic back then couldnt possibly be stretched to so many pages. Also, the drawings of the women have basically no anatomical meaning (there are no clear drawings of anatomy, or of child birth, or of any medical procedure). The drawings of the women are extremely repetitive. I can't see how information can really be encoded in them. If the tubes and such are supposed to somehow be symbolic anatomical clues, the repetitive women posing a hundred times on the page are not needed.

One thing struck me the whole time looking at those pictures: they are extemely ugly, the author couldn't draw for shit. It literally looks like how i would draw if i was trying to make something look deep and metaphorical, but didn't really have any meaning to it. There's a lot of "symmetry" and repetition in the pictures that don't seem to possibly encode information.

Then again, some illustrations are made with such detail, that it seems unlikely they aren't.

Really though? That seems so unlikely just based on simple human nature. Why go to such a great length to encrypt it in a way that no one can understand, if you actually want it to be understood? Are any of the other examples encrypted with nearly the same amount of care? What do we know of people who would have used manuscripts like this?

Is that really what you think after working in the field so long? It seems to me that it's such a long book with such elaborate and strange drawings, how could the answer be that "simple"? The drawings especially and how no one seems to be able to decode it with their help just immediately scream "whoever made this wanted people to have a hard time reading it".

What about all the plants? Aren't many of them nonexistent? Shouldn't those that exist have some known use in women's medicine if this theory holds true?

Thanks for the study though, fascinating read.

I didn't express myself well. What I meant to say was that the article is meant to be about the concept of seperating the art from the artist. So while johnny Depp is mentioned, it's not JUST about him or JUST about Kanye west or whatever. This is quite a common phenomenon now I mean I can think of like 3-4 people off the top of my head that have done absolutely horrible things, but they have a corpus of respected work still, and I'm terrible with celebrities and famous names and such.

I didn't agree with the article, but aside from the example mentioned of johnny Depp, it wasn't referring to anyone in particular.

I hate amber heard, and think she's a lot less likeable than johnny Depp. But I would say Johnny Depp was only exonerated of the crass made up accusations of heard. He is still "guilty" of having been in an extremely toxic relationship where both of them were violent and just vile. I've lost a lot of respect for johnny Depp since they've gone through all of it. He may not have beat her up or raped her with a bottle but he aired his dirtiest, stinkiest shittiest laundry for everyone to see. any normal person would now look down on him more than before.

You're not cool, just be honest, this is how you got i to this mess in the first place!

Then they'd be in his handwriting. I bet you felt quite smart typing that? I know I did.