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A mysterious manuscript written in a strange, indecipherable alphabet. What could be more tantalizing? But for one scientist, the bizarre book is just a gateway to cracking bigger mysteries.

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Two years ago, a Scotsman named Gordon Rugg slipped back in time. Night after night he spread his papers on the kitchen table once his children had gone to bed. Working on faux parchment with a steel-nibbed calligraphic pen, he scribbled a strange, unidentifiable, vaguely medieval script. If you converted some of those letters into the alphabet we use, some of the words would read: “qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy.”
As he wrote, Rugg struggled to get inside the mind of the person who had first scrawled this incomprehensible text some hundreds of years ago.

By day, Rugg, a forty-eight-year-old psychologist, teaches in the computer science department of Keele University, near Manchester, England. By night, as an intellectual exercise, he has been researching one of the world’s great oddities: the Voynich manuscript, a hand-lettered book written in an unknown code that has frustrated cryptographers since its discovery in an Italian villa in 1912.
How impregnable is the Voynich? During World War II, code breakers who blew away Nazi ciphers grappled with the manuscript in their spare time and came up empty. Since then, decoding the book’s contents has become an obsession for geeks and puzzle nuts everywhere.

Then came Rugg. In three months, he cooked up the most persuasive explanation yet for the 234-page text: Sorry, folks, there is no code—it’s a hoax! Some Voynichologists were impressed with his reasoning and proofs, even if they were a little chagrined. Others, who disagreed with his findings, were appalled that his work got so much press, nabbing coverage in top journals such as Nature or news outlets like the BBC.
“The Voynich is such a challenge,” says Rugg, “such a social activity. But then along comes someone who says ‘Oh, it’s just a lot of meaningless gibberish.’ It’s as if we’re all surfers, and the sea has dried up.”

When the news of Rugg’s breakthrough was published in January 2004, everyone missed the bigger story. Rugg’s finding came not because he was smarter, but because he focused on what everyone else had missed. This came naturally to Rugg: He has made a career out of studying how experts acquire knowledge yet screw up nevertheless. In 1996, he and his colleagues developed a rigorous method for peering over the shoulders of experts—doctors, software engineers, pilots, physicists—watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems.

Rugg calls this method the verifier approach, and the Voynich was its first major test. If Rugg gets his way, verifiers will revolutionize the scientific method and help solve other seemingly unsolvable mysteries, such as the origins of the universe or the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.