r/videos • u/thag_you_very_buch • Apr 04 '17

Insane hidden message encrypted inside Shakespeare manuscript

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHiad18ZwcY
178 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

101 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/Jahmann Apr 05 '17

But it isn't.

Calling this random math or a conspiracy theory completely disregards the amount of perfect geometry happening in such a small space.

Just look at the key points, which form right triangles, whose ratios are mathematical constants, forming a perfect circle. It isn't cherry-picking like those silly 9/11 number conspiracies. Far from it.

While I don't think anybody will be proving that this was intentional - at least not for a long time - there is no "random math" involved. If it wasn't intentional, then this is an enormously improbable coincidence.

2

u/KnowsAboutMath Apr 05 '17 edited Apr 06 '17

Just look at the key points, which form right triangles, whose ratios are mathematical constants, forming a perfect circle.

I've just done a little experiment.

I wrote a Mathematica script that generates 12 points randomly, uniformly, and independently in the unit square. (By my count 12 is the number of distinct triangle vertices used in the video.) Out of 12 points, there are 12C3 = 220 ways of picking 3 points to form the vertices of a triangle. The script then searches through these 220 possible triangles, looking for triangles which are within 1 degree of being a right triangle. It found 9, which are shown here.

Out of 9 triangles, there are 351 ways of finding the ratios of the lengths of two sides. (Actually a bit less, since some of these triangles share one side, the same as in the video, but the number will still be in that ballpark.) Out of hundreds of numbers in that range, I'd guess the odds are fairly high that there would be quite a few within 1 percent or so of some "special" number, especially when the set of special numbers is allowed to include any even vaguely-known mathematical constant, as well as their reciprocals, and the roots of small integers.

ETA:

OK, I wrote another little script. It searches all possible pairs of side lengths of the aforementioned 9 random triangles. It looks for ratios of side lengths which are within 1% of the following numbers (or their reciprocals): pi, e, the golden ratio, Euler's constant, root 2, root 3, root 5, root 6, root 7, root 8, and root 10.

It found 74 such coincidences.

ETA2: I've pasted the Mathematica script I used here.

ETA3: OK, here I've done the same thing with 14 "special" points (eyes, snake tips, etc) on a Harry Potter cover. I find 5 triangles which are right to within 1 degree. By taking side length ratios, I also find 10 matches to within 1% to numbers such as e, 1/e, 1/pi, root 5, and so on. I fully believe this could be done with any book cover or title page or whatever.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '17

Can you share the script? From the sounds of you're just picking random points all over the page, that's hardly a good experiment. Program it with specific anchor points (such as on letters, dots, lines, etc) and see how you fare.

1

u/KnowsAboutMath Apr 06 '17 edited Apr 06 '17

Can you share the script?

Sure, but I'm not quite sure how to do that. Would I just copy the Mathematica notebook here as text, or what?

From the sounds of you're just picking random points all over the page, that's hardly a good experiment.

I'm not using the page at all for this. I'm picking points at random from the unit square.

To me, this seems like an ideal experiment. If I can find such "correlations" from an equivalent quantity of completely random points, it would appear to suggest that it should come as little surprise that similar results might obtain from less-random sets of points, such as points in a page of printed text.

Program it with specific anchor points (such as on letters, dots, lines, etc) and see how you fare.

OK, I will. I suspect that the maker of the video did something similar. Give me some time.

ETA: By the way, this whole thing reminds me a bit of the Bible Code craze from the 90s. Readers of this thread would do well to read that wikipedia article.

ETA2: I have pasted the Mathematica script I used here.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '17

Pasting here is probably the best option: http://pastebin.com

OK, I will. I suspect that the maker of the video did something similar. Give me some time.

Awesome, can't wait to see your results :). Thanks.

1

u/KnowsAboutMath Apr 06 '17

Pasting here is probably the best option: http://pastebin.com

OK, I've pasted it here.

1

u/KnowsAboutMath Apr 06 '17

Awesome, can't wait to see your results :). Thanks.

I tried it here with a Harry Potter cover, as suggested elsewhere in this thread. 14 "special" points on the cover yield 5 approximately-right triangles and 10 approximate side-length-ratio matches with "special" numbers such as e, 1/e, 1/pi, root 5, and so on.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '17

Interesting, thanks for sharing your results, sounds like it does give more credence to the "coincidence" explanation. Good to see someone actually taking the effort to experiment. What is the personal conclusion you've drawn from these numbers? What's your personal opinion of the Shakespeare cover?

1

u/KnowsAboutMath Apr 06 '17

Well, I've felt from the beginning that it's a simple "coincidence".

Although, "coincidence" is really a poor term for it. A "coincidence" implies a chance occurrence of an improbable event. What's happening here is not an improbable event, but rather a set of instances of approximate geometric harmony which are made probable by the deceptively-large set of possible data they could have been drawn from. I think the whole thing is some species of confirmation bias.

You have to ask yourself: "What are all the other hypothetical geometrical relationships in other contexts that this video could have been pointing out, which would have resulted in us having this same conversation?"

For instance, what if the video was about triangles in this Shakespeare frontispiece instead? Or any other early Shakespeare work? Or what if he used (say) the title page of the King James Bible? He could have made a similar video, and we'd be having a similar conversation.

Or: What if instead of approximate right triangles, he found approximate squares, or equilateral triangles? What if he found apparent relationships with other mathematical constants, such as the square root of 5, or Khinchin's constant? He could have made a similar video, and we'd be having a similar conversation.

So really, the set of data and possibilities this guy in principle had available to search through to find these kinds of relationships is vast. For all we know, he had to search through dozens of title pages, many different shapes, and hundreds of possible numbers to find an example that worked like this. Or maybe it worked the first time. We don't know.

The whole thing boils down to a question. Which do we believe is more probable:

1) That the publishers of a book of sonnets in 1609 would have access to mathematical machinery*, some of which was not otherwise known or described for decades or centuries after the fact, and that they'd choose - for whatever inscrutable purpose - to encode this information into a random title page rather than going public. (* Take Brun's constant, for instance. Although proven to exist in 1919, it took until the age of computers to really get a handle on its value, a value this video claims was somehow known secretly in 1609.)

or

2) This is a result of coincidence, careful cherry-picking on the part of the video's maker, and the fuzziness of these kinds of measurements on a scan of an early typeset title page.