Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's the sweatshirt that you will never get
Speaker 1: back from them. Ali Ward and I have wanted to
Speaker 1: cover secret codes and cryptology for years and years, and
Speaker 1: I thought, one day I'll go to Maryland and interview
Speaker 1: someone at the National Cryptologic Museum. And then I realized
Speaker 1: that it's run by the National Security Agency, and I
Speaker 1: was like, they're going to be tight lipped. They're not
Speaker 1: going to give it the goods. So then a little
Speaker 1: more digging unearthed a better, more perfect guest, the guy
Speaker 1: who wrote the literal book on code breaking, titled The
Speaker 1: Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to
Speaker 1: Quantum Cryptography Done. He's in. He's a PhD theoretical particle
Speaker 1: physicist by training, an author by trade now and has
Speaker 1: worked at CERN and the BBC even made a BAFTA
Speaker 1: winning documentary about a mathematician called Furma's Last Theorem. He's
Speaker 1: also the author of the Book's Big Bang, The Origin
Speaker 1: of the Universe, and the Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.
Speaker 1: So much about the function and history of secret ciphers
Speaker 1: and code breaking, and has several additional honorary degrees. And
Speaker 1: he joined the video chat with a salt and pepper
Speaker 1: mohawk and for some reason, a mic in earbuds that
Speaker 1: refuse to play ball with our recording software Enigmatic. Indeed,
Speaker 1: so our first introduction was amid an absolutely horrific amount
Speaker 1: of tech gifts, and I was pretty sure he hated me.
Speaker 1: Thank you for spending a half hour troubleshooting. I swear
Speaker 1: that is not typical at all.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, these things happen.
Speaker 1: Well, look at that, brilliant and forgiving. So let's get
Speaker 1: to this great conbo. But first, thank you so much
Speaker 1: to all the patrons who support the show at patreon
Speaker 1: dot com, slash ologies, where you can join for a
Speaker 1: simple dollar a month and submit your questions ahead of time.
Speaker 1: Thank you to everyone who is buying and wearing Ologies
Speaker 1: merch from ologiesmerch dot com, where we have some lovely
Speaker 1: shirts and stuff. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews
Speaker 1: for me to read and as proof that I do
Speaker 1: read them. They help so much. Thank you to Jen
Speaker 1: GM seventeen who wrote longtime Knowledge I hear I still
Speaker 1: cannot get enough. And for anyone complaining about explicit It's
Speaker 1: in the description, so check out smologies instead. Jen GM
Speaker 1: zero seventeen, Thank you for reminding listeners that yes, we
Speaker 1: have a g rated and we have shortened episodes are
Speaker 1: called smologies. They're in their own feed wherever you get podcasts,
Speaker 1: they're linked in the show notes. Look at that A
Speaker 1: review and a reminder about smologies. All it wants perfect, okay,
Speaker 1: But for now, enjoy this full length conversation about slip ups,
Speaker 1: that lost wars, the cracking of the Enigma machine, hog
Speaker 1: Latin pigpen ciphers, the prison plots of Mary Queen of Scott's,
Speaker 1: a code breaking reality show that I wish existed, Indigenous
Speaker 1: code talking war heroes, hiding messages in your skin and guts.
Speaker 1: Plus one method that's a hole ball of wax you
Speaker 1: might not want to get into, Hidden treasure, a quantum
Speaker 1: computing apot clips, and a sketchbook that has puzzled people
Speaker 1: for nearly a thousand years with mathematics enthusiast, best selling author,
Speaker 1: award winning filmmaker and secret code expert and cryptologist Simon Singh.
Speaker 1: So cryptology. We obviously we've never done this topic. That's
Speaker 1: how it works here. But I know very little about code,
Speaker 1: but you've written an entire book on it, and I'm
Speaker 1: curious why cryptology? What caused you to research and go
Speaker 1: back to the history of cryptology and do a steep
Speaker 1: a dive.
Speaker 2: So two reasons. Really, I'd written a book. My first
Speaker 2: book was called Fermat's Last Theorem or Ferma's and Nick
Speaker 2: I think it was called in America, and it was
Speaker 2: the story of the world's most notorious maths problem, and
Speaker 2: it was a three hundred and fifty year old romp
Speaker 2: through mathematics. And somewhere in there was the story of
Speaker 2: cryptography during the Second World War, particularly Alan Turing, the
Speaker 2: British mathematician who cracked the Enigma code, and his story
Speaker 2: and the story of cryptography and how it changed the
Speaker 2: course of the Second World War was something I just
Speaker 2: wanted to explore more So, what was a few paragraphs
Speaker 2: in Fermar's Enigma turned out to be a whole chapter
Speaker 2: in the Codebook. And also previously I'd been working on
Speaker 2: a TV show in the UK called Tomorrow's World, and
Speaker 2: every week it was a magazine show, so every week
Speaker 2: we were going through lots of different science and technology stories,
Speaker 2: and each week I'd come up with a story about
Speaker 2: codes or code breaking or you know, the Internet was
Speaker 2: kind of just beginning to take off. So these were
Speaker 2: really important and interesting stories. They weren't very visual, so
Speaker 2: my TV editor never never accepted my cryptography stories. But
Speaker 2: I had a whole folder full of them, and I
Speaker 2: could see that cryptography was more important today than ever before.
Speaker 2: And so you have this topic with a fantastically long
Speaker 2: history and something which you know. We live in the
Speaker 2: information age today and the way you protect information is
Speaker 2: not really by locking up in a safe. You do
Speaker 2: it by locking it up with a code.
Speaker 1: Were you always a maths person?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was. I'm a physicist by training, but if
Speaker 2: you want to do physics, you have to be a mathematician.
Speaker 2: And as a science journalist, I was covering all sorts
Speaker 2: of different things for tomorrow's world. So I have a
Speaker 2: broad interest. And the interesting thing about cryptography is it
Speaker 2: is very mathematical, particularly today, but it's also about linguistics.
Speaker 2: It's also about all sorts of different things. So as
Speaker 2: a writer, it's lovely to have a topic which ranges
Speaker 2: so broadly. And it was one of the tricky things
Speaker 2: about writing the book was you know, which parts of
Speaker 2: history do you focus on, Which parts of the globe
Speaker 2: do you focus on?
Speaker 1: So Simon's book The Code Book The Science of Secrecy
Speaker 1: from Ancient Egypt to quantum cryptography is highly lauded and
Speaker 1: four hundred and thirty two pages. And yet were you
Speaker 1: absolutely heartbroken at having certain chapters or pieces that you
Speaker 1: just had to cut out or else it would be
Speaker 1: like a book of biblical proportions.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, no, there were huge chunks that got thrown at.
Speaker 2: I was fascinated by the decryption of ancient languages, so
Speaker 2: something like hieroglyphs. You know, decryption of hieroglyphs is an
Speaker 2: extraordinary story. And unless you can read hieroglyphs, you can't
Speaker 2: really read into the history of the Egyptians. It's a
Speaker 2: lost story unless you can read their texts.
Speaker 1: Just a side note if you're into hieroglyphs. We have
Speaker 1: an Egyptology episode as well as a Mammiology episode about
Speaker 1: mummies with Egyptologist doctor Kara Cooney. Oh, we also have
Speaker 1: a Curiology episode about emoji and what they mean depending
Speaker 1: on who uses them in their similarities and major differences
Speaker 1: to higher so we'll link those in the show notes.
Speaker 1: But yeah, let's talk ancient codes and language. Are they
Speaker 1: the same?
Speaker 2: Simon says, and I had chapters also about the Mayan
Speaker 2: codes and so on. But you know what, it's not
Speaker 2: really a code. It's not a you know, a code
Speaker 2: for me is where you deliberately obfuscate the meaning of something.
Speaker 2: So I'm sending you a secret message. I don't want
Speaker 2: anybody else in the world to read it, so I
Speaker 2: encrypt it so only you and I can read the message. Now,
Speaker 2: Egyptian hieroglyphs were not a code in that sense. They
Speaker 2: were written as a form of communication, and it's just
Speaker 2: that we've forgotten how to read them. So you have
Speaker 2: to use code breaking techniques to read hieroglyphs to crack
Speaker 2: the code. But it wasn't ever meant to be a code.
Speaker 2: The same with Morse code, for example. Morse code is
Speaker 2: not a secret way of communication. It's an efficient way
Speaker 2: of communication for the telegraph. We didn't have to crack
Speaker 2: the Morse code. We knew how it all worked. But
Speaker 2: the use of the word code in most of the
Speaker 2: things I write about things which were hidden that the
Speaker 2: meaning has been hidden from the reader, from the reader
Speaker 2: who's not supposed to be spying.
Speaker 1: I was wondering because that was my first question, what's
Speaker 1: the difference between a code and a language is language
Speaker 1: meant to communicate, code is essentially meant to not communicate.
Speaker 1: Is that like a chief distinguishing difference.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.
Speaker 2: And today encryption goes beyond just hiding the meaning of
Speaker 2: a message. So for example, I might send you a
Speaker 2: secret message and I don't want anybody else to read it.
Speaker 2: That's a traditional form of encryption. But sometimes I want
Speaker 2: to make sure that you've read it and you can't
Speaker 2: deny that you didn't read it, so that's important as well.
Speaker 2: And sometimes I want to guarantee that I sent the
Speaker 2: message so that you know you can't accuse me later
Speaker 2: on of not sending you the message. And sometimes I
Speaker 2: want to make sure that not only do you get
Speaker 2: the message, but nobody changed it on the way. So
Speaker 2: if you imagine voting in an election, I want to
Speaker 2: make sure that you know I cast my vote. I
Speaker 2: want to make sure that you can't deny that you
Speaker 2: didn't receive the vote. I want to make sure the
Speaker 2: vote wasn't changed, and I want to make sure the
Speaker 2: vote is secret. So today we have different aspects to cryptography,
Speaker 2: all of which are important in different situations.
Speaker 1: I'm curious how far back you found then it goes?
Speaker 1: And is that a philosophical question? Is there anything to
Speaker 1: suggest in the development of language that at some point
Speaker 1: it was turned into kind of a cipher or a code.
Speaker 1: I imagine so much of that has to be war related, right, Well.
Speaker 2: I think to start with, so few people can read
Speaker 2: that you don't really need to bother encrypting writing itself
Speaker 2: is almost a secret code, but once you start having
Speaker 2: military plans or One of the first examples of encryption
Speaker 2: is a recipe for a pottery glaze in ancient Sumaria.
Speaker 2: So somebody's come up with a fantastic recipe for pottery
Speaker 2: glaze and they don't want anybody else to steal it.
Speaker 1: And this was around fifteen hundred BC. It was like
Speaker 1: the Colonel Sanders original recipe of eleven herbs and spices
Speaker 1: of ceramics.
Speaker 2: So those are the kind of things that start emerging.
Speaker 2: As I said, hieroglyphs are just a way of writing,
Speaker 2: but sometimes people would write hieroglyphs in a very very
Speaker 2: cryptic way on the tombs of important people, and the
Speaker 2: idea there was that as people passed the tomb, rather
Speaker 2: than just reading it and walking on. They'd have to
Speaker 2: spend time there in order to decrypt what was going on.
Speaker 2: So you kind of got extra reverence from those passers by.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so sweet, and answer that was so sad. They're like,
Speaker 1: don't go, don't go, don't go. Here's a puddle.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1: Make your final resting place a mausleum escape room.
Speaker 2: But then there's one other type of thing, which is
Speaker 2: maybe we're talking about, which is if I encrypt a
Speaker 2: message and I send it to you and somebody intercepts it,
Speaker 2: it looks like gobbledegook, so they know that I'm sending
Speaker 2: you a secret message because this just doesn't look normal.
Speaker 2: So there's another technology, maybe we can call it called steganography.
Speaker 2: And steganography doesn't just really hide the meaning of the message,
Speaker 2: it hides its very existence.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: So here we're talking about things like invisible inks. If
Speaker 2: I send you a message on invisible ink, nobody even
Speaker 2: knows the message exists. And typically I don't send you
Speaker 2: a blank sheet of paper and maybe send you a
Speaker 2: normal postcard about my holiday. In between the normal ink
Speaker 2: are writing invisible ink. Wow, so it looks like a
Speaker 2: very normal postcard and In fact, the invisible ink is
Speaker 2: what's got the real message. It was a very nice
Speaker 2: invitation to a military cryptography conference in San Antonio. This
Speaker 2: is going back maybe forty years, and it looked like
Speaker 2: a very innocent sketch of the river. I guess it's
Speaker 2: the San Antonio River that runs through the town. I
Speaker 2: don't know my job very well, but correct. The way
Speaker 2: you're supposed to read it is if you look at
Speaker 2: the blades of grass along the side of the river bank,
Speaker 2: there are long blades and short blades, and so if
Speaker 2: you turn the long blades and short blades into instead
Speaker 2: of long long long, short, short short, you turn them
Speaker 2: into dot dot dot dash dash dash, you have a
Speaker 2: Morse code message which tells you when the conference is happening,
Speaker 2: where you're supposed to go, and so on. So these
Speaker 2: are examples of staganography, and my favorite example loads of
Speaker 2: these examples. One is the message will be written on silk.
Speaker 2: You wrap the silk into a wax ball and then
Speaker 2: you swallow the ball, so again nobody knows there's a
Speaker 2: message at all.
Speaker 1: So my morbid curiosity led me to a DePaul University
Speaker 1: paper titled simply Staganography, which notes that quote. There are
Speaker 1: quite a couple of sources that mention this technique that
Speaker 1: the Chinese used, but no one mentions how the ball
Speaker 1: of wax was recovered from the messenger. It continues, One
Speaker 1: is only left to imagine possible and probably painful ways
Speaker 1: the ball could have come out okay.
Speaker 2: Or even crazier. I think Herodotus, the Greek historian, writes
Speaker 2: about a messenger who had his head shaved. They tattooed
Speaker 2: the message on his scalp, waited for the hair to regrow,
Speaker 2: and then sent him on his way. And then at
Speaker 2: the other end, you know, you shave the head and
Speaker 2: recover the message. And I remember talking about this once
Speaker 2: and somebody said, it's a great code, but it's very
Speaker 2: low bandwidth. You know, it's not going to be a
Speaker 2: great way to transfer much information very quickly, but effective.
Speaker 1: Also, it's a long game. You're in it for a while.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I suppose that message has got one messenger
Speaker 2: has one one message and one message only.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you remember what that message was? Or do
Speaker 1: they do a lot of communicating through tattooed heads.
Speaker 2: Oh? I think it was possibly so remarkable, which is
Speaker 2: why maybe Herodesis wrote about it maybe it was an
Speaker 2: exception rather than the rule.
Speaker 1: So yes, one low commitment method of staganography might be
Speaker 1: using a wax writing tablet back then, but writing a
Speaker 1: message on the wood underneath the wax, which is very sneaky,
Speaker 1: or yeah, embedding a note via ink into the flesh
Speaker 1: of a trusted servant. And because I'm nosy, I wanted
Speaker 1: to find out what that secret tattoo message was. And
Speaker 1: according to the nineteen ninety nine historical paper Information Hiding
Speaker 1: a Survey, there was a passage that said the purpose
Speaker 1: was to instigate a revolt against the Persians, and just
Speaker 1: like people loved doing fighting, and it's never a bad
Speaker 1: year to get inked. This practice continued with German cryptography,
Speaker 1: according to the nineteen forty text Secrets of German Espionage.
Speaker 1: But how do you make sure that no one else
Speaker 1: sees the tattoo head message? If you don't have time
Speaker 1: for your hairstyles like awkwardly grow back, well, you could
Speaker 1: do a cover up or a revision tattoo, kind of
Speaker 1: like turning blurry college era astrological sign into a humming
Speaker 1: bird or covering up your ex wife's name with a dragon.
Speaker 1: Or you could just kill the servant or the soldier
Speaker 1: whose head you used to as a notepad. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine if it was just a pottery glaze recipe, you'd
Speaker 1: be like all that for a life? Well, okay, basic question,
Speaker 1: is pig Latin a code? Does that count as code
Speaker 1: or language?
Speaker 2: Now I have what is pig Latin.
Speaker 1: It's when you put the last syllable. It's like bidige
Speaker 1: a little bit, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: What do you study at college?
Speaker 2: Ak? Yeah? I mean that's another nice thing about codes.
Speaker 2: You know, they're childish in many ways. And you know,
Speaker 2: we all wrote secret codes when we were kids, and
Speaker 2: I've got a couple of kids, and you know they
Speaker 2: certainly had their invisible links and other secret messages that
Speaker 2: we used to write. And so yeah, it's a playful code, absolutely.
Speaker 1: And this kind of code is also sometimes called an
Speaker 1: argo or a cant. And in the case of pig Latin,
Speaker 1: you pretty much take the first letter and you moved
Speaker 1: to back the word and added so kat becomes at k,
Speaker 1: ball becomes alba, yarn becomes rnya uk fay becomes something
Speaker 1: you could say around grammar. And pig Latin is also
Speaker 1: called hog Latin, but it is not the same as
Speaker 1: the written system of pig pen.
Speaker 2: There's a very nice code called pig pen which just
Speaker 2: reminded me of which is you draw two tic tac
Speaker 2: toe grids, yes, kind of tictattoe grids, and then you
Speaker 2: put the letters instead of x's and y, you put A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
Speaker 2: And if you imagine A is in the top left
Speaker 2: hand corner of a tic tac toe grid, instead of
Speaker 2: writing the letter A, you would write kind of backwards L.
Speaker 2: Because the A is inside a kind of backwards L.
Speaker 2: He is in the middle of the tic tac toe grid.
Speaker 2: So E is represented by square because the E is
Speaker 2: wrapped around by a square.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, picture two tic tac toe grids and then
Speaker 1: two big exes. So in tictacto grid number one are
Speaker 1: the letters A through I. In grid number two are
Speaker 1: the letters J through R with some extra dots thrown in. Now,
Speaker 1: in the first X you have stuv like northeast southwest,
Speaker 1: and the second X has wxyz with some extra dots.
Speaker 1: So whatever the shape around the letter with dots, if
Speaker 1: need be, becomes a cipher and you can make secret
Speaker 1: words just using those shapes. It's easily crackable if you
Speaker 1: know this, pigpen cipher, and absolutely useless garbage shapes if
Speaker 1: you don't. I'm a big fan. Pretty cool.
Speaker 2: So there are lots of lovely little codes that you
Speaker 2: can invent yourself or that have been used for literally
Speaker 2: hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: You know, I was surprised. One thing I love about
Speaker 1: the way your book is structured is how much history
Speaker 1: it goes through. So there's so much narrative and stories. Mary,
Speaker 1: Queen of Scott's, I didn't know this about her code.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me a little bit more about that
Speaker 1: and why that was such an interesting thing you wanted
Speaker 1: to include?
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, absolutely So the most famous type of code
Speaker 2: that we probably used as kids is you substitute one
Speaker 2: letter for a different letter. And in fact, Julius Caesar,
Speaker 2: I think Julius Caesar wrote about codes quite extensively when
Speaker 2: he was a general of Gaul in France, and he
Speaker 2: explained that, you know, instead of writing A, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: write B. Instead of writing B, I'm gonna write C.
Speaker 2: Or I could shift even more. I could shift the
Speaker 2: alphabet five places or ten places. But essentially he was
Speaker 2: swapping one letter for a different letter. Now, you can
Speaker 2: change that substitution cipher. You can make it better. Instead
Speaker 2: of just shifting every letter, you can just randomly swap
Speaker 2: the letters around to A E, B Z, C IS
Speaker 2: Y and so on. You mix up all the letters essentially.
Speaker 2: And that's really quite a strong code in some ways.
Speaker 2: There are so many ways of rearranging the alphabet. There
Speaker 2: are so many ways of randomly swapping letters around. I
Speaker 2: think it's something like four hundred million, billion billion ordinary.
Speaker 2: So on the face of it, it looks like an
Speaker 2: unbreakable code. And this is the kind of code that Mary,
Speaker 2: Queen of Scot's used. Now why was she using codes? Well,
Speaker 2: she was Mary Queen of Scots. She fell out with
Speaker 2: her rivals, she was driven out of Scotland. She fled
Speaker 2: to England and sought safety and sanctuary from her cousin,
Speaker 2: Queen Elizabeth First. I love my family now. Queen Elizabeth
Speaker 2: First wasn't particularly keen on Mary because Mary was a
Speaker 2: Catholic and Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Elizabeth feared that
Speaker 2: Mary might try and trigger a Catholic rebellion, possibly invite
Speaker 2: foreign invaders from France and Spain and usurp her throne.
Speaker 2: So for safety. Elizabeth put Mary in prison and she
Speaker 2: locked her up and that was it. Now, while she
Speaker 2: was locked away in prison, she had a secretary and
Speaker 2: she had a few people around her. While she was
Speaker 2: in prison, she started writing treacherous letters. She did start
Speaker 2: writing to these foreign is, particularly Spain, and she was saying, look,
Speaker 2: let's coordinate some kind of rebellion, invade Britain, invade England,
Speaker 2: and let's turn England catholic again, put me on the
Speaker 2: throne and get rid of Elizabeth. Now, she wrote these
Speaker 2: letters using this kind of code where you wrote substitute
Speaker 2: each letter for a different letter or a different symbol perhaps,
Speaker 2: and she smuggled the letters out via beer barrels. Water
Speaker 2: was so contaminated at that time that it was much
Speaker 2: safer to drink a very diluted form of beer that
Speaker 2: was kind of just the general thing you would drink
Speaker 2: day and day out. And so these beer barrels were
Speaker 2: coming in and out of the prison. These notes were
Speaker 2: smuggled out in these beer barrels. Now, Elizabeth had spymasters
Speaker 2: who knew exactly what Mary might be up to, so
Speaker 2: they would intercept these beer barrels. They would intercept the
Speaker 2: messages and they could decode the messages. They knew how
Speaker 2: to crack this simple substitution side. And that shouldn't have
Speaker 2: been a surprise to Mary, because well, this code had
Speaker 2: been cracked about a thousand years ago, you know, we're
Speaker 2: talking about the sixteenth century for Mary, Queen of Scots
Speaker 2: and Elizabeth, but it had been cracked in the eleventh
Speaker 2: and tenth and eleventh century. In Baghdad, there was a
Speaker 2: guy called al Kindi, an Arabic philosopher mathematician, and he
Speaker 2: realized that every letter's got a personality. So E, for example,
Speaker 2: is very common. It's the most common letter in English.
Speaker 2: Thirteen percent of all letters are E. And if you
Speaker 2: disguise E by drawing it as a diamond, well then
Speaker 2: the diamonds are going to be really popular and common.
Speaker 2: And you therefore you know the diamond really is an E.
Speaker 2: If you have two symbols that only ever follow each other,
Speaker 2: so you know, a square that only ever follows a circle,
Speaker 2: well that could be Q and you, because you know
Speaker 2: Q was always followed by you. Also, you know words
Speaker 2: have personality, so the is the most common three letter word.
Speaker 2: So if you apply this kind of personality analysis to
Speaker 2: the letters or symbols in front of you, you can
Speaker 2: very rapidly decipher a message.
Speaker 1: But according to the twenty twenty two paper al Kenny,
Speaker 1: the father of cryptoanalysis, if the letter of the encrypted
Speaker 1: message K has a frequency in the encryption equal to
Speaker 1: about ten percent, probably the K of the encrypted message
Speaker 1: corresponds to an e in the decoded message, and thus
Speaker 1: it says within a few attempts the encrypted message can
Speaker 1: be resolved. So that rate at which a letter appears
Speaker 1: in regular language is the personality of the letter, and
Speaker 1: it can be applied to the encrypted message to find
Speaker 1: that connection. And based on those and spelling patterns, the
Speaker 1: spies could be onto you. Also, apparently your choices were
Speaker 1: to die of thirst, or have dysentery, or just be
Speaker 1: drunk all the time. So like, maybe this wasn't Mary's
Speaker 1: best work.
Speaker 2: So Phillips I think was Thomas Phillips was lizbe the spymaster.
Speaker 2: He decrypted this message that he'd intercepted from Mary. The
Speaker 2: message was clearly asking for the Spanish to invade Oh
Speaker 2: and Elizabeth then had the evidence she needed to then
Speaker 2: put Mary on trial for treason. She was put on trial,
Speaker 2: found guilty, and executed Oh so Wurstern, which kind of
Speaker 2: put an end to any hopes of a Catholic revival
Speaker 2: in England. And so you know, it's an example of
Speaker 2: a match of life and death, you know, changing the
Speaker 2: course of history all because a code was broken.
Speaker 1: Does that make switching letters of the alphabet like? You
Speaker 1: can do it mathematically a lot of ways, but that's
Speaker 1: easy to break.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, it's one of those things
Speaker 2: if you checked every permutation, if you checked every one
Speaker 2: of the four hundred million billion billion permutations, you'd spend
Speaker 2: the age of the universe, you know, trying to crack
Speaker 2: a code. But there's a shortcut. You just look at
Speaker 2: the message and you say, well, look, there are all
Speaker 2: these diamonds. They've got to be ease. Second most common
Speaker 2: symbol that's probably going to be a T. Third most
Speaker 2: common symbol is going to be an A. And once
Speaker 2: you've got a handful of symbols, you can begin to
Speaker 2: decipher the whole message. The whole thing just falls into
Speaker 2: your hands very easily after that. But I think one
Speaker 2: of the analogies I use in the book is to
Speaker 2: describe cryptography as a bit like the battle between bacteria
Speaker 2: and antibiotics. You know, we have these antibiotics and they're
Speaker 2: great for killing off a certain bug, but then the
Speaker 2: bugs evolve to become stronger and no longer killed by
Speaker 2: the antibiotics. So scientists have to go away and make
Speaker 2: cleverer antibiotics until the bacteria become immune again. So this
Speaker 2: constant evolutionary battle between bacteria and antibiotics. And it's the
Speaker 2: same in codes and code breaking. You know, I make
Speaker 2: a code, somebody else breaks it. I have to make
Speaker 2: a better code. Somebody breaks I have to come up
Speaker 2: with an even cleverer code. So what happened here? As
Speaker 2: you said, the simple substitution cipher can easily be cracked
Speaker 2: once you figure out this personality analysis, this frequency analysis.
Speaker 2: So one simple step forward is if E accounts for
Speaker 2: thirteen percent of all letters, if I use a diamond
Speaker 2: for E, then diamonds appear thirteen percent of the time.
Speaker 2: And I know that a diamond is really E. But
Speaker 2: if I use thirteen symbols to represent EH, then each
Speaker 2: of those symbols only appears one percent of the time.
Speaker 2: And let's say I don't know, let's say B appears
Speaker 2: three percent of the time. Well, if I use three symbols,
Speaker 2: to represent B. Then again, each symbol appears one percent
Speaker 2: of the time, so you flatten out all the frequencies
Speaker 2: and that becomes a much much tougher code to break.
Speaker 1: Hence al Kindy was also known as a pioneer of statistics.
Speaker 1: And this was back in the year eight hundred, so
Speaker 1: twelve hundred years ago. Some days I can't remember my
Speaker 1: bank pen and I was the one who said it.
Speaker 1: It's between me and me, and I still can't crack it.
Speaker 1: And I'm assuming that the person on the other side,
Speaker 1: the receiving side, they've got this on lock. They know
Speaker 1: exactly that there's thirteen different ease. They're not left having
Speaker 1: to bust it either. Right, you agree on it ahead
Speaker 1: of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's a really important point. There's something called
Speaker 2: the key. The key is the recipe for encryption, and
Speaker 2: it's the recipe for decryption. So if I'm sending you
Speaker 2: a message, I need to have a key which I
Speaker 2: share with you and which I don't want anybody else
Speaker 2: to steal. So we could jump ahead, because I think
Speaker 2: the most extraordinary thing about cryptography is it seems impossible.
Speaker 2: It seems like if you're going to decrypt a message
Speaker 2: from me, you have to have my key, okay, and
Speaker 2: you're on the other side of the ocean, So how
Speaker 2: on earth can I get this key to you? And
Speaker 2: particularly today, you know, when we're encrypting our credit card
Speaker 2: detail data is flying all over the globe, you don't
Speaker 2: see people running around distributing keys everywhere. This is something
Speaker 2: people that had to do for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: Keys in this sense meaning the secret instruction manual to
Speaker 1: the code, like a legend of a map. But for
Speaker 1: the sake of explanation, keys are a great analogy.
Speaker 2: So the British government would have to send keys to
Speaker 2: its diplomats all over the world in suitcases, literally having
Speaker 2: to physically transfer them around the world. Navy ships would
Speaker 2: have to come back to port to pick up the
Speaker 2: keys so that they could communicate with their port. So
Speaker 2: for hundreds of years, key distribution was a real pain.
Speaker 2: It's expensive and risky. You know, if somebody hijacks the
Speaker 2: guy who's distributing the keys, then they can read all
Speaker 2: your secret messages. So key distribution is expensive, it's slow,
Speaker 2: it's risky, but it seems unavoidable. It seems as though
Speaker 2: you and I cannot communicate secretly unless I give you
Speaker 2: the key in advance, and that's slow, risky and expensive.
Speaker 2: And yet today somehow we managed to do it. Today
Speaker 2: we found a way around it. And this is an
Speaker 2: incredible breakthrough.
Speaker 3: How does that work?
Speaker 2: Let me try and explain to you how that works.
Speaker 2: Let's imagine I want to send you a message and
Speaker 2: I'm going to put the message in a box, and
Speaker 2: I put a padlock on the box and I lock
Speaker 2: it with a key, and I send it to you. Okay,
Speaker 2: Now you can't open the box and read the message
Speaker 2: because I've still got the key.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sucks.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to send the key to you
Speaker 2: because that's slow, expensive and risky. So how can we
Speaker 2: avoid it? Well, this is what we can do. You
Speaker 2: at your end, you've got this box that's locked. You
Speaker 2: can add a second padlock to the box, your padlock
Speaker 2: with your key, and you send it back to me.
Speaker 2: Now I've got a box with two padlocks.
Speaker 1: How does that help?
Speaker 2: But I can Well, I can take my padlock off
Speaker 2: because I've got my key. I can send the box
Speaker 2: back to you. It's still secure, it's still pad and
Speaker 2: it's padlocked with your padlock.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: Nice, And you can then unlock it, open the box
Speaker 2: and read the message.
Speaker 1: Okay, daisy chain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So suddenly something that was impossible becomes actually it's
Speaker 2: not so difficult after all. But there's even a cleverer
Speaker 2: way of doing it, which is I have a padlock
Speaker 2: and a key, and I make a million copies of
Speaker 2: my padlock, and I distribute it all over the world.
Speaker 2: And let's imagine you're trying to send me something. Now,
Speaker 2: you go to your local post office, you say, can
Speaker 2: I have Simon Singh's padlock. You snap the padlock shut
Speaker 2: on the box, because you don't need a key to
Speaker 2: shut a padlock. It just snaps shut. You send it
Speaker 2: to me, and I've got the key already to open it.
Speaker 2: So we're not distributing the keys, We're just distributing the padlocks.
Speaker 2: Got it, And again, I think it was in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies this technology was invented. It's a mathematical padlock
Speaker 2: that we've be talking about that was invented by three
Speaker 2: guys at what we call GCHQ. You've got the NSA,
Speaker 2: don't you have the National Security Agency? We have the
Speaker 2: Government Communications Headquarters, and three people there invented this mathematical padlock.
Speaker 2: One of them was a chap called Cliver Cock who
Speaker 2: I actually got to meet, and he was working at GCHQ.
Speaker 2: He'd only just started day. He was in his twenties.
Speaker 2: He was a young Cambridge math graduate and he went
Speaker 2: home one evening and he started thinking about how would
Speaker 2: you invent a mathematical padlock? And he came up with
Speaker 2: the idea. He came up the whole mathematics, and he
Speaker 2: came up with it entirely in his head. He couldn't
Speaker 2: write down anything because when you work for GCCHQ, you're
Speaker 2: forbidden from writing down anything at home that relates to
Speaker 2: your work.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, So he had to.
Speaker 2: Go to bed that night he wouldn't forget the mathematical idea,
Speaker 2: and then rushed into work early the next day and
Speaker 2: wrote it all down, literally the greatest cryptographic breaks you're
Speaker 2: in a thousand years. And then having explained it to
Speaker 2: his colleagues, he couldn't tell the rest of the world
Speaker 2: because the British government made it confidential. They felt this
Speaker 2: was just too big a breakthrough to share with the
Speaker 2: rest of the world. But it was then rediscovered a
Speaker 2: decade later in California by wit, Diffy and Martin Hellman,
Speaker 2: and they're the people who then shared that technology with
Speaker 2: the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: Okay, who cares? What does this mean for you?
Speaker 2: And it's what's really enabled the Internet to take off
Speaker 2: in terms of financial transactions, secure databases, sharing information securely.
Speaker 2: We can do that today because we don't need to
Speaker 2: run around sharing keys. Instead, we can run around sharing
Speaker 2: these well, we don't need to run around, we can
Speaker 2: just share our mathematical padlocks.
Speaker 1: And if you were dying to know what system Clifford
Speaker 1: Cox came up with just off the dome, it was
Speaker 1: prime factorization which led to a public key cryptosystem. And
Speaker 1: because Wikipedia is not written in any kind of secret code,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read you what it told me about
Speaker 1: this to make this brief, which is in a public
Speaker 1: key cryptosystem, the encryption key is public and distinct from
Speaker 1: the decryption key, which is kept secret to private. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the public key is based on these two large
Speaker 1: prime numbers. Anyone can use the public key, but it
Speaker 1: can only be decrypted by someone who knows the private key.
Speaker 1: And you know what mathematical genius and cryptologic comprehension can
Speaker 1: get you, well, sometimes nothing, sometimes worse than nothing, And
Speaker 1: We're going to hear about that later. But in the
Speaker 1: case of Clifford Cox, it got him the title of
Speaker 1: Companion of the Order of the Bath and then Fellow
Speaker 1: of the Royal Society. Simon himself is now in the
Speaker 1: Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. But yeah, Clifford
Speaker 1: Cox was struck by this inspiration in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't until the method was declassified from its
Speaker 1: top secret status in like nineteen ninety nine that he
Speaker 1: was recognized for it. I wonder what he was doing
Speaker 1: when he came up with that, was that like a
Speaker 1: shower thought, or you know, you're washing dishes and you
Speaker 1: have a great idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know a lot of mathematicians talk about the
Speaker 2: idea of really thinking hard for a problem, thinking about
Speaker 2: a problem really deeply for hours and hours, and then
Speaker 2: suddenly when they relax and suddenly maybe the brain goes
Speaker 2: into a kind of instinctive mode, suddenly clarity emerges. And yeah,
Speaker 2: it was. It seems to be in one of those
Speaker 2: moments that the mathematical paddleot was invented.
Speaker 1: So, as we learned from the Oneurology episodes on Dreams,
Speaker 1: this is when the brain shifts to the default network.
Speaker 1: And we also did a two part Salue Genology episode
Speaker 1: on hobbies and why leisure activities are vital if we
Speaker 1: don't want to lose our marbles. But going back a
Speaker 1: few decades, what about mechanics, like when did things become mechanical?
Speaker 1: When did a code breaking machine sort of emerge? And
Speaker 1: how did Turing do what he did without the computer
Speaker 1: power that we have now.
Speaker 2: So I think cryptography develops because you know, I break
Speaker 2: your code and I need a better code. Cryptography also
Speaker 2: develops as a result of communications technology advancing. So when
Speaker 2: the telegraph was invented, we needed more secure forms of encryption.
Speaker 2: You know, the British Empire was being run by people
Speaker 2: in London sending messages over telegraph lines across the world.
Speaker 2: And then when the radio was invented again, we needed
Speaker 2: even better forms of communication because something on a battlefield
Speaker 2: can send a radio message over hundreds of miles and
Speaker 2: send lots of information just a few seconds. So we
Speaker 2: needed even more effective encryption that was rapid and secure.
Speaker 2: And so what you have in between the First and
Speaker 2: the Second World War is the idea of the encryption machine,
Speaker 2: a mechanical machine and something looks a bit like a
Speaker 2: typewriter where you type in a message and it gets
Speaker 2: encrypted automatically by the cogs and wheels inside the machine.
Speaker 2: And the Americans worked on one, the Dutch worked on one,
Speaker 2: the Swedes had an encryption device, and the Germans had
Speaker 2: one as well. But all of these companies really struggled
Speaker 2: because there wasn't a huge need for secret communication, and
Speaker 2: so all of these companies were gradually going bankrupt. Apart
Speaker 2: from the German one. The Enigma was designed by a
Speaker 2: guy called Arthur Sherbius because just as his company was struggling,
Speaker 2: Germany started gearing up for what would be the Second
Speaker 2: World War.
Speaker 1: Or it's great for business.
Speaker 2: And Germany began to buy these Enigma machines, not just
Speaker 2: for every army unit, but for every naval ship, for
Speaker 2: every air base, for every train station and so on,
Speaker 2: and so hundreds and thousands of these Enigma machines were
Speaker 2: made and distributed and they were essential for the you know,
Speaker 2: to say, the German concept of blitzkreek, we have coordinated attack,
Speaker 2: you have bombardment from land, you have attack from the air,
Speaker 2: and then ships off the coast. Also bombarding. So this
Speaker 2: coordinated kind of attack is only possible if you've got secure,
Speaker 2: effective rapids communication. So again, you have a key, and
Speaker 2: that means that because we're going back to the era
Speaker 2: where people had keys, you know, how do you set
Speaker 2: up your Enigma machine? And again, if I'm sending you
Speaker 2: a message on an Enigma machine, you have an Enigma machine.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what an Enigma machine looked like before this,
Speaker 1: And honestly, it's hard to picture something whose name means
Speaker 1: mystery or riddle. But yeah, these nineteen forties secret message machines.
Speaker 1: They look like a regular quirdy vintage typewriter with keys,
Speaker 1: but where the paper would be scrolling up, there are
Speaker 1: a few more rows of buttons with the alphabet on
Speaker 1: each button, and each button can light up. Now, above
Speaker 1: those two rows of buttons are a few turning sawtooth
Speaker 1: cog wheels that have numbers one through twenty six on them.
Speaker 1: Now you don't need to know all the electrical engineering,
Speaker 1: trust me, it's complex, but essentially, when a key is
Speaker 1: pressed at the bottom, electrical signals travel through a mess
Speaker 1: of kind of tangly wires inside each of those wheels,
Speaker 1: which can turn the next wheels, mess of wires, and
Speaker 1: if you press let's say the letter K, that letter
Speaker 1: K will be changed via the wires and via the
Speaker 1: turning cogs seven times before spitting out a new letter,
Speaker 1: which illuminates on that row of buttons. And it all
Speaker 1: depends on the settings on the machine. So one person
Speaker 1: usually would be pushing the keys to spell something out
Speaker 1: and the other is writing down which button lights up.
Speaker 1: Then they send that series of lighted buttons as text
Speaker 1: over morse code to the receiver. So it turns a
Speaker 1: series of letters or words into absolute gibber jabber unless
Speaker 1: you knew exactly how the rotors were dialed and what
Speaker 1: was plugged in, where when that message was typed, and
Speaker 1: the configuration of the machine was changed daily according to
Speaker 1: this printed log that was kept in a safe and
Speaker 1: then each day they would burn that day's instructions. Oh
Speaker 1: and there was another three letter code to encrypt each
Speaker 1: individual message. So overall, these wheels and plugs can be
Speaker 1: arranged in some calculate I think one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: one trillion ways, and they changed daily, So it is
Speaker 1: a horrifyingly complicated and swiftly moving target that's relaying information
Speaker 1: that is life and death to people. Breaking the enigma
Speaker 1: is like if Satan wrote Sudoku puzzles and then if
Speaker 1: you didn't get it, he swallowed your children.
Speaker 2: And there are rotors that you need to put into place.
Speaker 2: You need to select the right rotors, you need to
Speaker 2: orientate them in the right way. It's going to plug
Speaker 2: board a bit like an old fashioned telephone plug board twitchboard.
Speaker 2: To plug those cables incorrectly, you have to plug those
Speaker 2: in in the correct way. And if you and I
Speaker 2: have the same setup, and obviously we agree the key
Speaker 2: in advance, then we can communicate with each other. But
Speaker 2: for everybody else, it's impossible to guess our key. The
Speaker 2: number of combinations is just too vast, and things like
Speaker 2: frequency analysis and the personality of letters is just useless.
Speaker 2: This code was so utterly strong everybody gave up hope
Speaker 2: of ever trying to crack it. Actually, the only people,
Speaker 2: the only country that have the audacity to try and
Speaker 2: crack the enigma was the polls. Poland was in this
Speaker 2: desperate situation of being trapped between Germany on one side
Speaker 2: and Russia on the other. We understand, and the Poles
Speaker 2: knew that they were going to get invaded sooner or later,
Speaker 2: and so they set their best mathematicians of the task
Speaker 2: of trying to crack the Enigma. And this was before
Speaker 2: the war even started. They were working on this and
Speaker 2: they made some progress, They made some crucial progress, and
Speaker 2: those breakthroughs were smuggled out of Poland to Paris and
Speaker 2: from Paris to London, and it gave the British code
Speaker 2: break as a real head start in trying to break
Speaker 2: the Enigma. The British set up a code breaking center
Speaker 2: outside of London called Bletchley Park, where they hired a
Speaker 2: whole weird bunch of people from crossworld addicts to maths,
Speaker 2: to engineers to classic scholars, and they all worked at
Speaker 2: Bletchley trying to break the Enigma, but also lots of
Speaker 2: other codes from Japan and Italy and also Germany.
Speaker 1: Imagine if a reality show cast a bunch of the
Speaker 1: best notes and made them live in an English countryside
Speaker 1: mansion trying to defeat the Nazis. I would watch that
Speaker 1: in a heartbeat. Also, around seventy five percent of the
Speaker 1: people working at Bletchley Park were women, employed as translators
Speaker 1: cryptographic operators. They constructed and operated some of the world's
Speaker 1: first programmable electric computers. And one of these Bletchley Park nerds,
Speaker 1: was named Valerie, and she had a granddaughter who you
Speaker 1: are not supposed to call Kate Middleton because according to
Speaker 1: the Internet, her granddaughter's name is her Royal Highness, the
Speaker 1: Princess of Wales. But yeah, tons of folks, including Valerie,
Speaker 1: worked at this nine thousand square foot manner on fifty
Speaker 1: eight acres, like a wartime period piece set in a
Speaker 1: hazy cigarette smokey vintage computer lab.
Speaker 2: And Alan Turing was one of those mathematicians. He was
Speaker 2: one of the mathematicians who worked on the Enigma, and
Speaker 2: he and many others came up with the whole series
Speaker 2: of ways of trying to crack the Enigma. One of
Speaker 2: the weird things one of the ways that the Enigma
Speaker 2: was broken was that when you tie the letter A
Speaker 2: into an Enigma machine, it can be encrypted as any
Speaker 2: other letter except the letter A. Okay, which doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like a big problem because A can be encrypted into
Speaker 2: twenty five other letters. B similarly cannot be encrypted into
Speaker 2: a B, but it can be encrypted into any of
Speaker 2: the other twenty five letters. So that's fine, Except there
Speaker 2: was a letter that was once a message that was
Speaker 2: once intercepted, and the code breakers at blectually part looked
Speaker 2: at this message, and it was a mess of different letters,
Speaker 2: all different letters that looked like complete gobbledygook, except there
Speaker 2: wasn't a single W in the encrypted usage. So you've
Speaker 2: got three hundred characters but not a single W. And
Speaker 2: the code breakers looked at that, and they thought about
Speaker 2: it for a while, and then they realized the only
Speaker 2: way you can get a message, an output message with
Speaker 2: no doubus is if the input message is just W
Speaker 2: three hundred times. Oh wow, if I type itu W
Speaker 2: three hundred times, I'm going to get everything except W
Speaker 2: three hundred times. And so they crack the code. That's
Speaker 2: not the most interesting message in the world. It's just
Speaker 2: W three hundred times. But what that gives you once
Speaker 2: you know the output of the message, what you have
Speaker 2: in your hand, and once you have the input which
Speaker 2: is W three hundred times, you can then work out
Speaker 2: the settings of the machine for that day. The same
Speaker 2: machine settings were effectively used for the whole day, so
Speaker 2: now you can decipher all sorts of other messages set
Speaker 2: that day which are more interesting. For example, one of
Speaker 2: the messages that were set in that day that was
Speaker 2: intercepted and deciphered was about an attack on the British
Speaker 2: fleet and Alexandria, and the British fleet were warned and
Speaker 2: the result was the first Allied victory in the Mediterranean
Speaker 2: because the enigma had been broken and because the navy,
Speaker 2: the British Navy now had advanced notice of this attack
Speaker 2: on Alexandria.
Speaker 1: So some Nazi fucked up bad thankfully.
Speaker 2: That kind of maybe raises the question of why would
Speaker 2: somebody send the message W three hundred time. Yes, it
Speaker 2: seems like a pointless message. The reason somebody sent doubly
Speaker 2: three hundred times is if you've got an unbreakable code.
Speaker 2: I can't read your messages, but what I can do
Speaker 2: is count how many messages you send, And if you
Speaker 2: send one on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday,
Speaker 2: twenty on Thursday, I know something BIG's gonna happen on Friday.
Speaker 1: So this would be a real tell to have a
Speaker 1: sudden flurry. Like imagine if you texted someone once a day,
Speaker 1: but then suddenly you've got forty five messages from them
Speaker 1: in an hour. You'd be like storytime, what's happening?
Speaker 2: Because your communication suddenly peaked, So you combat that by
Speaker 2: sending twenty messages every day, Oh god, and then what
Speaker 2: we call the traffic is then flat. So when that
Speaker 2: person sent doubly three hundred times, they were just sending
Speaker 2: their quota of messages for the day. They were just
Speaker 2: trying to build up their quota. Had they sent a
Speaker 2: random message, if they just randomly tight with two fingers,
Speaker 2: it would have been fine. But that W three hundred
Speaker 2: times compromise the security of the enigma. And what Turing
Speaker 2: did that built on this was he said, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe we won't be lucky enough to have W three
Speaker 2: hundred times.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 2: We can't rely on that, but we can rely on
Speaker 2: the fact that maybe we can guess the beginning of
Speaker 2: a message. You know, if the message is going to Burlin,
Speaker 2: maybe the message reads high hit that and like that guy.
Speaker 2: If the message comes from a weather station at the Atlantic,
Speaker 2: maybe it starts off with pressure readings or wind directions.
Speaker 2: We can always guess a little bit of the message,
Speaker 2: and if we can guess a little bit of the
Speaker 2: original message, we can compare it with what is you know,
Speaker 2: came out at the other end and begin to narrow
Speaker 2: down what the keys might be, and Turing designed a
Speaker 2: machine called a bomb that could effectively use a little
Speaker 2: bit of the input, a little bit of the guest
Speaker 2: message what's called a crib against what was intercepted to
Speaker 2: try and identify what the key actually is. And the
Speaker 2: bombs were very effective. The bombs managed to work out
Speaker 2: the key on most days pretty rapidly.
Speaker 1: And I know we're talking about the theater of war
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties, so the word bomb, it's a
Speaker 1: little distracting, but a bomb with an E at the
Speaker 1: end was a machine used to try to break the
Speaker 1: Enigma's code, and a bomb got its name. Well, this
Speaker 1: is also a source of battle, the etymology of it.
Speaker 1: But some legends say that the mechanized rotors made a
Speaker 1: ticking sound like a bomb. Others said parts would sometimes
Speaker 1: fall off and make a very startling crashing noise on
Speaker 1: the floor. There's this other legend that tells the tale
Speaker 1: of a cryptologist eating this round shaped ice cream dessert
Speaker 1: and getting inspiration from that. But it doesn't matter as
Speaker 1: much as the messages deciphered through it.
Speaker 2: So the Allies then just kind of knew where the
Speaker 2: ships were in the Atlantic, where air raids were going
Speaker 2: to happen at night where armies were going to be
Speaker 2: move to know it gave the Allies a huge advantage
Speaker 2: in trying to win the war.
Speaker 1: I have some questions from listeners. Can I lightning around
Speaker 1: you with some of them? Yes, sure, they are great questions,
Speaker 1: and we will hear from them in a moment. But first,
Speaker 1: let's give away some money per Simon, and this week
Speaker 1: he shows GiveWell dot org, which vets and researches the
Speaker 1: most impactful charities and then grants accordingly, and donations go
Speaker 1: to the most reliably high impact and cost effective charities
Speaker 1: that they've identified, such as malaria prevention, childhood vaccination incentives,
Speaker 1: and vitamin A supplementation. You can learn more at GiveWell
Speaker 1: dot org. So thank you Simon and sponsors of the
Speaker 1: show for making that possible. Okay, we're back. Let's crack
Speaker 1: into your queries. Many of you had pop cultural cryptological questions,
Speaker 1: such as Cooper, Michael Mouse, Paxton, Atti Cappello, Mattzicado. First
Speaker 1: time question asker Chris f and Gree asked in.
Speaker 3: The movies, you often hear or see of people cracking
Speaker 3: these secret codes so quickly or without much research? How
Speaker 3: often does that happen in real life? How often do
Speaker 3: you come across some sort of secret code where it's
Speaker 3: that easy to just decipher versus how like long does
Speaker 3: it take to actually decipher?
Speaker 1: Does that ever piss you off about movies when someone
Speaker 1: cracks a code like instantly?
Speaker 2: Well, the codes we have today are effectively unbreakable. You know,
Speaker 2: we live in a golden age of encryption, and you
Speaker 2: know it's you can't break any of these codes. There
Speaker 2: is a fear that we have new computing technology, quantum computing,
Speaker 2: might break some of today's codes, and that would be
Speaker 2: disastrous because you know, our economic systems would begin to collapse.
Speaker 2: You know, giant corporations like Amazon would no longer have
Speaker 2: a business model if you can't send secure online payments.
Speaker 2: But encryption, it's unbreakable. It's absolutely unbreakable. You know, you
Speaker 2: and I can buy free software and send each other
Speaker 2: secret messages that nobody in the world could ever decrypt.
Speaker 2: But there is more information being sent around the world
Speaker 2: than ever before, and inevitably some of it is going
Speaker 2: to be badly encrypted. Maybe people will make silly mistakes,
Speaker 2: and so I think the code breakers are really looking
Speaker 2: for those slip ups. And those mistakes because if the
Speaker 2: code is implemented properly, it's almost an impossible task.
Speaker 1: So no, it is not as easy as you see
Speaker 1: in the movies for now, But more than one person
Speaker 1: had singularity and super position questions, such as first time
Speaker 1: question asker Paul S. R. Chris Holme, computer scientist and
Speaker 1: security engineer, Stephen Maxley, John Buckner, Mark Rubin, Mro, Maximilian Galindo,
Speaker 1: John Bundesman, Post Cubit concerned, Joshua yby z Adam foot
Speaker 1: PAVC of thirty four Rya The Tiger Kats and Adam
Speaker 1: Silk said, how worried should people be about quantum cryptography
Speaker 1: and quantum computers breaking encryption?
Speaker 2: A very important question, But like we were saying a
Speaker 2: while ago, you know, throughout history, if somebody breaks the code,
Speaker 2: they don't necessarily tell the world about it. So when
Speaker 2: the British cracked the Enigma, they didn't tell the Germans
Speaker 2: that they wanted the Germans to keep sending information via
Speaker 2: Enigma so they could keep intercepting it and exploiting it.
Speaker 2: And it's a little bit the same with quantum computing today.
Speaker 2: We don't really know how advanced the technology is getting
Speaker 2: particularly say in China, so I think people are right
Speaker 2: to be worried as to where what the future of
Speaker 2: secure communication might be. There are some other options. There's
Speaker 2: something called quantum cryptography, which would combat quantum computing, but
Speaker 2: it's much harder to implement, and so it's not quite
Speaker 2: clear that quantum cryptography would provide us all with the
Speaker 2: same level of secure communication that cryptography today does.
Speaker 1: Are you looking for up to date info on this?
Speaker 1: How about an article published last week via New Scientist
Speaker 1: with the headline breaking encryption with a quantum computer just
Speaker 1: got twenty times easier. But it does concede in the
Speaker 1: first paragraph that these machines don't exist yet, but when
Speaker 1: they do, it is going to be way easier for
Speaker 1: them than we thought, and by we, I mean the
Speaker 1: people who make quantum computers. And then yesterday The Conversation
Speaker 1: posted an article titled is a quantum cryptography apocalypse imminent?
Speaker 1: That's casual in it? Information Security Group Professor Keith Martin
Speaker 1: explains that the most common ways of encrypting information that
Speaker 1: we use will be impacted less than that public key
Speaker 1: encryption that we talked about earlier, the one that Clifford
Speaker 1: Cox worked on that's used in messaging and shopping transactions,
Speaker 1: and public key cryptography is also at the heart of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: Which cryptocurrency, it's a form of money that's decentralized from
Speaker 1: different nations currencies, and the public key for that is
Speaker 1: like your wallet, and the private key can open your wallet.
Speaker 1: And I know that we need a whole episode on
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency because I'm not going to make it make sense
Speaker 1: in an aside, and that's okay. But the point of
Speaker 1: this is to say that Keith Martin, writing about the
Speaker 1: imminent crypto apocalypse, answers his own headline question by writing
Speaker 1: that those in the no fight about it all the time.
Speaker 1: They fight about if and when quantum computing is going
Speaker 1: to be up and running. And right now the most
Speaker 1: advanced quantum computing is able to handle tiny amounts of
Speaker 1: info and it's prone to s growing up a lot.
Speaker 1: But Keith says that most experts believe it's a future possibility,
Speaker 1: but the prognoses range from between ten to twenty years
Speaker 1: to well beyond that. And he also writes, my core
Speaker 1: message is don't panic, okay, Keith, But also no one
Speaker 1: expected AI to go from like putting cat ears on
Speaker 1: an Instagram filter to f for lessly generating a video
Speaker 1: of your dead aunt Torking. But here we are, life
Speaker 1: comes at you fast. Now let's look back to the
Speaker 1: past instead. All right, Oh, look, another war, but an
Speaker 1: interesting story. So Jordan Crosby, first time question asker, wants
Speaker 1: to know what's been the lasting impact of the Navajo
Speaker 1: code talkers. How did they choose Navajo over other languages?
Speaker 1: And this was also voiced by their patrons Katie Barty,
Speaker 1: John Worstere, Nikki g Don Smallcheck, Dave Brewer h and
Speaker 1: Kapi beat Gaal. They all asked about ciphers and codes
Speaker 1: developed from and relying on indigenous languages and going backwards
Speaker 1: in time a little bit. Jordan Crosby, first time question
Speaker 1: asker wanted to know about the lasting impact of Navajo
Speaker 1: code talkers and how they chose Navajo over other languages.
Speaker 1: Was that a pretty isolated instance of using language to
Speaker 1: crack codes in English? Or any thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: So the first example I think was in the First
Speaker 2: World War, where I think some of the Canadian troops
Speaker 2: used Choctaw, which was a language which nobody else could
Speaker 2: understand well.
Speaker 1: People of the choc Donation could understand it, at least
Speaker 1: those who were not forced away from their families and
Speaker 1: cultures in the indigenous genocide upon which our country is built.
Speaker 1: Also side note, the people of the Navajo nation didn't
Speaker 1: call themselves Navajo. That was the name used by the
Speaker 1: Spanish to describe them, so you may hear the more
Speaker 1: accurate term Dine used by that nation. And we've had
Speaker 1: some great indigenous ologists who touch on this, and we'll
Speaker 1: link their episodes in the show notes. But yes, could breaking.
Speaker 2: When the Americans thought about using Navajo as a secret
Speaker 2: language for some of the forces in the Pacific. First
Speaker 2: they thought, well, what would be the right language to use,
Speaker 2: what right group to work with? And they needed a
Speaker 2: tribe that was big enough to supply the men that
Speaker 2: would be needed. They needed a tribe that had a
Speaker 2: high level of literacy as well, and they needed a
Speaker 2: tribe that hadn't been studied by German anthropologists because that
Speaker 2: would have again compromised the code. So that's why the
Speaker 2: Navajo were chosen. And so you had these Navajo soldiers
Speaker 2: who would travel with every radio unit and all the
Speaker 2: messages would be given in Navajo spoken to another Navajo
Speaker 2: speaker at the other end, who would then translate them
Speaker 2: back into English. And of course nobody in the Pacific
Speaker 2: Arena could understand Navajo, so it was a truly unbreakable code,
Speaker 2: and it was highly effective. And yeah, it's one of
Speaker 2: the great stories of the Second World War.
Speaker 1: And yes, they used their language as just spoken, but
Speaker 1: also as a base for ciphers, substituting words in their
Speaker 1: native language for letters in the English alphabet to spell
Speaker 1: out messages. And North America being home to this broad
Speaker 1: range of native languages, it was difficult for enemies to
Speaker 1: learn or guess which ones were being used, but many
Speaker 1: nations were tapped to lend their heritage and language and
Speaker 1: skill in Ko talking and where they get parades after
Speaker 1: World War Two. No, of course, not all of this
Speaker 1: remained classified into the late nineteen sixties, and in the
Speaker 1: decades that followed, some of the surviving co talkers were
Speaker 1: awarded medals of honor for their services. And for more
Speaker 1: on this history, were we're going to link the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: National Museum of the American Indians documentary The Power of Words,
Speaker 1: Native Languages as Weapons of War that one focuses on
Speaker 1: the Hoping Nations rule, and there's also PBS's twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: documentary Secrets of the Code Talkers the Warrior Tradition, which
Speaker 1: also explores how indigenous nations helped win the war by
Speaker 1: scrambling up sentences speaking of words. I don't know. Let's
Speaker 1: talk Voyage. This is the name of a manuscript written
Speaker 1: on calfskin sometime in the fourteen hundreds. It was discovered
Speaker 1: by a Polish book collector. His name was Wilfrid voynich
Speaker 1: voynick Voynache. Either way, it was on the minds of
Speaker 1: patrons John Buckner, Kurtz Wants and Eric k Ingve, Jennifer
Speaker 1: Grogen basspug Mine, Felipa Jimenez And how about Aaron White
Speaker 1: wants to know if you've heard of the Voyage manuscript
Speaker 1: secret code language, horseshit.
Speaker 2: And yeah, there are lots of these very peculiar codes,
Speaker 2: one off codes. This is an ancient manuscript and not
Speaker 2: so ancient, a few centuries old. We don't know why
Speaker 2: it was written, and we have no idea really what
Speaker 2: it talks about.
Speaker 1: So yes, this priceless and legendarily mysterious text now lives
Speaker 1: in New Haven, Connecticut. It's at Yale's rare book and
Speaker 1: Manuscript Library, and it was inherited by Voynick's widow's friend
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen sixties. No one was interested in
Speaker 1: buying it. She was like, I inherited this from my
Speaker 1: friend's husband, and they're like, Annie, nobody wants it. So
Speaker 1: she donated it to Yale. But now you have to
Speaker 1: know someone who knows someone important to glimpse it in person.
Speaker 1: Although Yale was kind enough to digitize the two hundred
Speaker 1: and thirteen page in twenty twenty. No one knows what
Speaker 1: the writing means or what it says, but there are
Speaker 1: drawings of flowers and titties in it, and we're going
Speaker 1: to link that in the show notes in case you
Speaker 1: are the code cracking genius it's been waiting eight hundred
Speaker 1: years for. Or if you just like drawings of everything
Speaker 1: from plants to blood letting, now if you love that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Also, we have a recent episode on
Speaker 1: eliminated manuscripts called Medieval Codecology. We also have a mammalogy episode.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's anyone's guess. Some people think it was
Speaker 1: a hoax or just a really creative or unmedicated person.
Speaker 2: And so the Voyniche manuscript is one that often gets discussed.
Speaker 2: There's the Beal Cipher, which is about a couple of
Speaker 2: cowboys in America who discover gold out west and brought
Speaker 2: it back, and there are secret messages that say where
Speaker 2: the gold is buried, but nobody's ever been able to
Speaker 2: crack the messages or find the gold.
Speaker 1: So just a quick note on this. A guy named
Speaker 1: Thomas Bile supposedly left a lock box with an innkeeper
Speaker 1: in eighteen twenty, and in it we're three coded tech
Speaker 1: describing the location in Virginia of a treasure worth now,
Speaker 1: from what I gather, around one hundred million dollars. No
Speaker 1: one has been able to crack the texts one or three,
Speaker 1: but text two was based on the first paragraphs of
Speaker 1: the US Constitution, and it was a heads up about
Speaker 1: how much gold and jewels and silver were buried somewhere
Speaker 1: six feet deep in Bedford County. So how did people
Speaker 1: even find out about this? Well, years after Beale left
Speaker 1: the lock box at the inn and never showed up again,
Speaker 1: the innkeeper was finally like enough of this crap and
Speaker 1: opened it up and it contained these three coded texts.
Speaker 1: And then eventually a friend of the innkeeper was like,
Speaker 1: let's publish and sell a pamphlet describing that it's the
Speaker 1: key to treasure, and people who buy this pamphlet can
Speaker 1: try to decode it. But here's the thing. Even the
Speaker 1: most modern and sophisticated code breakers and programs have not
Speaker 1: been able to crack texts one and three, And some
Speaker 1: people think it was all a hoax, with text two
Speaker 1: and the inventory of all the treasure easily crackable, but
Speaker 1: the location text being absolute random numbers and just a
Speaker 1: good story to sell these pamphlets. Essentially, some people think
Speaker 1: it's an old timey clickbait prank, but time will tell.
Speaker 1: Who knows.
Speaker 2: There's an ancient metal disc called the Feistos disc, which
Speaker 2: again nobody's been able to read. And then there are
Speaker 2: some ancient languages which still remain unbroken, which we still
Speaker 2: can't read. One of them is called linear A. Nobody
Speaker 2: can make head nor tell of what linear a means
Speaker 2: or knows can understand what the alphabet is or even
Speaker 2: the language.
Speaker 1: I looked up this ancient four thousand year old script
Speaker 1: from the extinct language of ancient Crete, and honestly, it
Speaker 1: looks like the alien squid language from the movie Arrival,
Speaker 1: or like abstract brushstroke art in a hotel lobby, like,
Speaker 1: what the heck is this shit?
Speaker 2: But Linear B was cracked I think in the fifties
Speaker 2: by called Michael Ventris, building on the work of an
Speaker 2: American woman called Alice Cober, also in league with a
Speaker 2: guy called John Chadwick.
Speaker 1: Several people all head down on this linear Bee.
Speaker 2: And John Chadwick. I interviewed him shortly before he died,
Speaker 2: and I said, John, how did you know? You're a
Speaker 2: classic scholar at Cambridge? How did you get into deciphering
Speaker 2: ancient languages? Why was that the thing that obsessed you?
Speaker 2: And he told me that he'd worked at Bletchley Park
Speaker 2: with the code breakers in the Second World War alongside
Speaker 2: Alan Turing.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And he never told anybody that he'd been a Bleschley
Speaker 2: Park codebreaker because all of those people were sworn to secrecy. Again,
Speaker 2: everybody keeps their secrets. Yeah, but that work in the
Speaker 2: Second World War led directly to inspiring Chadwick to crack
Speaker 2: linear Be.
Speaker 1: What a flex that he kept hidden, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Some people dragging up and down in the
Speaker 1: pubs about that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's an incredible thing that the story of Bleshley Park.
Speaker 2: You know when the war, everybody went back to their
Speaker 2: lives and got on with their day to day work.
Speaker 2: Alan Turing, for example, went to work on computing. You know,
Speaker 2: as well as being an incredible codebreaker, he's the father
Speaker 2: of computer technology, computer theory and computer science. And the
Speaker 2: thing was that later on he was a homosexual and
Speaker 2: the Gunment was aware of that, and so he wasn't
Speaker 2: given the clearance required to work on certain projects. He
Speaker 2: was sidelined. He went to Manchester and did some incredible
Speaker 2: work in Manchester, and then he was arrested because he
Speaker 2: was found with a man and I guess found guilty
Speaker 2: in decent behavior or some such accusation. He was found guilty.
Speaker 2: He was given a hormone treatment and chemically carustrated and
Speaker 2: eventually just took his own life. And when he died,
Speaker 2: virtually nobody was aware, not even his family were aware
Speaker 2: of the incredible work he'd done in terms of changing
Speaker 2: the course of the Second World War. And now he's
Speaker 2: celebrated and recognized and people are aware of the crime
Speaker 2: that was committed against him. And in fact I was
Speaker 2: very proud to be part of a panel the Governor
Speaker 2: of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. I think now
Speaker 2: is hoping to be Prime Minister of Canada.
Speaker 3: Mission accomplished.
Speaker 2: He was Governor's Bank of England and he wanted to
Speaker 2: have a scientist or a mathematician on the new fifty
Speaker 2: pound banknote, possibly one of our last ever banknotes, depending
Speaker 2: how money goes. We were on a panel. Our proposal
Speaker 2: to him was that Alan Turing beyond the new fifty
Speaker 2: pound notes. So it's great today if you're lucky enough
Speaker 2: to have a fifty pound note in Britain, Alan Sheuring
Speaker 2: is the person on it, because you know, not only
Speaker 2: did he change the course of the Second World War,
Speaker 2: not only was he a mathematician of epic achievements in mathematics.
Speaker 2: Not only did he know was he the father of
Speaker 2: computer science, but he also pioneered a lot of the
Speaker 2: concepts within artificial intelligence. So you know, it's great that
Speaker 2: he is now on our fifty pound notes.
Speaker 1: But the fact that he did so much for the
Speaker 1: world and suffered so greatly is something that no one
Speaker 1: should forget, especially as we see LGBTQ people under baffling
Speaker 1: and increasing hostility from political regimes. And the future can
Speaker 1: only get better if people learn from the past. Speaking
Speaker 1: of darkness, in the future, you know. On the topic
Speaker 1: of artificial intelligence, two more listener questions if you don't mind.
Speaker 1: You know, we talked a little bit about chronic computing,
Speaker 1: but several people wanted to know what role AI might
Speaker 1: have in modern cryptology on the real life Squishy Brains
Speaker 1: of Dave, Philip Meter cast the dog Ner, Megan Walker,
Speaker 1: Stephanie Coombs, Kate Equin west Corey, and Sarah Versara, who asked,
Speaker 1: can AI solve secret codes? If so, should we unplug
Speaker 1: it now? And are we getting much closer to that?
Speaker 2: I think the modern codes are so utterly unbreakable that
Speaker 2: artifish intelligence won't make any difference. It's just the sheer
Speaker 2: computing power is just not there to have any impact
Speaker 2: on secure communication. But AI could have, you know, an
Speaker 2: impact on trying to crack ancient codes, ancient messages, or
Speaker 2: ancient languages, where it's not about lacking computer power, it's
Speaker 2: about lacking that vital insight, or it's about getting all
Speaker 2: of the texts that are available and looking for patterns.
Speaker 2: You know, that's what code breaking is about, pattern recognition,
Speaker 2: and AI is terrific at pattern recognition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, some people wanted to know why do some people
Speaker 1: really excel at like escape rooms and things like that,
Speaker 1: and some of us are just great at that. Some
Speaker 1: of us myself and aren't. But let's talk about stuff
Speaker 1: he hates or at least his least favorite patron cat.
Speaker 1: You're gonna love this one.
Speaker 2: So there's a code which I didn't actually write about
Speaker 2: in the Codebook because COVI was published. There was another
Speaker 2: book out at almost the same time. In fact, it
Speaker 2: was at the same time because we were both kind
Speaker 2: of in the top ten bestseller list and we were
Speaker 2: kind of eating against each other. And it was called
Speaker 2: The Bible Code. So there was my book, the Codebook,
Speaker 2: and then there was the Bible Code, and the Bible
Speaker 2: Code was getting a lot of attention. And the idea
Speaker 2: in the Bible Code was that there are encrypted messages
Speaker 2: in the most ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and it's a very
Speaker 2: intriguing idea. The book was written by a guy called
Speaker 2: Michael Drosnin. So Michael Drosen wrote this book called the
Speaker 2: Bible Code. And the way you find these encrypted messages
Speaker 2: in the ancient Hebrew text is you put all the
Speaker 2: letters out in the form of an array, in the
Speaker 2: form of a grid, and you look for Hebrew letters
Speaker 2: that are equally spaced in a straight line. Okay, so
Speaker 2: you don't read it left to right or right to left.
Speaker 2: I suppose you're looking for diagonals. You're looking for lines
Speaker 2: going in all different directions that are equally spaced. And
Speaker 2: when you do that, something really weird happens. You find
Speaker 2: these messages, not just messages, but predictions that actually turned
Speaker 2: out to be true. You find the word Newton crossing
Speaker 2: with gravity. It was kind of extraordinary. You find the
Speaker 2: word Kennedy Dallas assassinate no, yeah, one hundred percent through
Speaker 2: absolutely no word of a lie. Take the mostation Hebrew texts.
Speaker 2: Put them in a grid. Look for these patterns, and
Speaker 2: these predictions emerge. Literally hundreds and hundreds of predictions. Every
Speaker 2: single one has come true. I've got good sumps. Now.
Speaker 2: A mathematician in Australia said, you know, I'm not sure
Speaker 2: I quite believe this. So he got another book, not
Speaker 2: the Bible, but he got Moby Dick. He said, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe Dick is a huge text. It's about the same
Speaker 2: size as these ancient manuscripts. What happens if I apply
Speaker 2: the same algorithm to Moby Dick and he looked at
Speaker 2: Moby Dicky, put all the letters in Moby Dick in
Speaker 2: a grid in an array. He looked for letters that
Speaker 2: are equally spaced in a straight line, and exactly the
Speaker 2: same thing happened. He found hundreds and hundreds of predictions,
Speaker 2: all of which came true. There's one about the death
Speaker 2: of Diana, Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, roads skid, the
Speaker 2: passenger who was killed with her, Dodie Dody, the name
Speaker 2: of the driver on Repaul. They all appear in Moby Dick.
Speaker 2: So the bottom line is that books are big objects.
Speaker 2: They contain millions of letters, that's millions of starting points,
Speaker 2: millions of ways you can jump around, millions of different
Speaker 2: diagonals you can find, and when you have so many possibilities,
Speaker 2: you will find anything you want to find. It's purely
Speaker 2: it's about the law of large numbers or the laws
Speaker 2: of large combinations. So you'll find everything that's ever happened,
Speaker 2: everything that won't happen, everything that will happen. It's all
Speaker 2: there in any large text. So that's kind of one
Speaker 2: of my favorite codes. In one of the code also
Speaker 2: really hate I suppose.
Speaker 1: Could it point to a simulation or it's really just chance.
Speaker 1: You get enough letters. Yeah, you're gonna get some messages.
Speaker 1: That's really the point, right.
Speaker 2: My favorite coincidence because you put your finger on It's
Speaker 2: really about coincidences. If you take Shakespeare's Hamlet quotation to
Speaker 2: be or not to be? That is the question. If
Speaker 2: you take that wonderful, you know, soliloquy and you juggle
Speaker 2: the letters around, you get the following anagram. You get
Speaker 2: the anagram which is in one of the Bard's best
Speaker 2: thought of tragedies are insistent here at Hamlet quis on
Speaker 2: two fronts about how life turns rotten, which is a
Speaker 2: part of summary of the entire play built from an
Speaker 2: anagram of its most famous soliloquy.
Speaker 1: So Yes, Seattle Lte graphic designer and anagram enthusiast Corey
Speaker 1: Calhoun sat down about fifteen years ago and thought, I
Speaker 1: wonder if you can anagram Hamlet's speech, and within just
Speaker 1: a few hours took the Shakespearean text to me or
Speaker 1: not to be? That is the question whether tis nobler
Speaker 1: in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of
Speaker 1: outrageous fortune? And then he anagrammed that and it spells
Speaker 1: out in one of the Bard's best thought of tragedies,
Speaker 1: our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how
Speaker 1: life turns rotten, way to go. Corey, who knew all
Speaker 1: of those letters, could spell all of those words. I
Speaker 1: now follow Corey Calhoun on Instagram because I think that
Speaker 1: that's so cool. And he is probably wondering why a
Speaker 1: podcast lady wants to see pictures of his kids and cakes.
Speaker 1: Let him wonder, and you.
Speaker 2: Can either say, what gosh, wasn't Shakespeare amazing that he
Speaker 2: could build in these incredible puzzles? But he just wrote
Speaker 2: so much stuff that eventually these weird coincidences will happen.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've never heard that, and I love it. Is
Speaker 1: there any codes that you ever keep an eye on, like,
Speaker 1: when are they going to crack that one?
Speaker 2: Gosh?
Speaker 1: Um?
Speaker 2: The one that people write me the most way is
Speaker 2: the bill code, the beial siphe everybody regularly on a
Speaker 2: monthly basis. Somebody thinks they've the bill cipher.
Speaker 1: That was the old timey treasure buried in the Virginia foothills,
Speaker 1: which made unfortune for the anonymous pamphlet maker.
Speaker 2: To which you know the replies, well, if you've cracked
Speaker 2: the bill cipher. Then show me where the gold is.
Speaker 2: You know, that's the old whether someone's cracked it or not.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's the one that people still seem to pursue.
Speaker 1: Well, maybe they've got it in a double padlocked treasure chest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, or maybe somebody's found the treasure stolen it.
Speaker 2: And as we say, the whole world of cryptography is
Speaker 2: full of secrets, and so maybe out about it. When
Speaker 2: you have discovered the gold, I.
Speaker 1: Would keep that under a tight, heavy lid. I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd tell I wouldn't go out tweeting about it. Well,
Speaker 1: this has been so wonderful to talk to you. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for my pleasure.
Speaker 2: It's been nice to kind of think about cryptography all
Speaker 2: over again. It's and we started off talking about ancient
Speaker 2: Samarians and their pottery glazes, and we've come all the
Speaker 2: way up to the internet and padlocked boxes.
Speaker 1: So that's great. So ask cryptological people cryptic and sometimes
Speaker 1: illogical questions, because what fun is a cat unless it's
Speaker 1: out of a bag. So thank you so much, doctor
Speaker 1: Simon Singh for humoring me with so many not smart questions.
Speaker 1: You can enjoy some of his other work, like the
Speaker 1: BBC documentary and book Pharma's Last Theorem, other books such
Speaker 1: as The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets and Tricker Treatment
Speaker 1: Alternative Medicine on Trial. His social media is linked in
Speaker 1: the show notes, as is his website, which is just
Speaker 1: his name dot net. And we are at Ologies on
Speaker 1: Blue Sky and Instagram. I personally am at Ali Ward.
Speaker 1: On both. We have shorter kid friendly episodes called Smologies
Speaker 1: you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. They're
Speaker 1: also linked in the show notes. Join our Patreon and
Speaker 1: submit questions before we record at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies.
Speaker 1: We have merch at ologiesmerch dot com, including hats and
Speaker 1: bathing suits and toats and gifts for the cute little
Speaker 1: weirdos in your life. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for
Speaker 1: admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Mallick makes our
Speaker 1: professional transcripts. Kelly yards Wire does the website Nowel Dilworth
Speaker 1: is our lovely scheduling producer. Susan Hale puts it all
Speaker 1: together as managing director and deciphering my transcripts into an
Speaker 1: actual episode. Are our Brainiac editors Jake Chafe and lead
Speaker 1: editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland audio extra editing by the
Speaker 1: wonderful Jared Sleeper of mind Jam Media, who helped out
Speaker 1: in a pinch for me because I had a mic
Speaker 1: malfunction lead at night on some of the sides. You
Speaker 1: may have noticed it, you may not have because he
Speaker 1: is great at helping out, and also he's married to me,
Speaker 1: so he had no choice. Nick Thorburn orchestrated the theme music.
Speaker 1: And if you stick around to the end of the episode,
Speaker 1: I tell you a secret. And first off, if you
Speaker 1: are stuck and annoyed about that pig Latin clip from earlier,
Speaker 1: what are you study at college? Pig alheadin atway? Aya ounk?
Speaker 2: You wouldn't know a thing about that, would you?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Olle nay?
Speaker 1: Two fun facts about it. It's from an old Three
Speaker 1: Stooges clip called three Little Pig Skins, and the pig
Speaker 1: Latin spoken was what are you doing tonight a day?
Speaker 1: And then she says no night. And it features a
Speaker 1: little known actress in a part of one of her
Speaker 1: earliest roles. Her name was Lucille Ball. She was blonde
Speaker 1: in it, which really threw me. Also, I could not
Speaker 1: not sign off with another little message don't work on
Speaker 1: this if you're driving five, twenty two, five, eighteen, twenty five,
Speaker 1: twenty eight, nine, fourteen, seven, nine, nineteen one, nineteen five three,
Speaker 1: eighteen five, twenty twenty one, fourteen, twenty nine, twelve, twenty five, fifteen,
Speaker 1: twenty one, twelve, five one, eighteen, fourteen nine, twenty Herbye pacadermatology, ommeiology,
Speaker 1: do zoology, lithology, YEA meteorology and wold peracology, ethology, seriology, selenology.
Speaker 3: Now you can break the cop H