Cryptology (SECRET CODES) with Simon Singh

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Speaker 16 Oh, hey, it's the sweatshirt that you will never get back from them.

Speaker 17 Allie Ward.

Speaker 12 And I have wanted to cover secret codes and cryptology for years and years.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I was like, they're going to be tight-lipped. They're not going to give up the goods.

Speaker 24 So then a little more digging unearthed a better, more perfect guest, the guy who wrote the literal book on code breaking titled The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography.

Speaker 21 Done.

Speaker 25 He's in.

Speaker 28 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 Ferma's Last Theorem.

Speaker 19 He's also the author of the books Big Bang, The Origin of the Universe, and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets.

Speaker 2 He knows so much about the function and history of secret ciphers and code breaking and has several additional honorary degrees.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 11 Enigmatic indeed. So, our first introduction was amid an absolutely horrific amount of tech diffs, and I was pretty sure he hated me.

Speaker 35 Thank you for spending a half hour troubleshooting.

Speaker 37 I swear, that is not

Speaker 3 typical at all.

Speaker 36 No, no, no, it's these things happen.

Speaker 17 But look at that, brilliant and forgiving.

Speaker 28 So, let's get to this great combo.

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Speaker 14 They're called Smologies.

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Speaker 14 A review and a reminder about Smologies all at once. Perfect.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 10 So cryptology, we obviously we've never done this topic.

Speaker 37 That's how it works here, but I know very little about code, but you've written an entire book on it.

Speaker 18 And I'm curious, why

Speaker 7 cryptology, what caused you to research and go back to the history of cryptology and do as deep a dive?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And it was the story of the world's most notorious maths problem. And it was a 350-year-old romp through mathematics.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So what was a few paragraphs in Fermar's Enigma turned out to be a whole chapter in the code book. And also, previously, I'd been working on a TV show in the UK called Tomorrow's World.

Speaker 36 And every week, it was a magazine show. So every week we were going through lots of different science and technology stories.

Speaker 36 And each week I'd come up with a story about codes or code breaking or, you know, the internet was kind of just beginning to take off.

Speaker 36 So, these were really important and interesting stories, but they weren't very visual.

Speaker 36 So, 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.

Speaker 36 And so, you have this topic with a fantastically long history, and something which, you know, we live in the information age today.

Speaker 36 And the way you protect information is not really by locking it up in a safe, you do it by locking it up with a code.

Speaker 12 Were you always a maths person?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So I have a broad interest.

Speaker 36 And the interesting thing about cryptography is it is very mathematical, particularly today.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 4 So Simon's book, The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, is highly lauded and 432 pages.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 36 Yeah, absolutely. No, there were were huge chunks that got thrown out.

Speaker 36 I was fascinated by the decryption of ancient languages. So something like hieroglyphs, you know, the decryption of hieroglyphs is an extraordinary story.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 12 Just a side note, if you're into hieroglyphs, we have an Egyptology episode as well as a mummyology episode about mummies with Egyptologist Dr.

Speaker 38 Kara Cooney.

Speaker 28 Oh, we 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.

Speaker 34 So we'll link those in the show notes.

Speaker 45 But yeah, let's talk ancient codes and language.

Speaker 32 Are they the same?

Speaker 33 Simon says.

Speaker 36 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...

Speaker 36 You know, 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 it wasn't ever meant to be a code.

Speaker 36 Same with Morse code, for example. Morse code is not a secret way of communication.
It's an efficient way of communication for for the telegraph. We didn't have to crack the Morse code.

Speaker 36 We knew how it all worked.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 10 I was wondering, because that was my first question, what's the difference between a code and a language?

Speaker 15 Is language meant to communicate?

Speaker 47 Code is essentially meant to not communicate?

Speaker 7 Is that like a chief distinguishing difference?

Speaker 36 Yeah, I think that that's a good way of putting it. And And today, encryption goes beyond just hiding the meaning of a message.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And sometimes I want to guarantee that I sent the message so that you know, you can't accuse me later on of not sending you the message.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So today we have different aspects to cryptography, all of which are important in different situations.

Speaker 14 I'm curious how far back you found that it goes.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 I imagine so much of that has to be war-related, right?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 recipe for pottery glaze and they don't want anybody else to steal it.

Speaker 2 And this was around 1500 BC.

Speaker 50 It was like the Colonel Sanders original recipe of 11 herbs and spices of ceramics.

Speaker 36 So those are the kind of things that start emerging. As I say, hieroglyphs are just a way of writing.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So they know that I'm sending you a secret message because this just doesn't look normal.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So here we're talking about things like invisible inks.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 But in between the normal ink, I'll write in invisible ink. Wow.
So it looks like a very normal postcard. And in fact, the invisible ink is what's got the real message.

Speaker 36 There 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 sketch of the river.

Speaker 36 I guess it's the San Antonio River that runs through the town. I don't know my geography very well, but

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 actually 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.

Speaker 6 It continues.

Speaker 19 One is only left to imagine the possible and probably painful ways the ball could have come out.

Speaker 51 Okay.

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 waited for the hair to regrow, and then sent him on his way. And then at the other end, you shave the head and recover the message.

Speaker 36 And I remember talking about this once and somebody said it's a great code, but it's very low bandwidth.

Speaker 36 It's

Speaker 36 not going to be a great way to transfer much information very quickly, but effective.

Speaker 10 Also, it's a long game.

Speaker 7 You're in it for a while.

Speaker 36 Yes, yes. I suppose that message has got one messenger, has one, one message and one message only.

Speaker 10 Do you remember what that message was?

Speaker 7 Or do they do a lot of communicating through tattooed heads?

Speaker 36 Oh, I think it was possibly possibly so remarkable, which is why maybe Herodotus wrote about it. Maybe it was an exception rather than the rule.

Speaker 52 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, which is very sneaky.

Speaker 22 Or yeah, embedding a note via ink into the flesh of a trusted servant.

Speaker 2 And because I'm nosy, I wanted to find out what that secret tattoo message was.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 3 But how do you make sure that no one else sees the tattoo head message if you don't have time for your hairstyle to like awkwardly grow back?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 7 Can you imagine if it was just a pottery glaze recipe? You'd be like, all that for life.

Speaker 36 Well, okay, basic question.

Speaker 10 Is pig Latin a code?

Speaker 7 Does that count as code or language?

Speaker 36 Now, I have to. What is Pig Latin?

Speaker 34 It's when you put the last syllable, it's like, itige, bitige, but

Speaker 36 you know what I mean? Right. What are you studying at college? Pig Latin.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I mean, that's another nice thing about codes. You know, they're childish in many ways.

Speaker 36 And, you know, we all wrote secret codes when we were a kid, and I've got a couple of kids, and they certainly had their invisible inks and other secret messages that we used to write.

Speaker 36 And so, yeah, you know, it's a playful code, absolutely.

Speaker 42 And this kind of code is also sometimes called an argo or a cant.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 42 So cat becomes at K, Ball becomes Albe, yarn becomes Arnie.

Speaker 42 Akfe becomes something you could say around grandma.

Speaker 13 And Pig Latin is also called hog Latin, but it is not the same as the written system of pig pen.

Speaker 36 There's a very nice code called pig pen, which you just reminded me of, which is you draw two tic-tac-toe grids.

Speaker 36 Yes, kind of tic-tac-toe grids, and then you put the letters in instead of X's and Y's, you put A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

Speaker 36 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 a kind of backwards L because the A is inside a kind of backwards L.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 51 Okay, picture.

Speaker 47 Two tic-tac-toe grids and then two big X's.

Speaker 11 So in tic-tac-toe grid number one are the letters A through I.

Speaker 32 In grid number two are the letters J through R with some extra dots thrown in.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 46 So whatever the shape around the letter with dots, if need be, becomes a cipher.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 12 I'm a big fan. Pretty cool.

Speaker 36 So there are lots of lovely little codes that you can invent yourself or that have been used for literally hundreds of years.

Speaker 7 You know, I was surprised.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Can you tell me a little bit more about that and why that was such an interesting thing that you wanted to include?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And in fact, Julius Caesar, I think Julius Caesar wrote about codes quite extensively when he was a general in Gaul in France.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 I could shift the alphabet five places or ten places. But essentially, he was swapping one letter for a different letter.

Speaker 36 Now,

Speaker 36 you can change that substitution cipher. You can make it better.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And that's really quite a strong code in some ways. There are are so many ways of rearranging the alphabet, there are so many ways of randomly swapping letters around.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 She fled to England and sought safety and sanctuary from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.

Speaker 64 I I love my family.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So for safety, Elizabeth put Mary in prison and she locked her up.

Speaker 36 And 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

Speaker 36 treacherous letters. She did start writing to these foreign powers, particularly Spain.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Now, She wrote these letters using this kind of code where you substitute each letter for a different letter or a different symbol perhaps and she smuggled the letters out via beer barrels now water was so contaminated at that time that it was much safer to drink a very diluted form of beer that was kind of just the general thing you would drink day in day out and so these beer barrels were coming in and out of the prison these notes were smuggled out in these beer barrels

Speaker 36 now

Speaker 36 Elizabeth had spy masters 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.

Speaker 36 They knew how to crack this simple substitution cycle.

Speaker 36 And that shouldn't have been a surprise to Mary because, well,

Speaker 36 this code had been cracked about a thousand years ago.

Speaker 36 We're talking about the 16th century for Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, but it had been cracked in the 11th and 10th and 11th century in Baghdad.

Speaker 36 There was a guy called Al-Kindi, an Arabic philosopher, mathematician, and he realized that every letter's got a personality.

Speaker 51 How so?

Speaker 36 So E, for example, is very common. It's the most common letter in English.
13% of all letters are E. Oh, wow.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 If you have two symbols that only ever follow each other, so you know, a square that only ever follows a circle, well, that could be Q and U, because, you know, Q is always followed by a U.

Speaker 36 Also, you know, words have personalities, so the is the most common three-letter word.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 24 But according to the 2022 paper, Al Kindy, the father of crypto analysis, if the letter of the encrypted message K has a frequency in the encryption equal to about 10%,

Speaker 3 probably the K of the encrypted message corresponds to an E in the decoded message.

Speaker 13 And thus, it says within a few attempts, the encrypted message can be resolved.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 26 And based on those and spelling patterns, the spies could be on you.

Speaker 3 Also, apparently your choices were to die of thirst or have dysentery or just be drunk all the time.

Speaker 59 So, like, maybe this wasn't Mary's best work.

Speaker 36 So, Phillips, I think it was Thomas Phillips, was Elizabeth's spy master. He decrypted this message that he'd intercepted from Mary.
The message was clearly asking for the Spanish to invade.

Speaker 36 And Elizabeth then had the evidence she needed to then put Mary on trial for treason. She was put on trial, found guilty, and executed.

Speaker 59 Oh, so busted.

Speaker 36 Which kind of of put an end to any hopes of a Catholic revival in England.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 7 Does that make switching letters of the alphabet like you can do it mathematically a lot of ways, but that's easy to break?

Speaker 36 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
You know, it's one of those things.

Speaker 36 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, you know, trying to crack a code.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 you can begin to decipher the whole message. The whole thing just falls into your hands very easily after that.

Speaker 36 But I think that one of the analogies I use in the book is to describe cryptography as a bit like the battle between bacteria and antibiotics.

Speaker 36 You know, 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 antibiotic.

Speaker 36 So scientists have to go away and make cleverer antibiotics until the bacteria become immune again. So this constant evolutionary battle between bacteria and antibiotics.

Speaker 36 And it's the same in codes and code breaking. You know, 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 if E accounts for 13% of all letters,

Speaker 36 if I use a diamond for E, then diamonds appear 13% of the time, and I know that a diamond is really E.

Speaker 36 But if I use 13 symbols to represent E,

Speaker 36 then each of those symbols only appears 1% of the time.

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 then

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 28 Hence, Al-Kindi was also known as a pioneer of statistics.

Speaker 2 And this was back in the year 800, so 1,200 years ago.

Speaker 30 Some days, I can't remember my bank pin, and I was the one who said it.

Speaker 45 It's between me and me, and I still can't crack it.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 You agree on it ahead of time.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So we could jump ahead because I think the most extraordinary thing about cryptography is it seems impossible. It seems though if you're going to decrypt a message from me, you have to have my key.

Speaker 36 Okay, we, and you're on on the other side of the ocean so how on earth can i get this key to you and particularly today you know 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 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 you know the british government would have to send keys to its diplomats all over the world in suitcases, literally having to physically transfer them around the world.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 You know, 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.
Okay.

Speaker 36 Now you can't open the box and read the message because I've still got the key.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that sucks.

Speaker 36 And

Speaker 36 I don't want to send the key to you because that's slow, expensive, and risky.

Speaker 36 So how can we avoid it? Well, this is what we can do. You, at your end, you've got this box that's locked.
You can add a second padlock to the box, your padlock with your key.

Speaker 36 and you send it back to me. Now, I've got a box with two padlocks.

Speaker 10 How does that help?

Speaker 36 But I can, can, 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,

Speaker 36 nice. And you can then unlock it, open the box, and read the message.
Nice.

Speaker 33 Daisy chain.

Speaker 36 Yeah, so suddenly something that was impossible becomes, oh, actually, it's not so difficult after all.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So we're not distributing the keys, we're just distributing the padlocks.

Speaker 3 Got it.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 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.

Speaker 36 Oh my God. So he had to go to bed that night,

Speaker 36 he wouldn't forget forget the mathematical idea, and then rushed into work early the next day and wrote it all down.

Speaker 36 It's literally the greatest cryptographic breakthrough in a thousand years.

Speaker 36 And then, and then, having explained it to his colleagues, he couldn't tell the rest of the world because the British government made it confidential.

Speaker 36 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 Witt Diffie and Martin Hellman.

Speaker 36 And they are the people who then shared that technology with the rest of the world.

Speaker 55 Okay, who cares?

Speaker 34 What does this mean for you?

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 41 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 crypto system, the encryption key is public and distinct from the decryption key, which is kept secret or private.

Speaker 55 Okay, so the public key is based on these two large prime numbers.

Speaker 18 Anyone can use the public key, but it can only be decrypted by someone who knows the private key.

Speaker 13 And you know what mathematical genius and cryptologic comprehension can get you?

Speaker 58 Well, sometimes nothing, sometimes worse than nothing.

Speaker 42 And we're going to hear about that later.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 13 Simon himself is now in the most excellent order of the British Empire.

Speaker 58 But yeah, Clifford Cox was struck by this inspiration in 1973.

Speaker 41 And it wasn't until the method was declassified from its top secret status in like 1999 that he was recognized for it.

Speaker 10 I wonder what he was doing when he came up with that.

Speaker 1 Was that like a shower thought?

Speaker 10 Or, you know, you're washing dishes and you have a great idea.

Speaker 36 Yeah. You know, 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.

Speaker 36 And then suddenly when they relax and suddenly maybe the brain goes into a kind of instinctive mode you know suddenly clarity emerges and yeah it was it seems to have been 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 cellulogenology episode on hobbies and why leisure activities are vital if we don't want to lose our marbles but going back a few decades what about mechanics like when did things become mechanical?

Speaker 11 When did a code-breaking machine sort of emerge?

Speaker 10 And how did Turing do what he did

Speaker 7 without the computer power that we have now?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So when the telegraph was invented, we needed more secure forms of encryption. You know, the British Empire was being run by people in London sending messages over telegraph lines across the world.

Speaker 36 And then when the radio was invented, again, we needed even better forms of communication because somebody on a battlefield can send a radio message over hundreds of miles and send lots of information in just a few seconds.

Speaker 36 So we needed even more effective encryption that was rapid and secure.

Speaker 36 And so what you have in between the First and the Second World War is 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.

Speaker 36 And the Americans worked on one, the Dutch worked on one, the Swedes had an encryption device, and the Germans had one as well.

Speaker 36 But all of these companies really struggled because there wasn't a huge need for secret communication. And so all of of these companies were gradually going bankrupt, apart from the German one.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 34 It's great for business.

Speaker 36 And Germany began to buy these Enigma machines,

Speaker 36 not just for every army unit, but for every naval ship, for every airbase, for every train station, and so on. And so hundreds and thousands of these Enigma machines were made and distributed.

Speaker 36 And they were essential for the, you know, say the German concept of Blitzkrieg. We have coordinated attack.

Speaker 36 You have bombardment from land, you have attack from the air, and then ships off the coast, also bombarding.

Speaker 36 So this coordinated kind of attack is only possible if you've got secure, effective, rapid communication.

Speaker 36 So again, you have a key. And that means that, you know, because we're going back to the era where people had keys, you know, how do you set up your Enigma machine?

Speaker 36 And again, if I'm sending you a message on an Enigma machine, you have an Enigma machine.

Speaker 45 I didn't know what an Enigma machine looked like before this.

Speaker 25 And honestly, it's hard to picture something whose name means mystery or riddle.

Speaker 17 But yeah, these 1940s secret message machines, they look like a regular QWERTY vintage typewriter with keys.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 38 Now above those two rows of buttons are a few turning sawtooth cogwheels that have numbers 1 through 26 on them.

Speaker 11 Now you don't need to know all the electrical engineering.

Speaker 12 Trust me, it's complex.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 2 And if you press, like, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 50 Then they send that series of lighted buttons as text over Morse code to the receiver.

Speaker 2 So it turns a series of letters or words into absolute jibber jabber unless you knew exactly how the rotors were dialed and what was plugged in where when that message was typed.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 45 Oh, and there was another three-letter code to encrypt each individual message.

Speaker 29 So overall, these wheels and plugs can be arranged in some calculate, I think, 151 trillion ways, and they change daily.

Speaker 2 So it is a horrifyingly complicated and swiftly moving target that's relaying information that is life and death to people.

Speaker 2 Breaking the enigma is like if Satan wrote Sudoku puzzles, and then if you didn't get it, he swallowed your children.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's got a plug board, a bit like an old-fashioned telephone plugboard, switchboard. You have to plug those cables in correctly.
You have to plug those in in the correct way.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 The number of combinations is just too vast. And things like frequency analysis and the personality of letters is just useless.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Poland was in this desperate situation of being trapped between Germany on one side and Russia on the other. We understand.

Speaker 36 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 code breakers a real head start in trying to break the enigma.

Speaker 36 The British set up a code-breaking center outside of London called Bletchley Park, where they hired a whole weird bunch of people from crossword addicts to maths to engineers to classic scholars.

Speaker 36 And they all worked at Bletchley trying to break the Enigma, but also lots of other codes from Japan and Italy and also Germany.

Speaker 47 Imagine if a reality show cast a bunch of the best nerds and made them live in an English countryside mansion trying to defeat the Nazis. I would watch that in a heartbeat.

Speaker 28 Also, around 75% of the people working at Letchley Park were women employed as translators, cryptographic operators.

Speaker 13 They constructed and operated some of the world's first programmable electric computers.

Speaker 28 And one of these Letchley Park nerds was named Valerie.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 66 But yeah, tons of folks, including Valerie, worked at this 9,000 square foot manor on 58 acres, like a wartime period piece set in a hazy, cigarette-smoky vintage computer lab.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 be encrypted as any other letter except the letter a

Speaker 36 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 so that's fine

Speaker 36 except

Speaker 36 There was a letter that was once, a message that was once intercepted, and the code breakers at Bletchy Park looked at this message, and it was a mess of different letters,

Speaker 36 all different letters. It looked like complete gobbledygook, except

Speaker 36 there wasn't a single W in the encrypted message. So you've got 300 characters, but not a single W.

Speaker 36 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 W's,

Speaker 36 is if the input message is just W 300 times.

Speaker 36 Oh, wow. If I type it W 300 times, I'm going to get everything except W 300 times.

Speaker 36 And so they'd crack the code. That's not the most interesting message in the world.
It's just W 300 times.

Speaker 36 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 W 300 times, you can then work out the settings of the machine for that day.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 For example, one of the messages that was sent that day that was intercepted and deciphered was about an attack on the British fleet and Alexandria.

Speaker 36 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 Navy, the British Navy now had advanced notice of this attack on Alexandria.

Speaker 12 So some Nazi fucked up bad, thankfully.

Speaker 36 Now that kind of

Speaker 36 maybe raises the question of why would somebody send the message W 300 times? It seems like a pointless message.

Speaker 36 The reason somebody sent W 300 times is if you've got an unbreakable code,

Speaker 36 I can't read your messages, but what I can do is count how many messages you send.

Speaker 36 And if you send one on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, 20 on Thursday, I know something big is going to happen on Friday.

Speaker 4 So this would be a real tell to have a sudden flurry.

Speaker 45 Like imagine if you texted someone once a day, but then suddenly you got 45 messages from them in an hour.

Speaker 28 You'd be like, story time, what's happening?

Speaker 36 Because your communication suddenly peaked. So you combat that by sending 20 messages every day.

Speaker 36 Oh, God.

Speaker 36 And then what we call the traffic is then flat.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 But we can rely on the fact that maybe we can guess the beginning of a message. You know, if the message is going to Berlin, maybe the message reads Heil Hitler.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And if we can guess a little bit of the original message, we can compare it with what

Speaker 36 came out at the other end and begin to narrow down what the keys might be.

Speaker 36 And Turing designed a machine called a bomb 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.

Speaker 36 And the bombs were very effective. The bombs managed to work out the key on most days pretty rapidly.

Speaker 44 And I know we're talking about the theater of war in the 1940s.

Speaker 53 So the word bomb, it's a little distracting.

Speaker 41 But a bomb with an E at the end was a machine used to try to break the Enigma's code.

Speaker 44 And a bomb got its name.

Speaker 59 Well, this is also a source of a battle, the etymology of it.

Speaker 42 But some legends say that the mechanized rotors made a ticking sound like a bomb.

Speaker 13 Others said parts would sometimes fall off and make a very startling crashing noise on the floor.

Speaker 41 There's this other legend that tells the tale of a cryptologist eating this round-shaped ice cream dessert and getting inspiration from that.

Speaker 13 But it doesn't matter as much as the messages deciphered through it.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 You know, it gave the Allies a huge advantage in trying to win the war.

Speaker 48 I have some questions from listeners.

Speaker 7 Can I lightning round you with some of them?

Speaker 36 Yes, sure.

Speaker 7 They are great questions.

Speaker 18 And we will hear from them in a moment.

Speaker 2 But first, let's give away some money per Simon.

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Speaker 2 So thank you, Simon, and sponsors of the show for making that possible.

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Speaker 23 Okay, we're back.

Speaker 16 And let's crack into your queries.

Speaker 2 Many of you had pop cultural cryptological questions, such as Cooper Michael, Mouse Paxton, Addie Capello, Matt Zaccado, first-time question asker, Chris F.

Speaker 69 And Bree asked: In the movies, you often hear or see of people cracking these secret codes so quickly or without much research.

Speaker 2 How often does that happen in real life?

Speaker 69 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?

Speaker 7 Does that ever piss you off about movies when someone cracks a code like instantly?

Speaker 36 Well, the codes we have today are effectively unbreakable. You know, we live in a golden age of encryption and

Speaker 36 you know,

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 there is more information being sent around the world than ever before.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Because if the code is implemented properly, it's almost an impossible task.

Speaker 5 So no, it is not as easy as you see in the movies.

Speaker 49 for now.

Speaker 17 But more than one person had singularity and super position questions, such as first-time question asker Paul S.R.

Speaker 4 Chris Holm, computer scientist and security engineer Stephen Moxley, John Buckner, Mark Rubin, M.

Speaker 38 Rowe, Maximilian Galindo, Jan Bundesmann, post-Cubit concerned Joshua YYZ, Adam Foot, PAFCOV34, Rya the Tiger, Katze, and.

Speaker 7 Adam Silk said, how worried should people be about quantum cryptography and quantum computers breaking encryption?

Speaker 36 It's a very, it's a very important question, but like we were saying a while ago, you know, throughout history, if somebody breaks a code, they don't necessarily tell the world about it.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So I think people are right to be worried as to where,

Speaker 36 you know, what the future of secure communication might be. There are some other options.

Speaker 36 There's something called quantum cryptography, which would combat quantum computing, but it's much harder to implement.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 13 Are you looking for up-to-date info on this?

Speaker 44 How about an article published last week via New Scientist with the headline, breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 20 times easier?

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 42 And by we, I mean the people who make quantum computers.

Speaker 61 And then yesterday, the conversation posted an article titled, Is a Quantum Cryptography Apocalypse Imminent?

Speaker 56 That's casual.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 44 And the public key for that is like your wallet, and the private key can open your wallet.

Speaker 2 And I know that we need a whole episode on cryptocurrency because I'm not going to make it make sense in an aside.

Speaker 13 And that's okay.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 24 They fight about if and when quantum computing is going to be up and running.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 13 And he also writes, my core message is don't panic.

Speaker 51 Okay, Keith.

Speaker 62 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 ant twerking.

Speaker 3 But here we are.

Speaker 62 Life comes at you fast.

Speaker 53 Now let's look back to the past instead.

Speaker 59 All right.

Speaker 51 Oh, look, another war, but an interesting story.

Speaker 42 So Jordan Crosby, first-time question asker, wants to know, what's been the lasting impact of the Navajo code talkers?

Speaker 49 How did they choose Navajo over other languages?

Speaker 18 And this was also voiced by their patrons, Katie Biarti, John Worcester, M.A.O.E., Nikki G, Don Smallchek, Dave Brewer, H., and Kathy Barrigal.

Speaker 3 They all asked about ciphers and codes developed from and relying on Indigenous languages.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Was that a pretty isolated instance of using language to crack codes in English or any thoughts on that?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 12 Also, side note, the people of the Navajo Nation didn't call themselves Navajo.

Speaker 2 That was a name used by the Spanish to describe them.

Speaker 4 So you may hear the more accurate term Dinay used by that nation.

Speaker 5 And we've had some great indigenous oligologists who touch on this and we'll link their episodes in the show notes.

Speaker 16 But yes, code breaking.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And of course, nobody in the Pacific arena 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.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 41 And North America America being home to this broad range of native languages, it was difficult for enemies to learn or guess which ones were being used.

Speaker 56 But many nations were tapped to lend their heritage and language and skill in code talking.

Speaker 61 And were they given parades after World War II?

Speaker 59 No, of course not.

Speaker 56 All of this remained classified into the late 1960s.

Speaker 59 And in the decades that followed, some of the surviving co-talkers were awarded medals of honor for their services.

Speaker 56 And for more 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.

Speaker 42 That one focuses on the Hopi Nation's role.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 58 Speaking of words, I don't know, let's talk Vojnich.

Speaker 57 This is the name of a manuscript written on calfskin sometime in the 1400s.

Speaker 51 It was discovered by a Polish book collector.

Speaker 65 His name was Wilfred Voinich.

Speaker 58 Voinich, Voynich, either way, it was on the minds of patrons John Buckner, Kurt Swanson, Eric K.

Speaker 59 Ingwe, Jennifer Grogan, Baz Puckmeyer, Felipe Jimenez, and...

Speaker 10 How about Aaron White wants to know

Speaker 7 if you've heard of the Voinich manuscript, secret code, language, horseshit, any thoughts?

Speaker 36 Yeah, there are lots of these very peculiar codes,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 41 So, yes, this priceless and legendarily mysterious text now lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Speaker 56 It's at Yale's rare book and manuscript library.

Speaker 61 And it was inherited by Voynick's widow's friend in the late 1960s.

Speaker 41 No one was interested in buying it.

Speaker 48 She was like, I inherited this from my friend's husband.

Speaker 2 And they were like, Annie, nobody wants it. So she donated it to Yale.

Speaker 41 But now you have to know someone who knows someone important to glimpse it in person.

Speaker 3 Although Yale was kind enough to digitize the 213-page butte in 2020.

Speaker 25 No one knows what the writing means or what it says, but there are drawings of flowers and titties in it.

Speaker 56 And we're going to link that in the show notes in case you are the code cracking genius that's been waiting 800 years for, or if you just like drawings of everything from plants to bloodletting.

Speaker 59 Now, if you love that kind of stuff, also we have a recent episode on illuminated manuscripts called Medieval Code Ecology.

Speaker 53 We also have a mammology episode.

Speaker 58 But yeah, it's anyone's guess.

Speaker 22 Some people think it was a hoax or just a really creative or unmedicated person.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 19 Constitution, and it was a heads up about how much gold and jewels and silver were buried somewhere six feet deep in Bedford County.

Speaker 40 So how did people even find out about this?

Speaker 2 Well, years after Beal 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 texts.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 2 Essentially, some people think it's an old-timey clickbait prank, but time will tell.

Speaker 18 Who knows?

Speaker 36 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 unbroken, which we still can't read.

Speaker 36 One of them is called Linear A.

Speaker 36 Nobody can make head nor tail of what Linear A means or knows, can understand what the alphabet is or even the language.

Speaker 38 I looked up this ancient 4,000-year-old script from the extinct language of ancient Crete.

Speaker 45 And honestly, it looks like the alien squid language from the movie Arrival, or like abstract brushstroke art in a hotel lobby.

Speaker 38 Like, what the heck is this shit?

Speaker 36 But Linear B

Speaker 36 was cracked, I think, in the 50s by a guy called Michael Ventress, building on the work of an American woman called Alice Coba, also in league with a guy called John Chadwick.

Speaker 45 Several people all head down on this Linear B.

Speaker 36 And John Chadwick, I interviewed him him shortly before he died and and i said john

Speaker 36 how did you you know you're a classic scholar at cambridge

Speaker 36 how did you get into deciphering ancient languages why was that the thing that obsessed you

Speaker 36 and he told me that he'd worked at bletchley park with the code breakers in the second world war alongside alan turing oh wow and he never told anybody that he'd been a bletchley park code breaker 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.

Speaker 20 What a flex that he kept hidden, you know what I mean?

Speaker 7 Some people be bragging up and down in the pubs about that, yeah.

Speaker 36 No, it's an incredible thing that the story of Bletchley Park, you know, when the war ended, everybody went back to their lives and got on with their day-to-day work.

Speaker 36 You know, Alan Trune, for example, went to work on computing, you know, as well as being an incredible co-breaker. He's the father of computer technology, computer theory, computer science.

Speaker 36 And the thing was that later on, he was a homosexual, and the government was aware of that. And so he wasn't given the clearance required to work on certain projects.
He was sidelined.

Speaker 36 He went to Manchester and did some incredible work in Manchester. And then he was arrested.
because he was found with a man and I guess found guilty of indecent behavior or some such accusation.

Speaker 36 He was found guilty, he was given hormone treatment

Speaker 36 and chemically castrated and eventually just took his own life.

Speaker 36 And when he died,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who I think now is hoping to be Prime Minister of Canada. Mission accomplished.

Speaker 36 He was governor of the Bank of England and he wanted to have a scientist or a mathematician on the new £50

Speaker 36 banknote,

Speaker 36 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 note.

Speaker 36 So it's great to say, if you're lucky enough to have a £50 note in Britain, Alan Turing is the person on it.

Speaker 36 Because not only did he change the course of the Second World War, not only was he a mathematician of

Speaker 36 epic achievements in mathematics, not only did he was he the father of computer science, but he also pioneered a lot of the concepts within artificial intelligence.

Speaker 36 So it's great that he's now on our 50 pound note.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 22 And the future can only get better if people learn from the past.

Speaker 39 Speaking of darkness and the future.

Speaker 7 You know, on the topic of artificial intelligence,

Speaker 7 a few more listener questions, if you don't mind.

Speaker 7 You know, we talked a little bit about quantum computing, but several people wanted to know what role AI might have in modern cryptology.

Speaker 38 On the real-life squishy brains of Dave, Philip Meter, Cass the Dogner, Megan Walker, Stephanie Coombs, Kate E., Quinn West, Corey, and Sarah Rossera, who asked, can AI solve secret codes?

Speaker 15 If so, should we unplug it now?

Speaker 7 And are we getting much closer to that?

Speaker 36 I think the modern codes are so utterly unbreakable that artificial intelligence won't make any difference.

Speaker 36 It's just the sheer computing power is just not there to have any impact on secure communication.

Speaker 36 But AI could have you know, 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.

Speaker 36 You know, that's what code breaking is about pattern recognition, and AI is terrific at pattern recognition.

Speaker 7 Yeah, some people wanted to know, why do some people really excel at like escape rooms and things like that?

Speaker 10 Some people, some of us are just great at that.

Speaker 7 Some of us myself are not.

Speaker 36 But let's talk about stuff he hates, or at least his least favorite patron cat you're gonna love this one so that there's a code which i didn't actually write about in the code book because yeah 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 lists 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.

Speaker 36 And it's a very intriguing idea. The book was written by a guy called Michael Droznin.
So Michael Droznin wrote this book called The Bible Code.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And you look for Hebrew letters that are equally spaced in a straight line.

Speaker 36 Okay, 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.

Speaker 36 And when you do that, something really weird happens.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 You find the word Kennedy, Dallas, assassinate.

Speaker 36 No.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Literally hundreds and hundreds of predictions. Every single one has come true.

Speaker 67 I've got goosebumps.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's about the same size as these ancient manuscripts. What happens if I apply the same algorithm to Moby Dick?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And exactly the same thing happened. He found hundreds and hundreds of predictions, all of which came true.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So the bottom line is that books are big objects. They contain millions of letters.

Speaker 36 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,

Speaker 36 you will find anything you want to find.

Speaker 36 It's purely about the law of large numbers or the laws of large combinations.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So that's kind of one of my favorite codes and one of the codes I also really hate, I suppose.

Speaker 7 Could it point to a simulation or it's really just chance? You get enough letters. Yeah.
You're going to get some messages.

Speaker 28 That's really the point, right?

Speaker 36 My favorite coincidence, because 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.

Speaker 36 If you take that wonderful, you know, soliloquy and you juggle the letters around, you get the following anagram.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 built from an anagram of its most famous soliloquy.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 28 That is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Speaker 30 And 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.

Speaker 23 Way to go, Corey.

Speaker 14 Who knew all of those letters could spell all of those words?

Speaker 30 I now follow Corey Calhoun on Instagram because I think that that's so cool.

Speaker 5 And he is probably wondering why a podcast lady wants to see pictures of his kids and cakes.

Speaker 49 Let him wonder.

Speaker 36 And you could 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.

Speaker 7 Oh, I've never never heard that and I love it.

Speaker 7 Is there any codes that you ever keep an eye on? Like, when are they going to crack that one?

Speaker 36 Gosh,

Speaker 36 the one that people write to me the most about is the Beale code, the Beale cipher. Everybody, you know, regularly, on a monthly basis, somebody thinks they've cracked the Beale cipher.

Speaker 28 That was the old timey treasure buried in the Virginia foothills, which made a fortune for the anonymous pamphlet maker.

Speaker 36 To which, you know, the reply is, well, if you've cracked the Beale cipher, then show me where the gold is. You know, that's the ultimate challenge, whether someone's cracked it or not.

Speaker 36 So, yeah, that's the one that people still seem to pursue.

Speaker 40 Well, maybe they've got it in a double padlocked treasure chest.

Speaker 14 Yep.

Speaker 36 It's not our business. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Or maybe somebody's found the treasure, stolen it.
And as we say, the whole world of cryptography is full of secrets.

Speaker 36 And so maybe you doubt about it when you have discovered

Speaker 36 the gold.

Speaker 7 I would keep that under a tight, heavy lid. I don't think I'd tell.
I wouldn't go out tweeting about it.

Speaker 7 Well, this has been so wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for

Speaker 36 my pleasure. It's been nice to kind of think about cryptography all over again.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 13 So ask cryptological people cryptic and sometimes illogical questions because what fun is a cat unless it's out of a bag?

Speaker 41 So thank you so much, Dr.

Speaker 49 Simon Singh, for humoring me me with so many not smart questions.

Speaker 66 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.

Speaker 13 His social media is linked in the show notes, as is his website, which is just his name.net.

Speaker 22 And we are at Olagies on Blue Sky and Instagram.

Speaker 3 I personally am at Allie Ward on both.

Speaker 13 We have shorter, kid-friendly episodes called Smologies.

Speaker 24 You can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 13 They're also linked in the show notes.

Speaker 58 Join our Patreon and submit questions before we record at patreon.com slash ologies.

Speaker 40 We have merch at ologiesmerch.com, including hats and bathing suits and totes and gifts for the cute little weirdos in your life.

Speaker 2 Thank you to Erin Talbert for administering the Ologies Podcast Facebook group.

Speaker 18 Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Speaker 58 Kelly Ardwire does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer.
Susan Hale puts it all together as managing director.

Speaker 58 And deciphering my transcripts into an actual episode are our brainiac editors, Jake Chafee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.

Speaker 4 Extra editing by the wonderful Jarrett 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.

Speaker 47 You may have noticed it, you may not have, because he is great at helping out.

Speaker 28 And also, he's married to me, so he had no choice.

Speaker 58 Nick Thorburn orchestrated the theme music.

Speaker 66 And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I'll tell you a secret.

Speaker 30 And first off, if you are stuck and annoyed about that Piglatin clip from earlier.

Speaker 36 What are you studying at college?

Speaker 36 Pig Latin.

Speaker 36 You wouldn't know a thing about that, would you?

Speaker 37 Oh, wonder.

Speaker 62 Two fun facts about it.

Speaker 41 It's from an old Three Stooges clip called Three Little Pigskins.

Speaker 52 And the Pig Latin spoken was, what are you doing tonight?

Speaker 52 And then she says, no.

Speaker 13 And it features a little-known actress in a part, one of her earliest roles.

Speaker 59 Her name was Lucille Ball.

Speaker 41 She was blonde in it, which really threw me.

Speaker 16 Also, I could not not sign off with another little message.

Speaker 2 Don't work on this if you're driving.

Speaker 13 5, 22, 5, 18, 25,

Speaker 46 20, 8, 9,

Speaker 62 14, 7,

Speaker 52 9, 19,

Speaker 36 1,

Speaker 44 19, 5, 3,

Speaker 48 18, 5, 20,

Speaker 48 21, 14, 20, 9, 12, 25, 15, 21, 12, 5, 1, 18, 14,

Speaker 44 9, 20.

Speaker 51 Bye-bye.

Speaker 8 Pachyermatology, homology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, old effectology, mapology, seriology, selenology.

Speaker 8 Now

Speaker 36 you can break the code.

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