PhD Material?

As I write this post, there are a couple zillion more slides to be completed (okay I'm fibbing) for the classes throughout the week, the intro theme to Sakura Taisen is playing on WMP, and I'm once again somewhat excited at the prospect of a PhD (though most probably not under the auspices of my current employer, but this will be something I'll explore later) mostly due to this.

For those of you who didn't click on the link (the article, culled from Wired IS a bit long) I'll give you the gist here. Keele University researcher and computer science lecturer Gordon Rugg has seemingly solved one of literature and science's most puzzling riddles, the Voynich Manuscript. Written some 400 years ago by an (up till now) unknown author, the manuscript has puzzled scientists and cryptologists throughout the years. Even the famed Enigma team who, at Bletchley Park cracked the Nazi coded messages balked at this monumental task. Using a method he calls the verifier approach, the psychology-trained-ex archaeologist seems to have proven that the manuscript is just a clever hoax perpetrated by a disciple of the famed court seer, John Dee.

Even hardcore Voynichists (who knew there was even a word?) have to concede that his method seems to have unraveled the mystery at last. Next on his list of projects, Rugg is trying to make sense of the mass of redundant, often overlapping scientific writings on Alzheimer's disease. The core of his method is very simple: since no one ever considered the Voynich to be a hoax, nobody ever paid any serious attention to that particular theory, which made it easy for him to jump in. There's more, but what got my attention was that he understands that one of the biggest hurdles for any potential PhD candidate is the fact that though he/she may take a year or more to do the required preparatory reading, usually they'll only be able to scratch the surface of the literature.

What Rugg intends to do is to apply his model to any field, and allow it to sift through the redundancies and quickly find a particular root of the problem, so to speak. Already, some other computer science, psychology and health experts have shown interest in his approach which may make a little more sense of the wide body of scientific literature out there.

I for one, think this is absolutely smashing. So much so, I actually shot him an email asking if he'd be looking for any PhD students to supervise come next year or so. Hell, life being what it is, anything's worth a shot.

Okay, back to work.

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In a related development, 25 Nobel-winning scientists today demanded the US government to make all taxpayer-funded research papers freely available, instead of other scientists having to pay a bundle in subscription fees. Details here.