The Voynich Manuscript: The World’s most Enigmatic Book from a Skeptical Perspective – Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh

The Voynich Manuscript is a handwritten book that probably dates back to the late Middle Ages. It is written in a script that no one can read. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both the First and Second World Wars. Still, the manuscript has never been demonstrably deciphered, and the mystery of its meaning and origin has excited the popular imagination, making it the subject of speculation and pseudoscience. This presentation explores the background behind the manuscript and its cryptic features. The most important scientific and pseudoscientific theories are covered. Elonka Dunin is an author, cryptographer, game developer, and management consultant. She is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association, Chairperson Emerita and a founding member of the IGDA's Online Games SIG, and a co-Director of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. Elonka's lifelong interest in cryptography became public in 2000 when she was awarded a prize for being the first person to crack the PhreakNIC Code, an up-until-Elonka unsolved puzzle created by the hacker group se2600. After the attacks of September 11th, Elonka helped out with the war on terrorism by teaching government agents about cryptography and what types of codes that Al Qaeda might have been using. From 2012–2022 she was on the Board of Directors for the National Cryptologic (Museum) Foundation. From 2015 to 2018 she chaired the Nashville 2600 Organization, a Tennessee 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Corporation. Elonka is co-founder and co-leader of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack a code on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters, and led the international team that cracked the related KGB Cyrillic Projector Cipher in 2003. She maintains a list of the World's most famous unsolved codes on her elonka.com site, and in 2006, published The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. As of 2023, her elonka.com website has had over 6 million page views. Bestselling author Dan Brown honored Elonka by naming one of the characters in his Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol, after her. Elonka is also an avid Wikipedian, having been elected to administrator status in 2007, and written or expanded over 500 articles on Wikipedia. In 2020, she co-wrote a book with prolific crypto-blogger Klaus Schmeh, Codebreaking: A Practical Guide. In 2023, they co-wrote the Expanded Edition of Codebreaking with US publisher No Starch Press. It was released on Amazon on September 19th. Klaus Schmeh is the most-published cryptology author in the world. He has written 15 books (in German) about the subject, as well as over 200 articles, 25 scientific papers, and 1500 blog posts. He is also a member of the editorial board of the scientific magazine Cryptologia. Klaus’s main fields of interest are codebreaking and the history of encryption. His website Cipherbrain is read by crypto enthusiasts all over the world. Klaus is a popular speaker, known for his entertaining presentation style involving self-drawn cartoons and Lego models. He has lectured at hundreds of conferences, including the NSA Cryptologic History Symposium, HistoCrypt, the Charlotte International Cryptologic Symposium, and the RSA Conference in San Francisco. In his day job, Klaus works as a crypto expert for the global IT security company Eviden. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

In May 2022, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza released 2000 Mules, a film which attempts to show that the 2020 US election was stolen by Democrats, and to provide a mechanism by which this took place – a coordinated effort to ‘harvest’ ballots and distribute them around ballot drop boxes in battleground states using paid ‘mules’. The film is based largely on assumptions, anomaly hunting, assertions without evidence and previously debunked claims. Where evidence is presented it has frequently been misinterpreted or taken out of context, or simply doesn’t support the conclusions the filmmakers claim. This talk provides a brief window into Jim’s obsession with debunking the film’s fractal wrongness. Jim Cliff is an author, video editor, and former BBFC examiner who’s always been fascinated in why people believe crazy things. He’s the producer and host of the podcast Fallacious Trump, where he and other host Mark explain logical fallacies using examples from Trump, pop culture and British politics. If he gets his arse in gear, his latest book, 2000 Mules and One Big Lie, will be released at the beginning of September. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

In 1543, Copernicus made us no longer the center of the universe. Science today shows we are one planet of billions in just one galaxy of billions, so can we be all alone? And if we are not alone, what does that make us is in relation to God? There are significant issues for parochial earthly religions if we have cosmic neighbors, including thorny problems such as: Are the aliens closer to God than us? Do aliens need salvation? Did Jesus visit just us or does he visit every planet with a civilization on it? Does the problem of evil become worse now that there can be cosmic-levels of suffering? How does the end of the world work if there are billions of worlds? These questions and more emerge when one wonders, what will the Pope say to Mr Spock? Dr. Aaron Adair (Physics PhD., The Ohio State University 2013) is a scholar of science education, popular culture, and especially science and religion–having published multiple books and articles on the topic, especially the rationalizations of religious myths, namely the Star of Bethlehem. He has presented in conferences internationally, such as the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Society of Biblical Literature, and a special conference on the Christmas Star at the University of Groningen. He is a research affiliate at MIT in physics education research, while working as a data scientist in the defense sector. He is an area chair at the Southwestern Popular and American Culture Association (SWPACA) on science, science fiction, and fantasy. Formerly a professor at Merrimack and Babson Colleges, he lives in the Greater Boston Area with his wife, Janice, and they are currently working together on a book concerning Godzilla. Dr. Adair is also currently working on articles and a book concerning the biblical Exodus tradition. His current books are “The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View” and (co-authored with Jonathan MS Pearce) “Aliens and Religion: Where Two Worlds Collide: Assessing the Impact of Discovering Extraterrestrial Intelligence on Religion and Theology.” The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

What is a Controlled Human Malaria Infection, and why are researchers at the University of Oxford and University of Edinburgh leaning on it to advance public health? Come along to a talk hosted by Katharina Grabowski and Matteo Putra to learn more about the ins and outs of this research approach, how it will be used to break new ground in understanding one of the most complex immune responses to an infectious disease, and how it could help save hundreds of thousands of lives by developing novel public health interventions alongside vaccines. Katharina Grabowski (BSc, MSc) is a Research Assistant and Matteo Putra (BSc, MRes, MScR) a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh who are working with the Oxford Vaccine Group and Department of Biochemistry on an upcoming Controlled Human Malaria Infection clinical trial. This study aims to understand how people become immune to malaria so that we can learn how to protect the most vulnerable from disease. And as bizarre as this may sound, we think controlled infections are the answer! This ground-breaking approach to malaria control was recently awarded an Medical Research Council Experimental Medicine Grant. You can find out more at malariaimmunology.com. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

In the last 10 years consumer production models of EVs have become more readily available. In spite of data which shows EVs are more efficient than fossil fuel vehicles, with reduced CO2, emissions and particulates, in a recent policy U-turn, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak kicked back the date for full transition to EVs to 2035, eliciting heavy criticism from the world’s major car manufacturers, who had already invested billions to meet the original deadline. There’s also been a significant uptick in anti-EV media headlines. Pervasive stories about EVs have returned. Aren’t they too expensive? Too heavy? With dangerously flawed batteries? Can our energy infrastructure even cope with the demand? Are they really ‘greener’ anyway? With 2023 global fossil fuel subsidies at a mind-blowing $7 trillion (IMF data) it’s no surprise there’s been pushback. In this talk, Robert Llewellyn aims to get us up to speed on progress during the last 10 years of electric vehicle production. They’ll aim to demonstrate how the barriers to electric transport are primarily psychological, not engineering. Robert Llewellyn is a British actor, presenter and writer, famous for his thirty-year stretch as the rubber-masked mechanoid Kryten in the much-loved science fiction comedy, ‘Red Dwarf’. With his interest in engineering, Robert then turned his hand to presenting the long-running TV gameshow, ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ and also ‘How Do They Do It?’ and ‘Carpool’. In 2010, after being blown away by early Electric Cars, Robert launched Fully Charged, a YouTube channel focussing on the future of electric vehicles, of all shapes and sizes, and clean energy. Fully Charged has exceeded 55 million views around the world and Robert was recently acknowledged as ‘Tech Legend’ at the T3 Awards. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

There was a time when you could be skeptical about cholesterol’s role in cardiovascular prevention. There was uncertainty about causality, diet seemed to have little impact and the drugs were either ineffective or potentially dangerous. But then things changed. Medications improved, genetic causes of high cholesterol became clear, and the cardiovascular benefits of cholesterol reduction were demonstrated in multiple trials. So how did cholesterol denialism become a thing and why has it become the latest pseudoscience? By reviewing the history of the “cholesterol controversy,” Dr Christopher Labos will show how this scientific debate played out in a real time over the span of the 20th century and why the best description of the cholesterol controversy now is that there isn’t one. Dr. Christopher Labos is a cardiologist with a master’s degree in Epidemiology. He is a columnist with the Montreal Gazette and Medscape, featured on the Sunday Morning House Call on CJAD radio, and has a regular TV segment with CTV Montreal and CBC Morning Live. He is an associate with the McGill Office of Science and Society and co-hosts the award-winning podcast “The Body of Evidence.” He is the author of “Does Coffee Cause Cancer?” published by ECW press, a story about food epidemiology and why food headlines are usually wrong. He occasionally practices as a cardiologist so he can buy groceries. To date no one has asked him for his autograph. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

Astronomers have successfully observed a great deal of the Universe’s history, from recording the afterglow of the Big Bang to imaging thousands of galaxies, and even to visualising an actual black hole. There’s a lot for astronomers to be smug about. But when it comes to understanding how the Universe began and grew up we are literally in the dark ages. In effect, we are missing the first one billion years from the timeline of the Universe. This brief but far-reaching period in the Universe’s history, known to astrophysicists as the ‘Epoch of Reionisation’, represents the start of the cosmos as we experience it today. The time when the very first stars burst into life, when darkness gave way to light. After hundreds of millions of years of dark, uneventful expansion, one by the one these stars suddenly came into being. This was the point at which the chaos of the Big Bang first began to yield to the order of galaxies, black holes and stars, kick-starting the pathway to planets, to comets, to moons, and to life itself. Incorporating the very latest research into this branch of astrophysics, this talk sheds light on this time of darkness, telling the story of these first stars, hundreds of times the size of the Sun and a million times brighter, lonely giants that lived fast and died young in powerful explosions that seeded the Universe with the heavy elements that we are made of. Emma Chapman tells us how these stars formed, why they were so unusual, and what they can teach us about the Universe today. She also offers a first-hand look at the immense telescopes about to come on line to peer into the past, searching for the echoes and footprints of these stars, to take this period in the Universe’s history from the realm of theoretical physics towards the wonder of observational astronomy. Emma Chapman is a Royal Society research fellow and fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, based at Imperial College London. She is among the world’s leading researchers in search of the first stars to exist in our Universe, 13 billion years ago, and she is involved in both the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands and the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia, a telescope that will eventually consist of a million antennas pointing skywards in the desert. Emma has been the recipient of multiple commendations and prizes, the most recent of which was both the 2018 Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship, two of the most prestigious science fellowships in the UK. She won the Institute of Physics Jocelyn Bell Burnell Prize in 2014, and was runner-up for the UK L’Oreal Women in Science award in 2017. In 2018 she was also the recipient of the Royal Society Athena Medal. Emma is a respected public commentator on astrophysical matters, contributing to the Guardian, appearing on BBC radio and regularly speaking at public events. Among others, she has spoken at Cheltenham Science Festival, the European Open Science Forum and at New Scientist Live. You can buy Emma’s book at https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Emma-Chapman/First-Light–Switching-on-Stars-at-the-Dawn-of-Time/24856473 Emma is on platform formerly known as twitter at https://twitter.com/DrEOChapman Emma has been involved in challenging and ending sexual harrassment in science. You can find out more about her work in this area here: https://dr-emma-chapman.com/diversity-work/ Information on the LOFAR telescope is available at https://www.astron.nl/telescopes/lofar and the Square Kilometer Array at https://www.skatelescope.org The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

During her presentation, Adrienne will delve into the myriad myths surrounding Tourette Syndrome, the intriguing TikTok Tics phenomenon that started during the pandemic, and the pseudoscientific “cures” targeting vulnerable parents who seek to support their children. Be ready with pencil and paper to experience what it is like to live with TS+. Adrienne, a retired high school mathematics teacher, has been a volunteer educating teachers, students and community members about Tourette Syndrome and its comorbid disorders (TS+) since 2005. She is a board member and educational consultant for the Tourette OCD Alberta Network. Her personal journey as a mother of three children includes two who have been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome +. Beyond her involvement with the network, Adrienne actively contributes as a board member to Susan Gerbic’s nonprofit organization, “About Time.” She also volunteers as a Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia editor and is a regular reporter for “The Skeptic Zone” podcast. Her written work has been featured in publications like The Skeptic (Australia) and Skeptical Inquirer magazines. https://cumming.ucalgary.ca/resource/tourette-ocd/tourette-ocd-alberta-network https://www.zonegiggler.ca/ This episode includes the empathy exercise, for which you will need a pen and paper, and this section of a poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carrol: The time has come,' the Walrus said, To talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — Of cabbages — and kings — And why the sea is boiling hot — And whether pigs have wings.' But wait a bit,' the Oysters cried, Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath, And all of us are fat!' No hurry!' said the Carpenter. They thanked him much for that The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

Mental health awareness is a very big concern in 2021, particularly with the impact of the pandemic and lockdown. But while being aware that mental health can and does go wrong is important, very little attention is paid to how and why this happens. In his new book, Psycho Logical, neuroscientist, author, and former Psychiatry lecturer Dr Dean Burnett explores all that and more, using the latest science to explain what happens in the brain when mental health goes awry, how these problems and treated and why they work (or often don’t), and why the whole issue is so slippery and uncertain, and why stigma still endures despite everything. Dean will also be answering questions and challenging misconceptions about mental health flagged up by the SITP community, making this talk very unique. Dr Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist, lecturer, author, blogger, podcaster, pundit, science communicator, comedian and numerous other things, depending on who’s asking and what they need. Previously employed as a psychiatry tutor and lecturer at the Cardiff University Centre for Medical Education, Dean is currently an honorary research associate at Cardiff Psychology School, as well as a Visiting Industry Fellow at Birmingham City University. However, Dean is currently a full-time author, previously known for his satirical science column ‘Brain Flapping‘ at the Guardian, which ran from 2012 to 2018. This led to his internationally acclaimed bestselling debut book ‘The Idiot Brain‘, which has resulted in several further books and even more interesting brain stuff. You can buy one of Dean’s excellent books at https://www.hive.co.uk/Search?Author=Dean+Burnett (by buying from Hive you also support local indendent bookshops). It’s okay to not be okay. Here are some helpful places to talk and get help when you need it. https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/your-mental-health/getting-help. If you need someone to talk to there is a free active listening service at https://www.7cupsoftea.com they cannot offer advice but can be useful if you need soneone to talk to annonymously, Dean is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/garwboy. He writes a blog at https://cosmicshambles.com/words/blogs/deanburnett and his website is https://www.deanburnett.com/. The slides used by Dean are available here. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.

Physicists and chemists are used to dealing with quantum mechanics, but biologists have thus far got away without having to worry about this strange yet powerful theory of the subatomic world. However, times are changing. There is now solid evidence that enzymes use quantum tunnelling to accelerate chemical reactions, while plants and bacteria use a quantum trick in photosynthesis – sending lumps of sunlight energy in multiple directions at once. It even appears that some animals have the ability to use quantum entanglement – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” – as a compass to ‘see’ the earth’s magnetic field. In our research at Surrey we are discovering that life may even have evolved mechanisms to control genetic mutations caused by quantum tunnelling of protons between strands of DNA. Welcome to the exciting new field of quantum, biology. Jim Al-Khalili CBE FRS is a distinguished professor of physics at the University of Surrey and a well-known author, broadcaster and science communicator. He received his PhD in theoretical nuclear physics in 1989 and has published widely on few-body quantum scattering methods to study nuclear structure, particularly as applied to the study of exotic nuclei. He has more recently focussed on the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum thermodynamics and quantum effects in biology. He currently leads an international interdisciplinary research collaboration on the arrow of time in quantum mechanics. Jim is a prominent author and broadcaster and has written 15 books on popular science and the history of science, between them translated into twenty-six languages. He is a regular presenter on TV and hosts the long-running weekly BBC Radio4 programme, The Life Scientific. He is a past president of the British Science Association and a recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday medal and Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medals, the Institute of Physics Kelvin medal and the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. He recently served as the only non-engineer judge on the QE Prize for Engineering and is a commissioner on the board of the 1851 Royal Commission. The music used in this episode is by Thula Borah and is used with permission.