Entropy of the Unknown: The Voynich Mystery

Synopsis

The Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most perplexing artifacts in history — a beautifully and strangely illustrated 15th-century codex written in an unknown script, so-far defying every attempt at translation. While linguists and cryptographers have long sought its meaning, physicists can approach the mystery from another angle: by measuring its statistical structure. In this talk, I explore how tools from statistical mechanics — entropy, correlations, and scaling laws — can quantify the “language-likeness” of a text, regardless of meaning. The Voynich script follows Zipf’s law like natural languages, yet its entropy and transition statistics deviate from known linguistic patterns, suggesting a strange balance between order and randomness. By viewing the manuscript as a system of symbols under constraints, we can place it on an order–disorder “phase diagram” of meaning, and reflect on how physics can illuminate the boundaries between noise, code, and communication.