Cryptology (SECRET CODES) with Simon Singh
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Oh, hey, it's the sweatshirt that you will never get back from them, Allie Ward. And I have wanted to cover secret codes and cryptology for years and years. And I thought one day I'll go to Maryland and interview someone at the National Cryptologic Museum. And then I realized that it's run by the National Security Agency. And I was like, they're going to be tight lipped. They're not going to give it the goods. So then a little more digging unearthed a better

more perfect guest, the guy who wrote the literal book on code breaking titled The Codebook, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. Done. He's in. He's a PhD theoretical particle physicist by training, an author by trade now and has worked at CERN, and the BBC even made a BAFTA winning documentary about a mathematician called Fermat's Last Theorem.

He's also the author of the books Big Bang, The Origin of the Universe, and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets. He knows so much about the function and history of secret ciphers and code breaking and has several additional honorary degrees. And he joined the video chat with a salt and pepper Mohawk and for some reason a mic and earbuds that refused to play ball with our recording software.

enigmatic indeed. So our first introduction was amid an absolutely horrific amount of tech diffs, and I was pretty sure he hated me. Thank you for spending a half hour troubleshooting. I swear that is not typical.

No, no, no. These things happen. But look at that. Brilliant and forgiving. So let's get to this great convo. But first, thank you so much to all the patrons who support the show at patreon.com slash ologies, where you can join for a simple dollar a month and submit your questions ahead of time. Thank you to everyone who is buying and wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com, where we have some lovely shirts and stuff.

Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for me to read. And as proof that I do read them, they help so much. Thank you to Jen GM 017, who wrote long time ology here. I still cannot get enough. And for anyone complaining about explicit, it's in the description. So check out small logies instead.

Jen, GM017, thank you for reminding listeners that yes, we have a G-rated and we have shortened episodes. They're called Smologies. They're in their own feed, wherever you get podcasts. They're linked in the show notes. Look at that, a review and a reminder about Smologies all at once. Perfect.

Okay, but for now, enjoy this full-length conversation about slip-ups that lost wars, the cracking of the Enigma machine, hog Latin, pig pen ciphers, the prison plots of Mary Queen of Scots, a code-breaking reality show that I wish existed, indigenous code talking war heroes, hiding messages in your skin and guts, plus one method that's a whole ball of wax you might not want to get into, hidden treasure,

a quantum computing apocalypse, and a sketchbook that has puzzled people for nearly a thousand years with mathematics enthusiast, best-selling author, award-winning filmmaker, and secret code expert and cryptologist, Simon Singh. So, cryptology. We obviously, we've never done this topic. That's how it works here. But I know very little about code, but you've written an entire book on it. And I'm curious why...

Cryptology, what caused you to research and go back to the history of cryptology and do a steeper dive?

So two reasons, really. I'd written a book. My first book was called Fermat's Last Theorem or Fermat's Enigma, I think it was called in America. And it was the story of the world's most notorious maths problem. And it was a 350-year-old romp through mathematics. And somewhere in there was the story of cryptography during the Second World War, particularly Alan Turing, the British mathematician who cracked the Enigma code. And

His story and the story of cryptography and how it changed the course of the Second World War was something I just wanted to explore more. What was a few paragraphs in Fermat's Enigma turned out to be a whole chapter in the code book. Also, previously, I'd been working on a TV show in the UK called Tomorrow's World. It was a magazine show, so every week we were going through lots of different science and technology stories.

And each week I'd come up with a story about codes or code breaking or whatever.

The internet was just beginning to take off, so these were really important and interesting stories, but they weren't very visual. My TV editor never accepted my cryptography stories, but I had a whole folder full of them, and I could see that cryptography was more important today than ever before. You have this topic with a fantastically long history and something which we live in the information age today, and the way you protect information is

is not really by locking it up in a safe. You do it by locking it up with a code. Were you always a maths person? Yeah, I was. I'm a physicist by training. But if you want to do physics, you have to be a mathematician. And as a science journalist, I was covering all sorts of different things for Tomorrow's World. So I have a broad interest. And the interesting thing about cryptography is it is very mathematical, particularly today.

but it's also about linguistics. It's also about all sorts of different things. So as a writer, it's lovely to have a topic which ranges so broadly. And that was one of the tricky things about writing the book was, you know, which parts of history do you focus on? Which parts of the globe do you focus on? So Simon's book, The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography is highly lauded and 432 pages. And yet...

Were you absolutely heartbroken at having certain chapters or pieces that you just had to cut out or else it would be like a book of biblical proportions? Yeah, absolutely. No, there were huge chunks that got thrown out.

I was fascinated by the decryption of ancient languages. So something like hieroglyphs, you know, the decryption of hieroglyphs is an extraordinary story. And unless you can read hieroglyphs, you can't really read into the history of the Egyptians. It's a lost story unless you can read their texts.

Just a side note, if you're into hieroglyphs, we have an Egyptology episode as well as a mamiology episode about mummies with Egyptologist Dr. Cara Cooney. Oh, we also have a curiology episode about emoji and what they mean, depending on who uses them and their similarities and major differences to hieroglyphs. So we'll link those in the show notes. But yeah, let's talk ancient codes and language. Are they the same?

Simon says. And I had chapters also about the Mayan codes and so on. But you know what? It's not really a code. It's not a...

A code for me is where you deliberately obfuscate the meaning of something. So I'm sending you a secret message. I don't want anybody else in the world to read it, so I encrypt it so only you and I can read the message. Now, Egyptian hieroglyphs were not a code in that sense. They were written as a form of communication, and it's just that we've forgotten how to read them. So you have to use code-breaking techniques to read hieroglyphs to crack the code, but

But it wasn't ever meant to be a code. Same with Morse code, for example. Morse code is not a secret way of communication. It's an efficient way of communication for the telegraph. We didn't have to crack the Morse code. We knew how it all worked. But the use of the word code in most of the things I write about are things which were hidden, that the meaning has been hidden from the reader, from the reader who's not supposed to be spying.

I was wondering, because that was my first question, what's the difference between a code and a language? Is language meant to communicate, code is essentially meant to not communicate? Is that like a chief distinguishing difference? Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. And today, encryption goes beyond just hiding the meaning of a message. So for example, I might send you a secret message and I don't want anybody else to read it. That's a traditional form of encryption.

But sometimes I want to make sure that you've read it and you can't deny that you didn't read it. So that's important as well. And sometimes I want to guarantee that I sent the message so that you can't accuse me later on of not sending you the message. And sometimes I want to make sure that not only do you get the message, but nobody changed it on the way. So if you imagine voting in an election, I want to make sure that you know I cast my vote.

I want to make sure that you can't deny that you didn't receive the vote. I want to make sure the vote wasn't changed. And I want to make sure the vote is secret. So today we have different aspects to cryptography, all of which are important in different situations. I'm curious how far back...

you found that it goes? And is that a philosophical question? Is there anything to suggest in the development of language that at some point it was turned into kind of a cipher or a code? I imagine so much of that has to be war related, right? Well, I think to start with, so few people can read that you don't really need to bother encrypting.

Writing itself is almost a secret code. But once you start having military plans or one of the first examples of encryption is a recipe for a pottery glaze in ancient Sumeria. So somebody's come up with a fantastic recipe for pottery glaze and they don't want anybody else to steal it.

And this was around 1500 BC. It was like the Colonel Sanders' original recipe of 11 herbs and spices of ceramics. So those are the kinds of things that start emerging. As I say, hieroglyphs are just a way of writing. But sometimes people would write hieroglyphs in a very, very cryptic way on the tombs of important people. And the idea there was that as people passed the tomb, rather than just reading it and walking on,

They'd have to spend time there in order to decrypt what was going on. So you kind of got extra reverence from those passers-by, yeah. That's so sweet and also so sad. They're like, don't go, don't go, don't go. Here's a puzzle. Exactly, exactly. Make your final resting place a mausoleum escape room. But then there's one other type of thing which is maybe worth talking about, which is if I encrypt a message and I send it to you and somebody intercepts it,

it looks like gobbledygook. So they know that I'm sending you a secret message because this just doesn't look normal. So there's another technology, maybe we can call it called steganography. And steganography doesn't just really hide the meaning of the message. It hides its very existence. Oh, wow. So here we're talking about things like invisible inks. If I send you a message on invisible ink,

Nobody even knows the message exists. And typically I don't send you a blank sheet of paper. I maybe send you a normal postcard about my holiday, but

In between the normal ink are writing invisibly. Wow. So it looks like a very normal postcard. And in fact, the invisible ink is what's got the real message. It was a very nice invitation to a military cryptography conference in San Antonio. This is going back maybe 40 years. And it looked like a very innocent postcard.

sketch of the river. I guess it's the San Antonio River that runs through the town. I don't know my geography very well, but- You're correct. The way you're supposed to read it is if you look at the blades of grass along the side of the riverbank, there are long blades and short blades. And so if you turn the long blades and short blades into, instead of long, long, long, short, short, short, you turn them into dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash,

you have a Morse code message which tells you when the conference is happening, where you're supposed to go and so on. So these are examples of steganography. And my favorite example, I've seen loads of these examples. One is the message will be written on silk. You wrap the silk into a wax ball

and then you swallow the ball. So again, nobody knows there's a message at all. So my morbid curiosity led me to a DePaul University paper titled simply Steganography, which notes that, quote, there are quite a couple of sources that mention this technique that the Chinese used, but no one mentions how the ball of wax was recovered from the messenger. It continues, one is only left to imagine the possible and probably painful ways the ball could have come out.

Okay. Or even crazier, I think Herodotus, the Greek historian, writes about a messenger who had his head shaved. They tattooed the message on his scalp, waited for the hair to regrow, and then he was like,

And then sent him on his way. And then at the other end, you shave the head and recover the message. And I remember talking about this once and somebody said, it's a great code, but it's very low bandwidth. It's not going to be a great way to transfer much information very quickly, but effective. Also, it's a long game. You're in it for a while.

Yes. Yes. I suppose that messenger has one message and one message only to carry. Do you remember what that message was? Or do they do a lot of communicating through tattooed heads?

Oh, I think it was possibly so remarkable, which is why maybe Herodotus wrote about it. Maybe it was an exception rather than the rule. So yes, one low commitment method of steganography might be using a wax writing tablet back then, but writing a message on the wood underneath the wax tablet.

which is very sneaky, or yeah, embedding a note via ink into the flesh of a trusted servant. And because I'm nosy, I wanted to find out what that secret tattoo message was. And according to the 1999 historical paper, Information Hiding, a survey, there was a passage that said, the purpose was to instigate a revolt against the Persians. And

Just like people love doing fighting and it's never a bad year to get inked, this practice continued with German cryptography, according to the 1940 text, Secrets of German Espionage. But how do you make sure that no one else sees the tattoo head message?

If you don't have time for your hairstyles, like awkwardly grow back, well, you could do a cover up or a revision tattoo, kind of like turning a blurry college era astrological sign into a hummingbird or covering up your ex-wife's name with a dragon. Or you could just kill the servant or the soldier whose head you used as a notepad.

Can you imagine if it was just a pottery glaze recipe? You'd be like, all that for life. Well, okay, basic question. Is Pig Latin a code? Does that count as code or language? Now I have to, what is Pig Latin? It's when you put the last syllable. It's like itty-gay, bitty-gay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? Right. What are you studying at college? Pig Latin. Atwe, aye, uye, uingay, unayte.

Yeah. I mean, that's another nice thing about codes. They're childish in many ways. And we all wrote secret codes when we were kids and I've got a couple of kids and they certainly had their invisible inks and other secret messages that we used to write. And so, yeah, it's a playful code. Absolutely. And this kind of code is also sometimes called an Argo or a cant. And in the case of

Pig Latin, you pretty much take the first letter and you move it to the back of the word and add an A. So cat becomes atke, ball becomes albe, yarn becomes arnie, akfe becomes something you could say around grandma. And Pig Latin is also called Hog Latin, but it is not the same as the written system of Pig Pen.

There's a very nice code called PigPen, which you just reminded me of, which is you draw two tic-tac-toe grids.

Yeah, it's kind of tic-tac-toe grids. And then you put the letters in, instead of X and Y, you put A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And if you imagine A is in the top left-hand corner of a tic-tac-toe grid, instead of writing the letter A, you would write kind of backwards L because the A is inside a kind of backwards L. E is in the middle of the tic-tac-toe grid. So E is represented by a square because the E is wrapped around by a square. Oh, okay.

Okay, picture two tic-tac-toe grids and then two big Xs. So in tic-tac-toe grid number one are the letters A through I. In grid number two are the letters J through R with some extra dots thrown in. Now in the first X you have S-T-U-V like North, East, South, West and the second X has W-X-Y-Z with some extra dots. So whatever the shape around the letter

with dots if need be becomes a cipher and you can make secret words just using those shapes it's easily crackable if you know this pig pen cipher and absolutely useless garbage shapes if you don't

I'm a big fan. Pretty cool. So there are lots of lovely little codes that you can invent yourself or that have been used for literally hundreds of years. You know, I was surprised. One thing I love about the way your book is structured is how much history it goes through. So there's so much narrative and stories. Mary Queen of Scots, I didn't know this about her code. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and why that was such an interesting thing that you wanted to include? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So the most

famous type of code that we probably used as kids is you substitute one letter for a different letter and in fact Julius Caesar I think Julius Caesar wrote about codes quite extensively when he was a general of Gaul in France and he explained that you know instead of writing a I'm going to write b instead of writing b I'm going to write c or I could shift it even more I could shift the alphabet five places or ten places but essentially he was swapping one letter for a different letter now

you can change that substitution cipher, you can make it better

Instead of just shifting every letter, you can just randomly swap the letters around. So A is E, B is Z, C is Y, and so on. You mix up all the letters essentially. And that's really quite a strong code in some ways. There are so many ways of rearranging the alphabet. There are so many ways of randomly swapping letters around. I think it's something like 400 million, billion, billion. It's extraordinary. So on the face of it, it looks like an unbreakable code.

And this is the kind of code that Mary Queen of Scots used. Now, why was she using codes? Well, she was Mary Queen of Scots. She fell out with her rivals. She was driven out of Scotland. She fled to England and sought safety and sanctuary from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. I love my family.

Now, Queen Elizabeth I wasn't particularly keen on Mary because Mary was a Catholic and Elizabeth was a Protestant. And Elizabeth feared that Mary might try and trigger a Catholic rebellion, possibly invite foreign invaders from France and Spain and usurp her throne.

So for safety, Elizabeth put Mary in prison and she locked her up. That was it. Now, while she was locked away in prison, she had a secretary and she had a few people around her. While she was in prison, she started writing treacherous letters. She did start writing to these foreign powers, particularly Spain.

And she was saying, look, let's coordinate some kind of rebellion, invade Britain, invade England, and let's turn England Catholic again. Put me on the throne and get rid of Elizabeth. Now, she wrote these letters using this kind of code where you substitute each letter for a different letter or a different symbol, perhaps.

She smuggled the letters out via beer barrels. Water was so contaminated at that time that it was much safer to drink a very diluted form of beer. That was just the general thing you would drink day in, day out. These beer barrels were coming in and out of the prison. These notes were smuggled out in these beer barrels.

Elizabeth had spymasters who knew exactly what Mary might be up to. So they would intercept these beer barrels and they would intercept the messages and they could decode the messages. They knew how to crack this simple substitution cycle. And that shouldn't have been a surprise to Mary because this code had been cracked before.

About a thousand years ago, we're talking about the 16th century for Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, but it had been cracked in the 10th and 11th century in Baghdad. There was a guy called Al-Kindi, an Arabic philosopher, mathematician, and he realized that every letter's got a personality. How so? So E, for example, is very common. It's the most common letter in English. 13% of all letters are E. Oh, wow.

And if you disguise E by drawing it as a diamond, well, then the diamonds are going to be really popular and common. And therefore, you know the diamond really is an E. If you have two symbols that only ever follow each other, so a square that only ever follows a circle, well, that could be Q and U because Q is always followed by a U.

Also, words have personalities. So "the" is the most common three-letter word. So if you apply this kind of personality analysis to the letters or symbols in front of you, you can very rapidly decipher a message.

But according to the 2022 paper, Al-Kindi, the father of crypto analysis, if the letter of the encrypted message K has a frequency in the encryption equal to about 10%, probably the K of the encrypted message corresponds to an E in the decoded message.

And thus, it says within a few attempts, the encrypted message can be resolved. So that rate at which a letter appears in regular language is the personality of the letter, and it can be applied to the encrypted message to find that connection. And based on those and spelling patterns,

the spies could be on to you. Also, apparently your choices were to die of thirst or have dysentery or just be drunk all the time. So like maybe this wasn't Mary's best work. So Phillips, I think it was Thomas Phillips, was Elizabeth's spymaster. He decrypted this message that he'd intercepted from Mary. The message was clearly asking for the Spanish to invade. Elizabeth then had the evidence she needed

to then put Mary on trial for treason. She was put on trial, found guilty and executed. Oh, so busted. Which kind of put an end to any hopes of a Catholic revival in England. And so, you know, it's an example of a match of life and death, you know, changing the course of history, all because a code was broken. Does that make switching letters of the alphabet, like you can do it mathematically a lot of ways, but that's easy to break?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's one of those things, if you checked every permutation, if you checked every one of the 400 million, billion, billion permutations, you'd spend the age of the universe trying to crack a code. But there's a shortcut. You just look at the message and you say, well, look, there are all these diamonds. They've got to be E's. Second most common symbol, that's probably going to be a T. Third most common symbol is going to be an A. And once you've got a handful of symbols...

you can begin to decipher the whole message. The whole thing just falls into your hands very easily after that. But I think one of the analogies I use in the book is to describe cryptography as a bit like the battle between bacteria and antibiotics. We have these antibiotics and they're great for killing off a certain bug, but then the bugs evolve to become stronger and no longer

killed by the antibiotics. So scientists have to go away and make cleverer antibiotics until the bacteria become immune again. So there's constant evolutionary battle between bacteria and antibiotics. And it's the same in codes and code breaking. I make a code, somebody else breaks it. I have to make a better code, somebody breaks it. I have to come up with an even cleverer code. So what happened here, as you said, the simple substitution cipher

can easily be cracked once you figure out this personality analysis, this frequency analysis. So one simple step forward is if E accounts for 13% of all letters, if I use a diamond for E, then diamonds appear 13% of the time, and I know that a diamond is really E. But if I use 13 symbols to represent E, then

Each of those symbols only appears 1% of the time. And let's say, I don't know, let's say B appears 3% of the time. Well, if I use three symbols to represent B, then again, each symbol appears 1% of the time. So you flatten out all the frequencies and that becomes a much, much tougher code to break.

Hence, Al-Kindi was also known as the pioneer of statistics. And this was back in the year 800, so 1,200 years ago.

Some days I can't remember my bank pin and I was the one who said it. It's between me and me and I still can't crack it. And I'm assuming that the person on the other side, the receiving side, they've got this on lock. They know exactly that there's 13 different E's. They're not left having to bust it either, right? You agree on it ahead of time?

Yeah, and that's a really important point. There's something called the key. The key is the recipe for encryption, and it's the recipe for decryption. So if I'm sending you a message, I need to have a key which I share with you and which I don't want anybody else to steal. So we could jump ahead because I think the most extraordinary thing about cryptography

It seems impossible. It seems that if you're going to decrypt a message from me, you have to have my key. And you're on the other side of the ocean. So how on earth can I get this key to you? And particularly today, when we're encrypting our credit card details,

data's flying all over the globe, you don't see people running around distributing keys everywhere. This is something people had to do for hundreds of years. Keys in this sense meaning the secret instruction manual to the code, like a legend of a map. But for the sake of explanation, keys are a great analogy. So the British government would have to send keys to its diplomats

diplomats all over the world in suitcases, literally having to physically transfer them around the world. Navy ships would have to come back to port to pick up the keys so that they could communicate with their port. So for hundreds of years, key distribution was a real pain. It's expensive and risky. If somebody hijacks the guy who's distributing the keys, then they can read all your secret messages.

So key distribution is expensive, it's slow, it's risky, but it seems unavoidable. It seems as though you and I cannot communicate secretly unless I give you the key in advance, and that's slow, risky, and expensive. And yet today, somehow we managed to do it. Today, we found a way around it. And this is an incredible breakthrough. How does that work? Let me try and explain to you how that works. Let's imagine I want to send you a message, and I'm going to put the message in a box

and I put a padlock on the box and I lock it with a key and I send it to you. Now you can't open the box and read the message because I've still got the key. Yeah, that sucks. I don't want to send the key to you because that's slow, expensive and risky. So how can we avoid it? Well, this is what we can do. You, your end, you've got this box that's locked. You can add a second padlock to the box, your padlock with your key.

and you send it back to me. Now I've got a box with two padlocks. Yeah. How does that help? Well, I can take my padlock off because I've got my key. I can send the box back to you. It's still secure. It's still padlocked and it's padlocked with your padlock. Ah, nice. And you can then unlock it, open the box and read the message. Nice. Daisy chain. Yeah. So suddenly something that was impossible...

becomes actually it's not so difficult after all you know but there's even a cleverer way of doing it which is I have a padlock and a key and I make a million copies of my padlock and I distribute it all over the world and let's imagine you're trying to send me something now you go to your local post office you say can I have Simon Singh's padlock and

You snap the padlock shut on the box because you don't need a key to shut a padlock. It just snaps shut. You send it to me and I've got the key already to open it. So we're not distributing the keys. We're just distributing the padlocks. Got it. And again, I think it was in the 1970s.

this technology was invented. It's a mathematical padlock that we'd be talking about. That was invented by three guys at what we call GCHQ. You've got the NSA, don't you? You have the National Security Agency. We have the Government Communications Headquarters. And three people there invented this mathematical padlock. One of them was a chap called Clifford Cox, who I actually got to meet. And he was working at GCHQ. He'd only just started there. He was in his 20s. He was a young Cambridge maths graduate.

And he went home one evening and he started thinking about how would you invent a mathematical padlock?

And he came up with the idea. He came up with the whole mathematics and he came up with it entirely in his head. He couldn't write down anything because when you work for GCHQ, you're forbidden from writing down anything at home that relates to your work. Oh my God. So he had to go to bed that night. He wouldn't forget the mathematical idea and then rushed into work early the next day and wrote it all down. It's literally the greatest cryptography

cryptographic breakthrough in a thousand years. And then, having explained it to his colleagues, he couldn't tell the rest of the world because the British government made it confidential. They felt this was just too big a breakthrough to share with the rest of the world. But it was then rediscovered a decade later in California by Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman. And they are the people who then shared that technology

with the rest of the world. Okay, who cares? What does this mean for you? And it's what's really enabled the internet to take off in terms of financial transactions, secure databases, sharing information securely. We can do that today.

Because we don't need to run around sharing keys. Instead, we can run around sharing these. Well, we don't need to run around. We can just share our mathematical padlocks. And if you were dying to know what system Clifford Cox came up with just off the dome, it was prime factorization, which led to a public key crypto system. And because Wikipedia is not written in any kind of secret code, I'm going to read you what it told me about this to make this brief, which is in...

A public key cryptosystem, the encryption key is public and distinct from the decryption key, which is kept secret or private. Okay, so the public key is based on these two large prime numbers. Anyone can use the public key, but it can only be decrypted by someone who knows the private key. And you know what mathematical genius and cryptologic comprehension can get you? Well,

Sometimes nothing, sometimes worse than nothing. And we're going to hear about that later. But in the case of Clifford Cox, it got him the title of Companion of the Order of the Bath and then Fellow of the Royal Society. Simon himself is now in the most excellent order of the British Empire. But yeah, Clifford Cox was struck by this inspiration in 1973. And it wasn't until the method was declassified from its top secret status in like 1999 that he was recognized for it.

I wonder what he was doing when he came up with that. Was that like a shower thought? Or, you know, you're washing dishes and you have a great idea? Yeah. A lot of mathematicians talk about the idea of really thinking hard for a problem, thinking about a problem really deeply for hours and hours. And then suddenly when

they relax and suddenly maybe the brain goes into a kind of instinctive mode. Suddenly clarity emerges. And yeah, it was, it seems to be in one of those moments that the mathematical padlock was invented. So as we learned from the oneurology episodes on dreams, this is when the brain shifts to the default network. And we also did a two-part saluginology episode on hobbies and why leisure activities are vital if we don't want to lose our marbles. Yeah.

But going back a few decades, what about mechanics? Like when did things become mechanical? When did a code breaking machine sort of emerge? And how did Turing do what he did without the computer power that we have now? So I think cryptography develops because, you know, I break your code and I need a better code. Cryptography also develops as a result of communications technology advancing.

So when the telegraph was invented, we needed more secure forms of encryption. The British Empire was being run by people in London sending messages over telegraph lines across the world. And then when the radio was invented, again, we needed even better forms of communication because somebody on a battlefield could send a radio message over hundreds of miles and send lots of information in just a few seconds. So we needed even more effective encryption that was rapid and secure.

And so what you have in between the First and the Second World War is the idea of the encryption machine.

a mechanical machine, something that looks a bit like a typewriter where you type in a message and it gets encrypted automatically by the cogs and wheels inside the machine. The Americans worked on one, the Dutch worked on one, the Swedes had an encryption device, and the Germans had one as well. But all of these companies really struggled because

There wasn't a huge need for secret communication. And so all of these companies were gradually going bankrupt, apart from the German one. The Enigma was designed by a guy called Arthur Sherbius, because just as his company was struggling, Germany started gearing up for what would be the Second World War. War, it's great for business. And Germany began to buy these Enigma machines, not just for every army unit, but for every naval ship, for every air base, for every...

train station and so on and so

Hundreds and thousands of these Enigma machines were made and distributed, and they were essential for the German concept of Blitzkrieg. We have coordinated attack. You have bombardment from land, you have attack from the air, and then ships off the coast also bombarding. So this coordinated kind of attack is only possible if you've got secure, effective, rapid communication systems.

So, again, you have a key and that means that, because we're going back to the era where people had keys, how do you set up your Enigma machine? And again, if I'm sending you a message on an Enigma machine, you have an Enigma machine. I didn't know what an Enigma machine looked like before this. And honestly, it's hard to picture something whose name means mystery or riddle. But yeah, these 1940s secret message machines...

They look like a regular QWERTY vintage typewriter with keys. But where the paper would be scrolling up, there are a few more rows of buttons with the alphabet on each button. And each button can light up. Now, above those two rows of buttons are a few turning sawtooth cogwheels that have numbers 1 through 26 on them. Now, you don't need to know all the electrical engineering. Trust me.

It's complex. But essentially, when a key is pressed at the bottom, electrical signals travel through a mess of kind of tangly wires inside each of those wheels, which can turn the next wheel's mess of wires. And if you press, let's say, the letter K, that letter K will be changed via the wires and via the turning cogs.

seven times before spitting out a new letter which illuminates on that row of buttons. And it all depends on the settings on the machine. So one person usually would be pushing the keys to spell something out and the other is writing down which button lights up. Then they send that series of lighted buttons as text over Morse code to the receiver. So it turns a series of letters or words into letters

absolute jibber-jabber unless you knew exactly how the rotors were dialed and what was plugged in where when that message was typed.

And the configuration of the machine was changed daily according to this printed log that was kept in a safe. And then each day they would burn that day's instructions. Oh, and there was another three-letter code to encrypt each individual message. So overall, these wheels and plugs can be arranged in some calculate, I think, 151 trillion ways. And they change daily. So it is a horrifyingly

complicated and swiftly moving target that's relaying information that is life and death to people. Breaking the enigma is like if Satan wrote Sudoku puzzles, and then if you didn't get it, he swallowed your children.

And there are rotors that you need to put into place. You need to select the right rotors. You need to orientate them in the right way. It's got a plug board, a bit like an old-fashioned telephone plug board, switch board. You have to plug those cables in correctly. You have to plug those in in the correct way. And if you and I have the same setup, and obviously we agree the key in advance, then we can communicate with each other.

But for everybody else, it's impossible to guess our key. The number of combinations is just too vast. And things like frequency analysis and the personality of letters is just useless. This code was so utterly strong, everybody gave up hope of ever trying to crack it. Actually, the only people, the only country that had the audacity to try and crack the enigma

was the Poles. Poland was in this desperate situation of being trapped between Germany on one side and Russia on the other. We understand. And the Poles knew that they were going to get invaded sooner or later. And so they set their best mathematicians at the task of trying to crack the enigma. And this was before the war even started. They were working on this. And they made some progress. They made some crucial progress.

And those breakthroughs were smuggled out of Poland to Paris and from Paris to London. And it gave the British codebreakers a real head start in trying to break the enigma. The British set up a codebreaking center outside of London called Bletchley Park, where they hired a whole bunch

Imagine if a reality show cast a bunch of the best nerds and made them live in an English countryside mansion, Trap.

trying to defeat the Nazis. I would watch that in a heartbeat. Also, around 75% of the people working at Bletchley Park were women employed as translators, cryptographic operators. They constructed and operated some of the world's first programs

programmable electric computers. And one of these Bletchley Park nerds was named Valerie. And she had a granddaughter who you are not supposed to call Kate Middleton because according to the internet, her granddaughter's name is Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales. But yeah, tons of folks, including Valerie, worked at this 9,000 square foot manor on 58 acres of

like a wartime period piece set in a hazy, cigarette-smoky, vintage computer lab. And Alan Turing was one of those mathematicians. He was one of the mathematicians who worked on the Enigma. And he and many others came up with a whole series of ways of trying to crack the Enigma. One of the weird things, one of the ways that the Enigma was broken was that when you type the letter A into an Enigma machine,

it can be encrypted as any other letter except the letter A, okay? Which doesn't seem like a big problem because A can be encrypted into 25 other letters. B similarly cannot be encrypted into a B, but it can be encrypted into any of the other 25 letters. So that's fine. Except there was a letter that was once, a message that was once intercepted. And the code breakers at Bletchley Park looked at this message and

And it was a mess of different letters, all different letters. It looked like complete gobbledygook, except there wasn't a single W in the encrypted message. So you've got 300 characters, but not a single W. And the code breakers looked at that and they thought about it for a while. And then they realized the only way you can get a message, an output message with no Ws, is if the input message is just W 300 times.

Oh, wow. If I type it W 300 times, I'm going to get everything except W 300 times. And so they'd crack the code. That's not the most interesting message in the world. It's just W 300 times.

But what that gives you, once you know the output of the message, what you have in your hand, and once you have the input, which is W300 times, you can then work out the settings of the machine for that day. The same machine settings were effectively used for the whole day. So now you can decipher all sorts of other messages sent that day, which are more interesting.

For example, one of the messages that was sent that day that was intercepted and deciphered was about an attack on the British fleet in Alexandria. And the British fleet were warned, and the result was the first Allied victory in the Mediterranean because the enigma had been broken and because the British Navy now had advanced notice of this attack on Alexandria. So some Nazi fucked up bad, thankfully. Now, that kind of...

Maybe raises the question of why would somebody send the message W300 times? It seems like a pointless message. The reason somebody sent W300 times is if you've got an unbreakable code, I can't read your messages, but what I can do is count how many messages you sent.

And if you said one on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, 20 on Thursday, I know something big is going to happen on Friday. So this would be a real tell to have a sudden flurry. Like imagine if you texted someone once a day, but then suddenly you got 45 messages from them in an hour. You'd be like, story time, what's happening? Because your communication suddenly peaked. So you combat that by sending 20 messages every day.

Oh, God. And then what we call the traffic is then flat. So when that person sent W 300 times, they were just sending their quota of messages for the day. They were just trying to build up their quota. Had they sent a random message, if they just randomly typed with two fingers, it would have been fine. But that W 300 times compromised the security of the enigma. And what Turing did that built on this was he said, you know,

Maybe we won't be lucky enough to have W 300 times again. We can't rely on that. But we can rely on the fact that maybe we can guess the beginning of a message. If the message is going to Berlin, maybe the message reads Heil Hitler. You'd be like, fuck that guy. If the message comes from a weather station at the Atlantic, maybe it starts off with pressure readings or wind directions. We can always guess a little bit of the message.

And if we can guess a little bit of the original message, we can compare it with what came out the other end and begin to narrow down what the keys might be. And Turing designed a machine called a BOM that could effectively use a little bit of the input, a little bit of the guest message, what's called a CRIB.

against what was intercepted to try and identify what the key actually is. And the bombs were very effective. The bombs managed to work out the key on most days pretty rapidly. And I know we're talking about the theater of war in the 1940s. So the word bomb, it's a little distracting. But a bomb with an E at the end was a machine used to try to break the Enigma's code. And a bomb got its name. Well, this is also a source of

battle, the etymology of it. But some legends say that the mechanized rotors made a ticking sound like a bomb. Others said parts would sometimes fall off and make a very startling crashing noise on the floor. There's this other legend that tells the tale of a cryptologist eating this round shaped ice cream dessert and getting inspiration from that. But it doesn't matter as much as the messages deciphered through it. So the Allies

Then, just kind of knew where the ships were in the Atlantic, where air raids were going to happen at night, where armies were going to be moved to. It gave the Allies a huge advantage in trying to win the war. I have some questions from listeners. Can I lightning round you with some of them? Yes, sure. They are great questions.

And we will hear from them in a moment. But first, let's give away some money per Simon. And this week, he chose GiveWell.org, which vets and researches the most impactful charities and then grants accordingly. And donations go to the most reliably high impact and cost effective charities that they've identified, such as malaria prevention, childhood vaccination incentives, and vitamin A supplementation. You can learn more at GiveWell.org. So thank you, Simon and sponsors of the show for making that possible.

Okay, friends, I know you love trivia, and I love it too. Do you know which best-selling summer water toy was invented in a NASA engineer's bathroom? Or which Taco Bell innovation involved an actual paint sprayer to coat taco shells in Dorito dust? It's

These are just a few of the delightfully weird and wildly true stories featured on The Best Idea Yet. This is a podcast all about the surprising origin stories behind the products that you are most obsessed with.

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Okay, we're back. Let's crack into your queries. Many of you had pop cultural, cryptological questions such as Cooper Michael, Mouse Paxton, Addie Capello, Matt Zaccato, first time question asker Chris F. and Brie asked, In the movies, you often hear or see of people cracking these secret codes so quickly, or without much research. And

How often does that happen in real life? How often do you come across some sort of secret code where it's that easy to just decipher versus how long does it take to actually decipher? Does that ever piss you off about movies when someone cracks a code instantly? Well, the codes we have today are effectively unbreakable. We live in a golden age of encryption and

You can't break any of these codes. There is a fear that we have new computing technology, quantum computing might break some of today's codes.

And that would be disastrous because our economic systems would begin to collapse. Giant corporations like Amazon would no longer have a business model if you can't send secure online payments. But encryption today, it's unbreakable. It's absolutely unbreakable. You and I can buy free software and send each other secret messages that nobody in the world could ever decrypt. But there is more information being sent around the world than ever before.

And inevitably, some of it is going to be badly encrypted. Maybe people will make silly mistakes. And so I think the code breakers are really looking for those slip ups and those mistakes. Because if the code is implemented properly, it's almost an impossible task. So no, it is not as easy as you see in the movies.

For now. But more than one person had singularity and superposition questions, such as first-time question asker Paul S.R. Chris Holm, computer scientist and security engineer Stephen Moxley, John Buckner, Mark Rubin, Emro, Maximilian Galindo, Jan Bundesman, Post, Qubit, Concern, Joshua, YYZ, Adam Foote, Pafka34, Raya the Tiger, Katze, and...

Adam Silk said, how worried should people be about quantum cryptography and quantum computers breaking encryption? It's a very important question, but...

Like we were saying a while ago, throughout history, if somebody breaks a code, they don't necessarily tell the world about it. So when the British cracked the Enigma, they didn't tell the Germans that. They wanted the Germans to keep sending information via Enigma so they could keep intercepting it and exploiting it. And it's a little bit the same with quantum computing today. We don't really know how advanced the technology is getting, particularly, say, in China. So I think people are right to be worried as to where

what the future of secure communication might be. There are some other options. There's something called quantum cryptography, which would combat quantum computing, but it's much harder to implement. And so it's not quite clear that quantum cryptography would provide us all with the same level of secure communication that cryptography today does.

Are you looking for up-to-date info on this? How about an article published last week via New Scientist with the headline, Breaking Encryption with a Quantum Computer Just Got 20 Times Easier.

But it does concede in the first paragraph that these machines don't exist yet. But when they do, it is going to be way easier for them than we thought. And by we, I mean the people who make quantum computers. And then yesterday, The Conversation posted an article titled, Is a Quantum Cryptography Apocalypse Imminent?

That's casual. In it, information security group professor Keith Martin explains that the most common ways of encrypting information that we use will be impacted less than that public key encryption that we talked about earlier, the one that Clifford Cox worked on that's used in messaging and shopping transactions. And public key cryptography is also at the heart of cryptocurrency, which cryptocurrency, it's a

form of money that's decentralized from different nations' currencies. And the public key for that is like your wallet, and the private key can open your wallet. And I know that we need a whole episode on cryptocurrency because I'm not going to make it make sense in an aside.

And that's okay. But the point of this is to say that Keith Martin writing about the imminent crypto apocalypse answers his own headline question by writing that those in the know fight about it all the time. They fight about if and when quantum computing is going to be up and running. And right now, the most advanced quantum computing is able to handle tiny amounts of info and it's prone to screwing up a lot. But

Keith says that most experts believe it's a future possibility, but the prognoses range from between 10 to 20 years to well beyond that. And he also writes, my core message is don't panic. Okay, Keith. But also no one expected AI to go from like putting cat ears on an Instagram filter to effortlessly generating a video of your dead aunt twerking. But here we are, life continues.

comes at you fast. Now let's look back to the past instead. All right. Oh, look, another war, but an interesting story. So Jordan Crosby, first time question asker wants to know what's been the lasting impact of the Navajo code talkers. How did they choose Navajo over other languages? And this was also voiced by their patrons, Katie Biardi, John Worcester, Emma Oe, Nikki G.,

Don Smolchek, Dave Brewer, H. and Kappi Berrigal. They all asked about ciphers and codes developed from and relying on indigenous languages. And going backwards in time a little bit, Jordan Crosby, first-time question asker, wanted to know about the lasting impact of Navajo code talkers and how they chose Navajo over other languages. Was that a pretty isolated instance of using language to crack codes?

codes in English or any thoughts on that? So the first example, I think, was in the First World War, where I think some of the Canadian troops used Choctaw, which was a language which nobody else could understand. Well, people of the Choctaw Nation could understand it, at least those who were not forced away from their families and cultures in the indigenous genocide upon which our country is built.

Also, side note, the people of the Navajo Nation didn't call themselves Navajo. That was a name used by the Spanish to describe them. So you may hear the more accurate term Diné used by that nation. And we've had some great indigenousologists who touch on this and we'll link their episodes in the show notes. But yes, code breaking. When the Americans thought about using Navajo as a secret language,

for some of the forces in the Pacific. First, they thought, well, what would be the right language to use? What right group to work with? And they needed a tribe that was big enough to supply the men that would be needed. They needed a tribe that had a high level of literacy as well. And they needed a tribe that hadn't been studied by German anthropologists.

because that would have again compromised the code. So that's why the Navajo were chosen. And so you had these Navajo soldiers who would travel with every radio unit and all the messages would be given in Navajo, spoken to another Navajo speaker at the other end, who would then translate them back into English. And of course, nobody in the Pacific arena

You could understand Navajo. So it was a truly unbreakable code and it was highly effective. And yeah, it's one of the great stories of the Second World War.

And yes, they used their languages just spoken, but also as a base for ciphers, substituting words in their native language for letters in the English alphabet to spell out messages. And North America, being home to this broad range of native languages, it was difficult for enemies to learn or guess which ones were being used. But many nations were tapped to lend their

heritage and language and skill in Kotaking. And were they given parades after World War II? No, of course not. All of this remained classified into the late 1960s. And in the decades that followed, some of the surviving Kotakers were awarded medals of honor for their services. And for more on this history, we're going to link the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indians documentary, "The Power of Words: Native Languages as Weapons of War."

That one focuses on the Hopi Nation's role. And there's also PBS's 2019 documentary, Secrets of the Code Talkers: The Warrior Tradition, which also explores how Indigenous nations helped win the war by scrambling up sentences.

Speaking of words I don't know, let's talk Voynich. This is the name of a manuscript written on calfskin sometime in the 1400s. It was discovered by a Polish book collector. His name was Wilfrid Voynich. Voynich? Voynich? Either way, it was on the minds of patrons John Buckner, Kurt Swanson, Eric Kay, Yngwie, Jennifer Grogan, Baz Bugmeier, Felipe Jimenez, and... How about Aaron White wants to know if you've heard of the Voynich manuscript?

manuscript, secret code, language, horseshit, any thoughts? Yeah, there are lots of these very peculiar codes, one-off codes. This is an ancient manuscript, not so ancient, a few centuries old. We don't know

why it was written, and we have no idea really what it talks about. So yes, this priceless and legendarily mysterious text now lives in New Haven, Connecticut. It's at Yale's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. And it was inherited by Voynich's widow's friend in the late 1960s. No one was interested in buying it. She was like, I inherited this from my friend's husband.

And they're like, Annie, nobody wants it. So she donated it to Yale. But now you have to know someone who knows someone important to glimpse it in person. Although Yale was kind enough to digitize the 213 page Butte in 2020. No one knows...

what the writing means or what it says, but there are drawings of flowers and titties in it. And we're going to link that in the show notes in case you are the code cracking genius it's been waiting 800 years for, or if you just like drawings.

of everything from plants to bloodletting. Now, if you love that kind of stuff, also we have a recent episode on illuminated manuscripts called Medieval Codicology. We also have a mammology episode. But yeah, it's anyone's guess. Some people think it was a hoax or just a really creative or unmedicated person. And so the Voynich manuscript is one that often gets discussed. There's the Beale cipher, which is about a couple of cowboys in America who discovered gold out West and brought it back.

And there are secret messages that say where the gold is buried, but nobody's ever been able to crack the messages or find the gold. So just a quick note on this. A guy named Thomas Beale supposedly left a lockbox with an innkeeper in 1820. And in it were three coded texts describing the location in Virginia of a treasure worth now, from what I gather, around $100 million. No one has been able to crack the texts.

one or three, but text two was based on the first paragraphs of the U.S. Constitution. And it was a heads up about how much gold and jewels and silver were buried somewhere six feet deep in Bedford County. So how did people even find out about this? Well, years after Beale left the lockbox at the inn and never showed up again, the innkeeper was finally like, enough of this crap, and opened it up and it contained these three coded textiles.

And then eventually a friend of the innkeeper was like, let's publish and sell a pamphlet describing that it's the key to treasure. And people who buy this pamphlet can try to decode it. But here's the thing. Even the most modern and sophisticated code breakers and programs have not been able to crack texts one and three. And some people think it was all a hoax with text two and the inventory of all the treasure.

easily crackable, but the location text being absolute random numbers and just a good story to sell these pamphlets. Essentially, some people think it's an old-timey clickbait prank, but time will tell. Who knows? There's an ancient metal disc called the Phaistos Disc, which again, nobody's been able to read. And then there are some ancient languages which still remain unreadable.

unbroken, which we still can't read. One of them is called Linear A. Nobody can make head nor tail of what Linear A means or knows, can understand what the alphabet is or even the language.

I looked up this ancient 4,000 year old script from the extinct language of ancient Crete and honestly it looks like the alien squid language from the movie Arrival or like abstract brushstroke art in a hotel lobby. Like what the heck is this shit? But Linear B

was cracked, I think in the 50s, by a guy called Michael Ventris, building on the work of an American woman called Alice Kober, also in league with a guy called John Chadwick. Several people all head down on this linear B. And John Chadwick, I interviewed him shortly before he died. And I said, John, you're a classic scholar at Cambridge. How did you get into deciphering ancient languages? Why was that the thing that obsessed you?

And he told me that he'd worked at Bletchley Park.

with the codebreakers in the Second World War alongside Alan Turing. Oh, wow. And he never told anybody that he'd been a Bletchley Park codebreaker because all of those people were sworn to secrecy. Again, everybody keeps their secrets. Yeah. But that work in the Second World War led directly to inspiring Chadwick to crack Linear B. What a flex that he kept hidden. You know what I mean? Some people be bragging up and down in the pubs about that.

Yeah, no, it's an incredible thing. The story of Bletchley Park, when the war ended, everybody went back to their lives and got on with their day-to-day work. Alan Turing, for example, went to work on computing. As well as being an incredible co-breaker, he's the father of computer technology, computer theory, computer science.

The thing was that later on, he was a homosexual and the government was aware of that. He wasn't given the clearance required to work on certain projects. He was sidelined. He went to Manchester and did some incredible work in Manchester. Then he was arrested because he was found with a man and, I guess, found guilty of indecent behavior or some such accusation. He was found guilty. He was given hormone treatment and chemically castrated.

and eventually just took his own life. And when he died, virtually nobody was aware, not even his family were aware of the incredible work he'd done in terms of changing the course of the Second World War. And now he's celebrated and recognized and people are aware of the crime that was committed against him. And in fact, I was very proud to be part of a panel of

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who I think now is hoping to be prime minister of Canada. Mission accomplished. He was governor of the Bank of England. He wanted to have a scientist or a mathematician on the new 50-pound banknote, possibly one of our last ever banknotes, depending how money goes.

We were on a panel, and our proposal to him was that Alan Turing be on the new 50-pound note. So it's great to say, if you're lucky enough to have a 50-pound note in Britain, Alan Turing is the person on it. Because not only did he change the course of the Second World War, not only was he a mathematician of epic achievements in mathematics, not only was he the father of computer science, but he also...

pioneered a lot of the concepts within artificial intelligence. So it's great that he's now on our £50 note. But the fact that he did so much for the world and suffered so greatly is something that no one should forget, especially as we see LGBTQ people under baffling and increasing hostility from political regimes. And the future can only get better if people learn from the past. Speaking of darkness and the future... You know, on the topic of artificial intelligence...

Two more listener questions, if you don't mind. We talked a little bit about quantum computing, but several people wanted to know what role AI might have in modern cryptology. On the real life squishy brains of Dave Philip Meter, Cass the Dog Nerd, Megan Walker, Stephanie Coombs, Kate E. Quinn West, Corey and Sarah Rossero who asked, "Can AI solve secret codes? If so, should we unplug it now?" And are we getting much closer to that?

I think the modern codes are so utterly unbreakable that artificial intelligence won't make any difference. It's just the sheer computing power is just not there.

to have any impact on secure communication. But AI could have an impact on trying to crack ancient codes, ancient messages, or ancient languages where it's not about lacking computer power, it's about lacking that vital insight, or it's about getting all of the texts that are available and looking for patterns. Code breaking is about pattern recognition, and AI is terrific at pattern recognition.

Yeah, some people wanted to know why do some people really excel at like escape rooms and things like that. Some people, some of us are just great at that. Some of us myself are not. But let's talk about stuff he hates, or at least his least favorite. Patron Kat, you're going to love this one.

So there's a code which I didn't actually write about in the code book because the code book was published. There was another book out at almost the same time. In fact, it was at the same time because we were both kind of in the top 10 bestseller list and we were kind of competing against each other. And it was called The Bible Code. So there was my book, The Code Book, and then there was The Bible Code. And The Bible Code was getting a lot of attention. And the idea in The Bible Code was that there are encrypted messages in the most ancient Hebrew manuscripts.

And it's a very intriguing idea. The book was written by a guy called Michael Drozdny. So Michael Drozdny wrote this book called The Bible Code. And the way you find these encrypted messages in the ancient Hebrew text is you put all the letters out in the form of an array, in the form of a grid. And you look for Hebrew letters that are equally spaced in a straight line.

So you don't read it left to right or right to left, I suppose. You're looking for diagonals. You're looking for lines going in all different directions that are equally spaced. And when you do that, something really weird happens. You find these messages, not just messages, but predictions that actually turned out to be true. You find the word Newton crossing with gravity. It's kind of extraordinary. Mm-hmm.

you find the word Kennedy, Dallas, assassinate. No. Yeah, yeah. 100% true. Absolutely. No word of a lie. Take the most ancient Hebrew texts, put them in a grid, look for these patterns and these predictions emerge. Literally hundreds and hundreds of predictions. Every single one has come true. I've got goosebumps. Now,

A mathematician in Australia said, you know, I'm not sure I quite believe this. So he got another book, not the Bible, but he got Moby Dick. He said, you know, Moby Dick is a huge text. It's about the same size as these ancient manuscripts. What happens if I apply the same algorithm to Moby Dick? And he looked at Moby Dick. He put all the letters in Moby Dick in a grid, in an array. He looked for letters that are equally spaced in a straight line.

And exactly the same thing happened. He found hundreds and hundreds of predictions, all of which came true. There's one about the death of Diana, Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, Rhodes, Skid, the passenger who was killed with her, Dodie, Dodie, the name of the driver, Henri Paul. They all appear in Moby Dick. So the bottom line is that books are big objects. They contain millions of letters.

That's millions of starting points, millions of ways you can jump around, millions of different diagonals you can find. And when you have so many possibilities, you will find anything you want to find. It's purely, it's about the law of large numbers or the laws of large combinations. So you'll find everything that's ever happened, everything that won't happen, everything that will happen. It's all there in any large tech. So that's kind of

One of my favorite codes and one of the codes I really hate, I suppose. Could it point to a simulation or it's really just chance? You get enough letters, you're going to get some messages. That's really the point, right? My favorite coincidence, you put your finger on it, it's really about coincidences. If you take Shakespeare's Hamlet quotation, to be or not to be, that is the question.

If you take that wonderful soliloquy and you juggle the letters around, you get the following anagram. You get the anagram, which is in one of the Bard's best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten, which is a perfect summary of the entire play.

built from an anagram of its most famous soliloquy. So yes, Seattleite, graphic designer and anagram enthusiast Corey Calhoun sat down about 15 years ago and thought, I wonder if you can anagram Hamlet's speech. And within just a few hours took the Shakespearean text to be or not to be. That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and then

Then he anagrammed that and it spells out, in one of the Bard's best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten. Way to go, Corey. Who knew all of those letters could spell all of those words? I now follow Corey Calhoun on Instagram because I think that that's so cool. And he is probably wondering why a podcast lady wants to see pictures of his kids and cakes.

Let him wonder. And you can either say, why, gosh, wasn't Shakespeare amazing that he could build in these incredible puzzles? But he just wrote so much stuff that eventually these weird coincidences will happen. Oh, I've never heard that, Ant. I love it. Is there any codes that you ever keep an eye on? Like, when are they going to crack that one? Gosh, um...

The one that people write to me the most about is the Beale Code, the Beale Cipher. Everybody regularly, on a monthly basis, somebody thinks they've cracked the Beale Cipher. That was the old-timey treasure buried in the Virginia foothills, which made a fortune for the anonymous pamphlet maker. To which the reply is, well, if you've cracked the Beale Cipher, then show me where the gold is. That's the ultimate answer to whether someone's cracked it or not. So yeah, that's the one that people still seem to pursue.

Well, maybe they've got it in a double padlocked treasure chest. Yeah. It's not our business. Absolutely. Or maybe somebody's found the treasure, stolen it, and as we say, the whole world of cryptography is full of secrets. And so maybe you shout about it when you have discovered the gold. I would keep that under a tight, heavy lid. I don't think I'd tell. I wouldn't go out tweeting about it. Yeah.

Well, this has been so wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for... My pleasure. It's been nice to kind of think about cryptography all over again. We started off talking about ancient Sumerians and their pottery glazes, and we've come all the way up to the internet and padlock boxes. So that's great. Thanks.

So ask cryptological people cryptic and sometimes illogical questions because what fun is a cat unless it's out of a bag? So thank you so much, Dr. Simon Singh, for humoring me with so many not smart questions. You can enjoy some of his other work like the BBC documentary and book, Firma's Last Theorem, other books such as The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, and Trick or Treatment,

alternative medicine on trial. His social media is linked in the show notes, as is his website, which is just his name, .net. And we are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I personally am at Allie Ward on both. We have shorter kid-friendly episodes called Smologies. You can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. They're also linked in the show notes. Join our Patreon and submit questions before we record at patreon.com slash ologies. We have merch at ologiesmerch.com, including hats.

and bathing suits and totes and gifts for the cute little weirdos in your life. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning Neology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardweier does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer. Susan Hale puts it all together as managing director. And deciphering my transcripts into an actual episode are our Brainiac editors, Jake Chafee and lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Extra editing by the wonderful Jared Slater.

sleeper of Mindjam Media who helped out in a pinch for me because I had a mic malfunction late at night on some of the asides. You may have noticed it, you may not have because he is great at helping out. And also he's married to me, so he had no choice. Nick Thorburn orchestrated the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I'll tell you a secret. And first off, if you are stuck and annoyed about that Pig Latin clip from earlier. What are you studying at college? Pig Latin.

You wouldn't know a thing about that, would you? Oh, won't I? Two fun facts about it. It's from an old Three Stooges clip called Three Little Pigskins. And the pig Latin spoken was, what are you doing tonight? And then she says, no. And it features a little known actress in a part of one of her earliest roles.

Her name was Lucille Ball. She was blonde in it, which really threw me. Also, I could not not sign off with another low message. Don't work on this if you're driving. 5, 22, 5, 18, 25, 20, 8, 9, 14, 7, 9, 19, 1, 19, 5, 3, 18, 5, 20, 21.

21 14 20 9 12 25 15 21 12 5 1 18 14 9 20 bye-bye hackadermatology homeology cryptozoology lithology technology meteorology now you can break the code

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