Skip to main content

Unsolved! - Craig Bauer ****

This chunky book proved to be an unexpected pleasure. Craig Bauer introduces the reader to a host of mostly unsolved ciphers, from historical greats to the latest computer-derived puzzles. Although he tells the complete story of each cipher he deals with before moving onto the next, the chapters are cleverly structured so he is able to introduce us to increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for hiding messages - and techniques for attempting to break them.

 We start with the Voynich manuscript, a whole book, probably from the fifteenth or sixteenth century in cipher form - though as Bauer points out, some believe it's a meaningless hoax. After a dabble with ancient ciphers, we next discover that Elgar was a cipher fan. I'd heard about his playful concealment in the Enigma Variations, but wasn't aware of the Dorabella cipher, which remains unsolved to this day. (Bauer also takes us through Elgar's own workings to solve a public cipher challenge, which is fascinating.) Then we zoom forward to the infamous Zodiac killings and their associated ciphers (the inspiration of the Dirty Harry movie), plus a number of other true crime stories with an unsolved cipher involved.

 I was a bit wary about this section, as I'm no fan of true crime, but the cipher element made the whole thing much more of an intriguing mystery, where the details of the crimes were necessary for cipher's context. We then go on to a whole host of other ciphers, from attempts to use them to prove communication from beyond the grave to a whole world of 'challenge ciphers' I wasn't aware of. Here, the public is challenged to deal with a cipher, some via convoluted communications such as the enigmatic Cicada 3301 challenges which spanned websites and physical locations. And, of course, there is the CIA's famous Kryptos sculpture, still partially unsolved.

 The book does have some minor irritations. Bauer can't resist exclamation marks - it's not just in the title, but almost every page seems to have them. (I can't help but wonder if there's a cipher involved, there are so many.) He also does tend to give us just a bit too much detail in the background information. So, for example, when tracing the early years of the Voynich manuscript, we are told too much dull detail, transcribing letters about it that don't add much to the narrative.

 There's also an inherent difficulty in the topic, in that most of the ciphers covered are still unsolved, as the title suggests. This means that many of the stories in the book don't have an ending - or rather they all have the same ending 'We don't know yet...' which gets wearing after a while. It's fine that some of these can be seen as challenges for the reader, if so inclined - but it makes the book work a little less well. Many of the best bits of Unsolved! were where at least a partial solution was reached. The book might have worked better if Bauer had gone for more of a mix of solved and unsolved ciphers, so we could have had regular 'aha' moments during the journey. 

 Despite the many mysteries left hanging, though, this was a thoroughly engaging read. Whether you have the patience and fortitude to have a go at cracking ciphers yourself, or, like me, are happy to be impressed with the ingenuity but would never put the time and effort in, there are some cracking (sorry) stories and surprises here. What else can I say, but TIEL TKIA CEOB HSXL B!SN ENOC

 Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more