Cryptology (SECRET CODES) with Simon Singh

Summary

Ologies with Alie Ward: Cryptology (SECRET CODES) with Simon Singh
Release Date: June 4, 2025

In this riveting episode of Ologies with Alie Ward, host Alie Ward delves deep into the intricate world of cryptology with renowned cryptologist and author Simon Singh. The conversation spans from ancient code-breaking techniques to modern-day encryption challenges, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of how secret codes have shaped history and continue to influence our digital age.

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Introduction to Simon Singh and Cryptology

Alie Ward begins by introducing Simon Singh, highlighting his impressive credentials: a PhD in theoretical particle physics, work at CERN, involvement with the BBC, and his authorship of acclaimed books such as Big Bang, Fermat's Last Theorem, and The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. Singh's expertise in mathematics and code-breaking sets the stage for an enlightening discussion.

Why Cryptology?

[04:33]
Alie Ward: "But cryptology, we obviously we've never done this topic, that's how it works here. But I know very little about code. But you've written an entire book on it and I'm curious why cryptology? What caused you to research and go back to the history of cryptology and do as deep a dive?"

[04:46]
Simon Singh: "Two reasons really. I'd written a book... and I had a whole folder full of cryptography stories... cryptography was more important today than ever before."

Singh explains that his initial exploration of cryptography began while writing Fermat's Last Theorem, leading him to discover the profound impact of cryptography on historical events like World War II. Additionally, his experience working on the TV show Tomorrow's World fueled his interest in the evolving significance of cryptography in the information age.

Codes vs. Languages

[08:45]
Alie Ward: "What's the difference between a code and a language? Is language meant to communicate? Code is essentially meant to not communicate. Is that the main distinguishing difference?"

[08:58]
Simon Singh: "Yeah, I think that that's a good way of putting it... today encryption goes beyond just hiding the meaning of a message."

The discussion clarifies that while languages are designed for clear communication, codes aim to obscure the message from unintended recipients. Singh elaborates on modern encryption techniques that not only hide the content but also ensure message integrity and authentication.

Steganography: Hiding the Message Itself

[11:26]
Simon Singh: "But then there's one other type of thing which is maybe worth talking about, which is steganography... it hides its very existence."

They explore steganography, the art of concealing the existence of a message, using examples like invisible ink and hidden tattoos. Singh recounts historical instances, such as Herodotus's account of tattooed messages and the use of silk-wrapped wax balls to transport secret information.

Historical Case Study: Mary, Queen of Scots

[18:40]
Simon Singh: "Mary, Queen of Scots... used a simple substitution cipher to send treasonous messages that were easily cracked by Elizabeth's spymasters."

Singh narrates how Mary, Queen of Scots, attempted to coordinate a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I using a substitution cipher. His explanation underscores the vulnerability of simple codes and the effectiveness of frequency analysis pioneered by Al Kindi in the 9th century, which allowed Elizabeth's spies to decipher Mary's messages and ultimately led to her execution.

The Enigma Machine and Bletchley Park

[37:09]
Simon Singh: "Breaking the Enigma is like if Satan wrote Sudoku puzzles and then if you didn't get it, he swallowed your children."

The conversation shifts to the intricacies of the German Enigma machine used during World War II. Singh details how the Enigma's complexity, with its rotors and plugboards, made it seemingly unbreakable. He highlights the crucial role of the Polish mathematicians who initially cracked Enigma codes and the subsequent efforts at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and his team developed the Bombe machine to decipher German communications. This breakthrough provided the Allies with a significant advantage, contributing to pivotal victories such as the defense of Alexandria.

Quantum Computing and the Future of Encryption

[26:29]
Simon Singh: "There’s something called the key. The key is the recipe for encryption, and it’s the recipe for decryption... today, we found a way around it."

Singh discusses the revolution brought by public-key cryptography, which eliminated the need for physical key distribution. He explains how the invention of mathematical padlocks by Clifford Cox at GCHQ, later uncovered by Diffie and Hellman, paved the way for secure digital communication essential for the internet.

[56:32]
Simon Singh: "It's a very important question... quantum computing today. We don't really know how advanced the technology is getting, particularly say in China."

Addressing concerns about quantum computing potentially breaking current encryption methods, Singh acknowledges the threat but emphasizes that widespread impact is still years away. He mentions quantum cryptography as a possible countermeasure but notes its current challenges in implementation.

Listener Questions: Code Breaking in Reality vs. Movies

[54:53]
Simon Singh: "Well, the codes we have today are effectively unbreakable... encryption today, it’s unbreakable."

Responding to listener inquiries, Singh contrasts the often-quick code-breaking depicted in films with the reality that modern encryption methods are highly secure and require significant computational power to break. He reassures that while historical codes like Enigma were cracked with persistence and ingenuity, today's encryption remains robust against unauthorized decryption.

Navajo Code Talkers and Indigenous Languages

[60:24]
Simon Singh: "When the Americans thought about using Navajo as a secret language... it was a truly unbreakable code, and it was highly effective."

Singh honors the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, who used their native language to create codes that the Japanese could not decipher. This unique application of linguistic diversity provided the Allies with a strategic advantage in secure communications.

Unsolved Mysteries: The Voynich Manuscript and Beale Cipher

[63:35]
Simon Singh: "There are lots of these very peculiar codes... We don't know why it was written and we have no idea really what it talks about."

The episode explores enigmatic codes like the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale Cipher. Singh explains the mysterious nature of these texts, which remain undeciphered despite extensive efforts. He highlights the Voynich Manuscript's strange illustrations and unknown script, as well as the Beale Cipher's tantalizing promise of hidden treasure that continues to elude cryptologists.

AI and Its Role in Cryptology

[71:17]
Simon Singh: "I think the modern codes are so utterly unbreakable that artificial intelligence won't make any difference... code breaking is about pattern recognition. And AI is terrific at pattern recognition."

Addressing questions about artificial intelligence's potential to revolutionize code-breaking, Singh acknowledges AI's strengths in pattern recognition but maintains that modern encryption remains secure. He suggests that while AI may assist in deciphering ancient or poorly implemented codes, robust contemporary encryption techniques are beyond its current reach.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In the closing segments, Singh reflects on historical figures like Alan Turing and the lasting impact of their contributions to cryptology and computer science. Alie Ward wraps up the episode by encouraging listeners to explore more about cryptology and appreciate the complex interplay between codes, technology, and history.

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Notable Quotes:

• Simon Singh [18:40]: "Mary, Queen of Scots... used a simple substitution cipher to send treasonous messages that were easily cracked by Elizabeth's spymasters."

• Simon Singh [37:09]: "Breaking the Enigma is like if Satan wrote Sudoku puzzles and then if you didn't get it, he swallowed your children."

• Simon Singh [04:46]: "Cryptography was more important today than ever before."

• Simon Singh [54:53]: "The codes we have today are effectively unbreakable... encryption today, it’s unbreakable."

---

This episode serves as a captivating journey through the history and science of codes, illustrating their profound significance in shaping global events and safeguarding information in our interconnected world. Whether you're a history buff, a math enthusiast, or simply curious about secret codes, Singh's insights provide a valuable perspective on the art and science of cryptology.

Transcript

[Alie Ward]

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[Simon Singh]

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[Alie Ward]

Loans offered by NetCredit or lending partner.

[Simon Singh]

Banks and serviced by NetCredit applications subject.

[Alie Ward]

To review and approval. Learn more at netcredit.com partners. NetCredit credit to the People Pacifico is a Mexican lager brood to be discovered.

[Simon Singh]

It'S like fresh tracks on a powder day like that uncharted trail a stone's.

[Alie Ward]

Throw away like the perfect wave on a sunny day Pacifico find your own way.

[Simon Singh]

21 plus drink responsibly imported by Crown Import, Chicago, Illinois.

[Alie Ward]

Oh hey, it's the sweatshirt that you will never get back from them. Alie Ward and I have wanted to cover secret codes and cryptology for years and years and I thought one day I'll go to Maryland and interview someone at the National Cryptologic Museum. And then I realized that it's run by the National Security Agency and I was like, they're going to be tight lipped. They're not going to give it the goods. So then a little more digging unearthed a better, more perfect guest. The guy who wrote the literal book on code breaking titled the the Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. Done. He's in. He's a PhD theoretical particle physicist by training, an author by trade now, and has worked at CERN and the BBC. Even made a BAFTA winning documentary about a mathematician called called Fermat's Last Theorem. He's also the author of the books Big Bang, the Origin of the Universe and the Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets. He knows so much about the function and history of secret ciphers and code breaking and has several additional honorary degrees. And he joined the video chat with a salt and pepper mohawk and for some reason a mic and earbuds that refused to play ball with our recording software. Enigmatic indeed. So our first introduction was amid an absolutely horrific amount of tech diffs and I was pretty sure he hated me. Thank you for spending a half hour troubleshooting. I swear that is not typical at all.

[Simon Singh]

No no no, it's these things happen.

[Alie Ward]

But look at that. Brilliant and forgiving. So let's get to this great convo. But first, thank you so much to all the patrons who support the show at patreon.com ologies where you can join for a simple dollar a month and submit your questions. Thank you to everyone who is buying and wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com where we have some lovely shirts and stuff. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for me to read and as proof that I do read them, they help so much. Thank you to Jen GM 017 who wrote long time ologite here. I still cannot get enough and for anyone complaining about explicit it's in the description so check out Smallogies instead. Jen GM017 thank you for reminding listeners that yes, we have a G rated and we have shortened episodes. They're called smallogies. They're in their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts, they're linked in the show notes. Look at that. A review and a reminder about smallogies all at once. Perfect. Okay. But for now enjoy this full length conversation about slip ups that lost wars, the cracking of the Enigma machine, hog Latin pig pen ciphers, the prison plots of Mary Queen of Scots, a code breaking reality show that I wish existed, indigenous code talking war heroes hiding messages in your skin and guts, plus one method that's a whole ball of wax you might not want to get into. Hidden Treasure, a quantum computing apocalypse and a sketchbook that has puzzled people for nearly a thousand years with mathematics enthusiast, best selling author, award winning filmmaker and secret code expert and cryptologist Simon Sing. So cryptology, we obviously we've never done this topic, that's how it works here. But I know very little about code. But you've written an entire book on it and I'm curious why cryptology? What caused you to research and go back to the history of cryptology and do as deep a dive?

[Simon Singh]

So two reasons really. I'd written a book. My first book was called Fermat's Last Theorem or Fermat's Enigma I think it was called in America and it was the story of the world's most notorious maths problem and it was a 350 year old romp through mathematics. And somewhere in there was the story of cryptography during the Second World War, particularly Alan Turing, the British mathematician who cracked the Enigma code. And his story and the story of cryptography and how it changed the course of the Second World War was something I just wanted to explore more. So what was a few paragraphs in Fermat's Enigma turned out to be a whole chapter in the code book. And also previously I'd been working on a TV show in the UK called Tomorrow's World and every week it was a magazine show. So every week we were going through lots of different science and technology stories and each week I'd come up with a story about Codes or code breaking or, you know, the Internet was kind of just beginning to take off. So these were really important and interesting stories, but they weren't very visual. So my TV editor never, never accepted my cryptography stories, but I had a whole folder full of them and I could see that cryptography was more important today than ever before. And so you have this topic with a fantastically long history and something which, you know, we live in the information age today. And the way you protect information is not really by locking up in a safe. You do it by locking it up with a code.

[Alie Ward]

Were you always a maths person?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, I was. I'm a physicist by training, but if you want to do physics, you have to be a mathematician. And as a science journalist, I was covering all sorts of different things for tomorrow's world. So I have a broad interest. And the interesting thing about cryptography is it is very mathematical, particularly today, but it's also about linguistics. It's also about all sorts of different things. So as a writer, it's lovely to have a topic which ranges so broadly. And that was one of the tricky things about writing the book, was which parts of history do you focus on? Which parts of the globe do you focus on?

[Alie Ward]

So Simon's book, the Code Book, the Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, is highly lauded and.432 pages, and yet were you absolutely heartbroken at having certain chapters or pieces that you just had to cut out or else it would be like a book of biblical proportions?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, absolutely. No, there were huge chunks that got thrown out. I was fascinated by the decryption of ancient languages, so something like hieroglyphs, you know, the decryption of hieroglyphs is an extraordinary story. And, you know, unless you can read hieroglyphs, you can't really read into the history of the Egyptians. It's a lost story unless you can read their texts.

[Alie Ward]

Just a side note, if you're into hieroglyphs, we have an Egyptology episode as well as a momiology episode about mummies with Egyptologist Dr. Kara Cooney. Oh, we also have a curiology episode about emoji and what they mean depending on who uses them and their similarities and major differences to hieroglyphs. So we'll link those in the show notes. But yeah, let's talk ancient codes and language. Are they the same? Same, Simon says.

[Simon Singh]

And I had chapters also about the Mayan codes and so on. But you know what? It's not really a code. It's not a You know, a code for me is where you deliberately obfuscate the meaning of something. So I'm sending you a secret message. I don't want anybody else in the world to read it, so I encrypt it so only you and I can read the message. Now, Egyptian hieroglyphs were not a code in that sense. They were written as a form of communication and it's just that we've forgotten how to read them. So you have to use code breaking techniques to read hieroglyphs to crack the code, but it wasn't ever meant to be a code. Same with Morse code, for example. Morse code is not a secret way of communication. It's an efficient way of communication for the telegraph. We didn't have to crack the Morse code. We knew how it all worked. But the use of the word code in most of the things I write about are things which were hidden, that the meaning has been hidden from the reader, from the reader who's not supposed to be spying.

[Alie Ward]

I was wondering, because that was my first question, what's the difference between a code and a language? Is language meant to communicate? Code is essentially meant to not communicate. Is that like a chief distinguishing difference?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, I think that that's a good way of putting it. And today encryption goes beyond just hiding the meaning of a message. So, for example, I might send you a secret message and I don't want anybody else to read it. That's a traditional form of encryption. But sometimes I want to make sure that you've read it and you can't deny that you didn't read it. So that's important as well. And sometimes I want to guarantee that I sent the message so that, you know, you can't accuse me later on of not sending you the message. And sometimes I want to make sure that not only do you get the message, but nobody changed it on the way. So if you imagine voting in an election, I want to make sure that, you know, I cast my vote. I want to make sure that you can't deny that you didn't receive the vote. I want to make sure the vote wasn't changed, and I want to make sure the vote is secret. So today we have different aspects to cryptography, all of which are important in different situations.

[Alie Ward]

I'm curious how far back you found that it goes. And is that a philosophical question? Is there anything to suggest in the development of language that at some point point it was turned into kind of a cipher or a code? I imagine so much of that has to be war related Right.

[Simon Singh]

Well, I think to start with, so few people can read that you don't really need to bother encrypting. Writing itself is almost a secret code. But once you start having military plans or. One of the first examples of encryption is a recipe for a pottery glaze in ancient Sumeria. So somebody's come up with a fantastic, you know, recipe for pottery glaze, and they don't want anybody else to steal it.

[Alie Ward]

And this was around 1500 BC it was like the Colonel Sanders original recipe of 11 herbs and spices of ceramics.

[Simon Singh]

So those are the kind of things that start emerging. As I say, hieroglyphs are just a way of writing. But sometimes people would write hieroglyphs in a very, very cryptic way on the tombs of important people. And the idea there was that as people passed the tomb, rather than just reading it and walking on, they'd have to spend time there in order to decrypt what was going on. So you kind of got extra reverence from those passers by.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah, that's so sweet and also so sad. They're like, don't go, don't go, don't go. Here's a puzzle.

[Simon Singh]

Exactly, exactly.

[Alie Ward]

Make your final resting place a mausoleum escape room.

[Simon Singh]

But then there's one other type of thing which is maybe worth talking about, which is if I encrypt a message and I send it to you and somebody intercepts, looks like gobbledygook. So they know that I'm sending you a secret message, because this just doesn't look normal. So there's another technology, maybe we can call it called steganography. And steganography doesn't just really hide the meaning of the message, it hides its very existence.

[Alie Ward]

Oh, wow.

[Simon Singh]

So here we're talking about things like invisible inks. If I send you a message on invisible ink, nobody even knows the message exists. And typically, I don't send you a blank sheet of paper. I maybe send you a normal postcard about my holiday. But in between the normal ink, I'll write an invisible ink. Wow. So it looks like a very normal postcard. And in fact, the invisible ink is what's got the real message. There was a very nice invitation to a military cryptography conference in San Antonio. This is going back maybe 40 years. And it looked like a very innocent sketch of the river. I guess it's the San Antonio river that runs through the town. I don't know my geography very well, but you're correct. The way you're supposed to read it is if you look at the blades of Grass along the side of the riverbank. No, there are long blades and short blades. And so if you turn the long blades and short blades into. Instead of long, long, long, short, short, short, you turn them into dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash. You have a Morse code message which tells you when the conference is happening, where you're supposed to go, and so on. So these are examples of steganography and my favorite example, loads of these examples. One is the message would be written on silk. You wrap the silk into a wax ball and then you swallow the ball. So again, nobody knows there's a message at all.

[Alie Ward]

So my morbid curiosity led me to a DePaul University paper titled simply steganography, which notes that, quote, there are quite a couple of sources that mention this technique that the Chinese used, but no one mentions how the ball of wax was recovered from the messenger. It continues, One is only left to imagine the possible and probably painful ways the ball could have come out okay.

[Simon Singh]

Or even crazier, I think. Herodotus, the Greek historian, writes about a messenger who had his head shaved. They tattooed the message on his scalp, waited for the hair to regrow, and then sent him on his way. And then at the other end, you shave the head and recover the message. And I remember talking about this once and somebody said, it's a great code, but it's very low bandwidth. You know, it's not going to be a great way to transfer much information very quickly, but effective.

[Alie Ward]

Also, it's a long game. You're in it for a while.

[Simon Singh]

Yes, yes, I suppose that message has got One messenger has one message and one message only to carry.

[Alie Ward]

Do you remember what that message was? Or did they do a lot of communicating through tattooed heads?

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

So, yes, one low commitment method of steganography might be using a wax writing tablet back then, but writing a message on the wood underneath the wax, which is very sneaky. Or, yeah, embedding a note via ink into the flesh of a trusted servant. And because I'm nosy, I wanted to find out what that secret tattoo message was. And According to the 1999 historical paper information Hiding A Survey, there was a passage that said the purpose was to instigate a revolt against the Persians. And just like people love doing fighting and it's never a bad year to get inked. This practice continued with German cryptography, According to the 1940 text Secrets of German Espionage. But how do you make sure that no one else sees the tattoo head message. If you don't have time for your hairstyles, like awkwardly grow back, well, you could do a cover up or a revision tattoo. Kind of like turning a blurry college era astrological sign into a hummingbird, or covering up your ex wife's name with a dragon. Or you could just kill the servant or the soldier whose head you used as a notepad. Can you imagine if it was just a pottery glaze recipe? You'd be like, all that for life. Well, okay, basic question. Is pig Latin a code? Does that count as code or language?

[Simon Singh]

Now I have, what is pig Latin?

[Alie Ward]

It's when you put the last syllable, it's like ittygay, bittigay. You know what I mean, right? What are you studying at college?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, I mean, that's another nice thing about codes, you know, they're childish in many ways. And, you know, we all wrote secret codes when we were a kid and I've got a couple of kids and you know, they certainly had their invisible inks and other secret messages that we used to write. And so, yeah, it's a playful code. Absolutely.

[Alie Ward]

And this kind of code is also sometimes called an argo or a can't. And in the case of pig Latin, you pretty much take the first letter and you move it to the back of the word and add an A. So cat becomes at, K, bulb becomes albe, yarn becomes arnier, acfe becomes something you could say about grandma. And pig Latin is also called hog Latin, but it is not the same as the written system of pig pen.

[Simon Singh]

There's a very nice code called pig pen which you just reminded me of, which is you draw two tic tac toe grids. Yeah, it's kind of tic tac toe grids. And then you put the letters in. Instead of X and Y, put A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And if you imagine A is in the top left hand corner of a tic tac toe grid, instead of writing the letter A, you would write kind of backwards L because the A is inside a kind of backwards L. E is in the middle of the tic tac toe grid. So E is represented by a square because the E is wrapped around by a square.

[Alie Ward]

Oh, okay, Picture two tic tac toe grids and then two big X's. So in tic tac toe grid number one are the letters A through I. In grid number two are the letters J through R with some extra dots thrown in. Now in the first X, you Have S, T, U, V, like north, east, southwest. And the second X has W, X, Y, Z with some extra dots. So whatever the shape around the letter with dots, if need be, becomes a cipher. And you can make secret words just using those shapes. It's easily crackable if you know this pig pen cipher and absolutely useless garbage shapes if you don't. I'm a big fan. Pretty cool.

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

You know, I was surprised. One thing I love about the way your book is structured is how much history it goes through. So there's so much narrative and stories. Mary, Queen of Scots, I didn't know this about her code. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and why that was such an interesting thing that you wanted to include?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So the most famous type of code that we probably used as kids is you substitute one letter for a different letter. And in fact, Julius Caesar, I think Julius Caesar wrote about codes quite extensively when he was a general of Gaul in France. And he explained that, you know, instead of writing A, I'm going to write B, instead of writing B, I'm going to write C. Or I could shift it even more. I could shift the Alphabet 5 places or 10 places, but essentially he was swapping one letter for a different letter. Now, you can change that substitution cipher. You can make it better. Instead of just shifting every letter, you can just randomly swap the letters around. So A is E, B is Z, C is Y and so on. You mix up all the letters, essentially, and that's really quite a strong code in some ways. There are so many ways of rearranging the Alphabet. There are so many ways of randomly swapping letters around. I think it's something like 400 million billion billion. It's extraordinary. So on the face of it, it looks like an unbreakable code. And this is the kind of code that Mary Queen of Scots used. Now, why was she using codes? Well, she was Mary Queen of Scots. She fell out with her rivals, she was driven out of Scotland. She fled to England and sought safety and sanctuary from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. I love my family. Now, Queen Elizabeth I wasn't particularly keen on Mary because Mary was a Catholic and Elizabeth was a Protestant. And Elizabeth feared that Mary might try and trigger a Catholic rebellion, possibly invite foreign invaders from France and Spain and usurp her throne. So for safety, Elizabeth put Mary in prison and she locked her up. And that was it. Now, while she was locked away in prison. She had a secretary and she had a few people around her. While she was in prison, she started writing treacherous letters. She did start writing to these foreign powers, particularly Spain. And she was saying, look, let's coordinate some kind of rebellion, invade Britain, invade England, and let's turn England Catholic again, put me on the throne and get rid of Elizabeth. Now, she wrote these letters using this kind of code where you substitute each letter for a different letter or a different symbol perhaps. And she smuggled the letters out via beer barrels. Water was so contaminated at that time that it was much safer to drink a very diluted form of beer. That was kind of just the general thing you would drink day in, day out. And so these beer barrels were coming in and out of the prison. These notes were smuggled out in these beer barrels. Now, Elizabeth had spy masters who knew exactly what Mary might be up to. So they would intercept these beer barrels, they would intercept the messages, and they could decode the messages. They knew how to crack this simple substitution cycle. And that shouldn't have been a surprise to Mary because this code had been cracked about a thousand years ago. Now we're Talking about the 16th century for Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth. But it had been cracked in the 11th and 10th and 11th century in Baghdad. There was a guy called Al Kindi, an Arabic philosopher, mathematician, and he realized that every letter's got a personality. How so? So E, for example, is very common. It's the most common letter in English. 13 of all letters are E. Oh, wow. And if you disguise E by drawing it as a diamond, well, then the diamonds are going to be really popular and common. And you therefore, you know the diamond really is an E. If you have two symbols that only ever follow each other. So you know a square that only ever follows a circle, well, that could be Q and U, because, you know, Q is always followed by a U. Also, words have personalities, so the is the most common three letter word. So if you apply this kind of personality analysis to the letters or symbols in front of you, you can very rapidly decipher a message.

[Alie Ward]

But According to the 2022 paper, Al Kindi, the father of crypto analysis, if the letter of the encrypted message K has a frequency in the encryption equal to about 10%, probably the K of the encrypted message corresponds to an E in the decoded mess. And thus it says, within a few attempts, the encrypted message can be resolved. So that rate at which a letter appears in regular language is the personality of the letter, and it can be applied to the encrypted message to find that connection. And based on those and spelling patterns, the spies could be onto you. Also, apparently, your choices were to die of thirst or have dysentery or just be drunk all the time. So, like, maybe this wasn't Mary's best work.

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

No.

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

Oh, so busted.

[Simon Singh]

Which kind of put an end to any hopes of a Catholic revival in England. And so it's an example of a match of life and death changing the course of history, all because a code was broken.

[Alie Ward]

Does that make switching letters of the Alphabet, like you can do it mathematically a lot of ways, but that's easy to break.

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's one of those things. If you checked every permutation, if you checked every one of the 400 million billion billion permutations, you'd spend the age of the universe, you know, trying to crack a code. But there's a shortcut. You just look at the message and you say, well, there are all these diamonds. They've got to be E's second most common symbol. That's probably going to be a T. Third most common symbol is going to be an A. And once you've got a handful of symbols, you can begin to decipher the whole message. The whole thing just falls into your hands very easily after that. But I think that one of the analogies I use in the book is to describe cryptography as a bit like the battle between bacteria and antibiotics. You know, we have these antibiotics and they're great for killing off a certain bug. But then the bugs evolve to become stronger and no longer killed by the antibiotics. So scientists have to go away and make clever antibiotics until the bacteria become immune again. So this constant evolutionary battle between bacteria and antibiotics, and it's the same in codes and code breaking. You know, I make a code, somebody else breaks it, I have to make a better code, somebody breaks, I have to come up with an even cleverer code. So what happened here? As you said, the simple substitution cipher can easily be cracked once you figure out this personality analysis, this frequency analysis. So one simple step forward is if e accounts for 13% of all letters. If I use a diamond for E, then diamonds appear 13% of the time. And I know that a diamond is really E, but If I use 13 symbols to represent E, oh, then each of those symbols only appears 1% of the time. And let's say. I don't know, let's say B appears 3% of the time. Well, if I use three symbols to represent B, then again, each symbol appears 1% of the time. So you flatten out all the frequencies, and that becomes a much, much tougher code to break.

[Alie Ward]

Hence, Al Kindi was also known as the pioneer of statistics. And this was back in the year 800, so 1200 years ago. Some days I can't remember my bank pin, and I was the one who said it, it's between me and me, and I still can't crack it. And I'm assuming that the person on the other side, the receiving side, they've got this on lock. They know exactly that there's 13 different E's. They're not left having to bust it either. Right? You agree on it ahead of time.

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, and that's a really important point. There's something called the key. The key is the recipe for encryption, and it's the recipe for decryption. So if I'm sending you a message, I need to have a key which I share with you and which I don't want anybody else to steal. So we could jump ahead, because I think the most extraordinary thing about cryptography is it seems impossible. It seems if you're going to decrypt a message from me, you have to have my key. Okay? And you're on the other side of the ocean, so how on earth can I get this key to you? And particularly today, you know, when we're encrypting our credit card details, data's flying all over the globe. You don't see people running around distributing keys everywhere. This is something people had to do for hundreds of years.

[Alie Ward]

Keys in this sense, meaning the secret instruction manual to the code. Like a legend of a map. But for the sake of explanation, keys are a great analogy.

[Simon Singh]

So the British government would have to send keys to its diplomats all over the world in suitcases, literally having to physically transfer them around the world. Navy ships would have to come back to port to pick up the keys so that they could communicate with their port. So for hundreds of years, key distribution was a real pain. It's expensive and risky. If somebody hijacks the guy who's distributing the keys, then they can read all your secret messages. Key distribution is expensive, it's slow, it's risky. But it seems unavoidable. It seems as though you and I cannot communicate secretly unless I give you the key in advance. And that's slow, risky, and expensive. And yet today, somehow, we managed to do it. Today, we found a way around it, and this is an incredible breakthrough.

[Alie Ward]

How does that work?

[Simon Singh]

Let me try and explain to you how that works. Let's imagine I want to send you a message, and I'm going to put the message in a box, and I put a padlock on the box, and I lock it with a key and I send it to you.

[Alie Ward]

Okay?

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

Yeah, that sucks.

[Simon Singh]

I don't want to send the key to you because that's slow, expensive and risky. So how can we avoid it? Well, this is what we can do. You, your end, you've got this box that's locked. You can add a second padlock to the box, your padlock, with your key, and you send it back to me. Now, I've got a box with two padlocks.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah. How does that help?

[Simon Singh]

But I can. Well, I can take my padlock off because I've got my key. I can send the box back to you. It's still secure. It's still padlocked. And it's padlocked with your padlock.

[Alie Ward]

Ah, nice.

[Simon Singh]

And you can then unlock it, open the box and read the message.

[Alie Ward]

Nice.

[Simon Singh]

Okay.

[Alie Ward]

Daisy chain.

[Simon Singh]

Yeah. So suddenly, something that was impossible becomes actually, it's not so difficult after all. But there's even a clever way of doing it, which is I have a padlock and a key, and I make a million copies of my padlock, and I distribute it all over the world. Let's imagine you're trying to send me something. Now, you go to your local post office, you say, can I have Simon Singh's padlock? You snap the padlock shut on the box, because you don't need a key to shut a padlock. It just snaps shut. You send it to me, and I've got the key already to open it. So we're not distributing the keys, we're just distributing the padlocks.

[Alie Ward]

Got it.

[Simon Singh]

And again, I think it was in the 1970s, this technology was invented. It's a mathematical padlock that we'd be talking about that was invented by three guys at what we call gchq. You've got the nsa. Don't you have the National Security Agency? We have the government communications headquarters. And three people there invented this mathematical padlock. One of them was a chap called Clifford Cox, who I actually got to meet. And he was working at GCHQ. He'd only just started there. He was in his 20s. He was a young Cambridge maths graduate. And he went home one evening and he started thinking about, how would you invent a mathematical padlock? And he came up with the idea. He came up the whole mathematics, and he came up with it entirely in his head. He couldn't write down anything because when you work for gchq, you're forbidden from writing down anything at home that relates to your work.

[Alie Ward]

Oh, my God.

[Simon Singh]

So he had to go to bed that night. He wouldn't forget the mathematical idea, and then rushed into work early the next day and wrote it all down. It's literally the greatest cryptographic breakthrough in a thousand years. And then, having explained it to his colleagues, he couldn't tell the rest of the world because the British government made it confidential. They felt this was just too big a breakthrough to share with the rest of the world. But it was then rediscovered a decade later in California by Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman. And they are the people who then shared that technology with the rest of the world.

[Alie Ward]

Okay, who cares? What does this mean for you?

[Simon Singh]

And it's what's really enabled the Internet to take off in terms of financial transactions. Secure databases, sharing information securely. We can do that today because we don't need to run around sharing keys. Instead, we can run around sharing these. Well, we don't need to run around. We can just share our mathematical padlocks.

[Alie Ward]

And if you were dying to know what system Clifford Cox came up with, just off the dome, it was prime factorization, which led to a public key cryptosystem. And because Wikipedia is not written in any kind of secret code, I'm going to read you what it told me about this to make this brief. Which is in a public key cryptosystem, the encryption key is public and distinct from the decryption key, which is kept secret or private. Okay, so the public key is based on these two large prime numbers. Anyone can use the public key, but it can only be decrypted by someone who knows the private key. And you know what mathematical genius and cryptologic comprehension can get you? Well, sometimes nothing, sometimes worse than nothing. And we're going to hear about that later. But in the case of Clifford Cox, it got him the title of Companion of the Order of the Bath and then Fellow of the Royal Society. Simon himself is now in the most excellent Order of the British Empire. But yeah, Clifford Cox was struck by this inspiration in 1973. And it wasn't until the method was declassified from its top secret status in like 1999 that he was recognized for it. I wonder what he was doing when he came up with that. Was that like a shower thought or, you know, you're washing dishes and you have a great idea?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah. You know, a lot of mathematicians talk about the idea of really thinking hard for a problem, thinking about a problem really deeply for hours and hours, and then suddenly when they relax and suddenly maybe the brain goes into a kind of instinctive mode, you know, suddenly clarity emerges. And yeah, it was. It seems to be in one of those moments that the mathematical padlock was invented.

[Alie Ward]

So as we learned from the oneirology episodes on dreams, this is when the brain shifts to the default network. And we also did a two part saludology episode on hobbies and why leisure activities are vital if we don't want to lose our marbles. But going back a few decades, what about mechanics? Like, when did things become mechanical? When did a code breaking machine sort of emerge? And how did Turing do what he did without the computer power that we have now?

[Simon Singh]

So I think cryptography develops because I break your code and I need a better code. Cryptography also develops as a result of communications technology advances. So when the telegraph was invented, we needed more secure forms of encryption. You know, the British Empire was being run by people in London sending messages over telegraph lines across the world. And then when the radio was invented again, we needed even better forms of communication because somebody on a battlefield could send a radio message over hundreds of miles and send lots of information just a few seconds. So we needed even more effective encryption that was rapid and secure. And so what you have in between the first and the Second World War is the idea of the encryption machine. A mechanical machine and something looks a bit like a typewriter where you type in a message and it gets encrypted automatically by the cogs and wheels inside the machine. And the Americans worked on one, the Dutch worked on one, the Swedes had an encryption device and the Germans had one as well. But all of these companies really struggled because there wasn't a huge need for secret communication. And so all of these companies were gradually going bankrupt. Apart from the German one. The Enigma was designed by a guy called Arthur Scherbius, because just as his company was struggling, Germany started gearing up for what would be the Second World War.

[Alie Ward]

War, it's great for business.

[Simon Singh]

And Germany began to buy these Enigma Machines not just for every army unit, but for every naval ship, for every air base, for every train station and so on. And so hundreds and thousands of these Enigma machines were made and distributed. And they were essential for the, you know, say the, you know, the German concept of blitzkrieg. We have coordinated attack. You have bombardment from land, you have attack from the air, and then ships off the coast also bombarding. So this coordinated kind of attack is only possible if you've got secure, effective, rapid communication. So again, you have a key. And that means that, you know, because we're going back to the era where people had keys, you know, how do you set up your Enigma machine? And again, if I'm sending you a message on an Enigma machine, you have an Enigma machine.

[Alie Ward]

I didn't know what an Enigma machine looked like before this. And honestly, it's hard to picture something whose name means mystery or riddle. But, yeah, these 1940s secret message machines, they look like a regular QWERTY vintage typewriter with keys. But where the paper would be scrolling up, there are a few more rows of buttons with the Alphabet on each button and each button can light up. Now, above those two rows of buttons are a few turning sawtooth cogwheels that have numbers 1 through 26 on them. Now, you don't need to know all the electrical engineering, trust me. It's complex, but essentially, when a key is pressed at the bottom, electrical signals travel through a mess of kind of tangly wires inside each of those wheels, which can turn the next wheel's mess of wires. And if you press like, let's say, the letter K, that letter K will be changed via the wires and via the turning cogs seven times before spitting out a new letter which illuminates on that row of buttons. And it all depends on the settings on the machine. So one person usually would be pushing the keys to spell something out and the other is writing down which button lights up. Then they send that series of lighted buttons as text over Morse code to the receiver. So it turns a series of letters or words into absolute jibber jabber. Unless you knew exactly how the rotors were dialed and what was plugged in where, when that message was typed and the configuration of the machine was changed daily according to this printed log that was kept in a safe. And then each day they would burn that day's instructions. Oh, and there was another three letter code to encrypt each individual message. So overall, these wheels and plugs can be arranged in some calculate, I think, 151 trillion ways and they change daily. So it is a horrifyingly complicated and swiftly moving target that's relaying information that is life and death to people. Breaking the Enigma is like if Satan wrote Sudoku puzzles and then if you didn't get it, he swallowed your children.

[Simon Singh]

And there are rotors that you need to put into place. You need to select the right rotors, you need to orientate them in the right way. It's got a plug board, a bit like an old fashioned telephone, plug board, switchboard. To plug those cables incorrectly, you have to plug those in in the correct way. And if you and I have the same setup and obviously we agree the key in advance, then we can communicate with each other. But for everybody else, it's impossible to guess our key. The number of combinations is just too vast and things like frequency analysis and the personality of letters is just useless. This code was so utterly strong, everybody gave up hope of ever trying to crack it. Actually, the only people, the only country that had the audacity to try and crack the Enigma was the Poles. Poland was in this desperate situation of being trapped between Germany on one side and Russia on the other.

[Alie Ward]

We understand.

[Simon Singh]

And the Poles knew that they were going to get invaded sooner or later. And so they set their best mathematicians at the task of trying to crack the Enigma. And this was before the war even started. They were working on this and they made some progress, they made some crucial progress. And those breakthroughs were smuggled out of Poland to Paris and from Paris to London. And it gave the British code breakers a real head start in trying to break the Enigma. The British set up a code breaking centre outside of London called Bletchley park, where they hired a whole weird bunch of people, from crossword addicts to mathematicians to engineers to classic scholars, and they all worked at Bletchley trying to break the Enigma, but also lots of other codes from Japan and Italy and also Germany.

[Alie Ward]

Imagine if a reality show cast a bunch of the best nerds and made them live in an English countryside mansion trying to defeat the Nazis. I would watch that in a heartbeat. Also, around 75% of the people working at Bletchley park were women, employed as translators, cryptographic operators. They constructed and operated some of the world's first programmable electric computers. And one of these Bletchley park nerds was named Valerie. And she had a granddaughter who you are not supposed to call Kate Middleton, because according to the Internet, her granddaughter's name is Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales. But yeah, tons of folks, including Valerie worked at this 9,000 square foot manor on 58 acres, like a wartime period piece set in a hazy, cigarette smoky vintage computer lab.

[Simon Singh]

And Alan Turing was one of those mathematicians, he was one of the mathematicians who worked on the Enigma and he and many others came up with a whole series of ways of trying to crack the Enigma. One of the weird things, one of the ways that the Enigma was broken was that when you type the letter A into an Enigma machine, it can be encrypted as any other letter except the letter A. Okay. Which doesn't seem like a big problem because A can be encrypted into 25 other letters. B, similarly cannot be encrypted into a B, but it can be encrypted into any of the other 25 letters. So that's fine, except there was a letter that was once a message that was once intercepted. And the code breakers at Bletchley park looked at this message and it was a mess of different letters, all different letters. It looked like complete gobbledygook, except there wasn't a single W in the encrypted usage. So you've got 300 characters but not a single W. And the code breakers looked at that and they thought about it for a while and then they realize the only way you can get a message, an output message with no W's, is if the input message is just W300 times. Oh wow, if I type in W300 times, I'm going to get everything except W300 times. And so they'd crack the code. That's not the most interesting message in the world, it's just W300 times. But what that gives you, once you know the output of the message, what you have in your hand, and once you have the input, which is W300 times, you can then work out the settings of the machine for that day. The same machine settings were effectively used for the whole day. So now you can decipher all sorts of other messages sent that day which are more interesting. For example, one of the messages that was sent that day that was intercepted and deciphered was about an attack on the British fleet. And Alexandria and the British fleet were warned and the result was the first Allied victory in the Mediterranean. Because the Enigma had been broken and because the Navy, the British Navy now had advanced notice of this attack on Alexandria.

[Alie Ward]

So some Nazi up bad. Thankfully.

[Simon Singh]

Now that kind of maybe raises the question of why would somebody send the message W 300 times? Yes, it seems like a pointless message. The reason somebody sent W300 times is if you've got an unbreakable code, I can't read your messages, but what I can do is count how many messages you send. And if you send one on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, 20 on Thursday, I know something big is going to happen on Friday.

[Alie Ward]

So this would be a real tell to have a sudden flurry. Like, imagine if you texted someone once a day, but then suddenly you got 45 messages from them in an hour. He'd be like, story time. What's happening?

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

Oh, God.

[Simon Singh]

And then what we call the traffic is then flat. So when that person sent W300 times, they were just sending their quota of messages for the day. They were just trying to build up their quota. Had they sent a random message, if they just randomly typed with two fingers, it would have been fine. But that W300 times compromised the security of the Enigma. And what Turing did that built on this was he said, you know, maybe we won't be lucky enough to have W300 times again. We can't rely on that. But we can rely on the fact that maybe we can guess the beginning of a message. You know, if the message is going to Berlin, maybe the message reads, heil Hitler.

[Alie Ward]

Like, fuck that guy.

[Simon Singh]

If the message comes from a weather station at the Atlantic, maybe it starts off with pressure readings or wind directions. We can always guess a little bit of the message. And if we can guess a little bit of the original message, we can compare it with what came out the other end and begin to narrow down what the keys might be. And Turing designed a machine called a bomb that could effectively use a little bit of the input, a little bit of the guest message, what's called a crib, against what was intercepted to try and identify what the key actually is. And the bombs were very effective. The bombs managed to work out the key on most days pretty rapidly.

[Alie Ward]

And I know we're talking about the theater of war in the 1940s, so the word bomb, it's a little distracting. But a bomb with an E at the end was a machine used to try to break the Enigma's code. And a BO got its name. Well, this is also a source of battle, the etymology of it. But some legends say that the mechanized rotors made a ticking sound like a bomb. Others said parts would sometimes fall off and make a very startling crashing noise on the floor. There's this other legend that tells the tale of a cryptologist eating this round shaped ice cream dessert and getting inspiration from that. But it doesn't matter as much as the messages deciphered through it.

[Simon Singh]

So the Allies then just kind of knew where the ships were in the Atlantic, where air raids were going to happen at night, where armies were going to be moved to. You know, it gave the Allies a huge advantage in trying to win the war.

[Alie Ward]

I have some questions from listeners. Can I lightning round you with some of them?

[Simon Singh]

Yes, sure.

[Alie Ward]

They're great questions and we will hear from them in a moment. But first let's give away some money per Simon and this week he chose givewell.org, which vets and researches the most impactful charities and then grants accordingly. And donations go to the most reliably high impact and cost effective charities that they've identified, such as malaria prevention, childhood vaccination incentives, and vitamin A supplementation. You can learn [e-mail] so thank you Simon and sponsors of the show for making that possible. Okay friends, I know you love trivia and I love it too. Do you know which best selling summer water toy was invented in a NASA engineer's bathroom? Or which Taco Bell innovation involved an actual paint sprayer to coat taco shells in Dorito dust? It's bonkers. These are just a few of the delightfully weird and wildly true stories featured on the Best Idea Yet. This is a podcast all about the surprising origin stories behind the products that you are most obsessed with. This covers the Happy Meal to good old Costco's Kirkland brand and each episode unpacks how these icons went viral thanks to a whole lot of trial and error. I love these tales. I love blunders. I love a backstory. I love context. So if you're in interested into that kind of thing, you may really want to get into the Best Idea yet. Which is a great idea. If you love hearing how stuff works or who made it, why on earth it caught on. Follow the Best Idea Yet Wherever you get your podcasts, maybe you'll invent something weird. I hope so. You know me, you know I love Squarespace. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies launched. Here's the deal. I needed a website. I put it off for three years. I heard an ad about Squarespace. I on another podcast in one night. I put up my own website and then I was able to launch Ologies with it. You need a website. You need Squarespace straight up. They have amazing cutting edge design tools. 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Many of you had pop cultural cryptological questions such as Cooper, Michael Mouse, Paxton, Addy Cappello, Matt Zicato, first time question asker Chris F. And Bri asked, in the movies you often hear or see of people cracking these secret co so quickly or without much research. How often does that happen in real life? How often do you come across some sort of secret code where it's that easy to just decipher versus how like long does it take to actually decipher? Does that ever piss you off about movies when someone cracks a code like instantly?

[Simon Singh]

Well, the codes we have today are effectively unbreakable. You know, we live in a golden age of encryption and you know it. You can't break any of these codes. There is a fear that we have new computing technology, quantum computing might break some of today's codes and that would be disastrous because you know, our economic systems would begin to collapse. You know, giant corporations like Amazon would no longer have a business model if you can't send secure online payments. But encryption today, it's unbreakable. It's absolutely unbreakable. You know, you and I can buy free software and send each other secret messages that nobody in the world could ever decrypt. But there is more information being sent around the world than ever before and inevitably some of it is going to be badly encrypted. Maybe people will make silly mistakes. And so I think the code breakers are really looking for those slip ups and those mistakes because if the code is implemented properly it's almost an impossible task.

[Alie Ward]

So no, it is not as easy as you see in the movies for now. But more than one person had singularity and superposition questions such as first time question asker Paul Sr. Chrisholm computer scientist and security engineer Steven Moxley, John Buckner, Mark Rubin Emro Maximilian Galindo, Jan Bundesmann Post qubit concern Joshua Yyz, Adam Foote Pavka 34 Rya the Tiger Katze and Adam Silk said how worried should people be about quantum cryptography and quantum computers breaking encryption?

[Simon Singh]

It's a very, it's a very important question. But like we were saying a while ago, you know, throughout history if somebody breaks a code, they don't necessarily tell the world about it. So when the British cracked the Enigma, they didn't tell the Germans that they wanted the Germans to keep sending information via Enigma so they could keep intercepting it and exploiting it. And it's a little bit the same with quantum computing today. We don't really know how advanced the technology is getting, particularly say in China. So I think people are right to be worried as to where, what the future of secure communication might be. There are some other options. There's something called quantum cryptography which would combat quantum computing, but it's much harder to implement. And so it's not quite clear that quantum cryptography would provide us all with the same level of secure communication that cryptography today does.

[Alie Ward]

Are you looking for up to date info on this? How about an article published last week via New Scientists with the headline breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 20 times easier. But it does concede in the first paragraph that these machines don't exist yet. But when they do, it is gonna be way easier for them than we thought. And by we, I mean the people who make quantum computers. And then yesterday the conversation posted an article titled is a Quantum Cryptography Apocalypse Imminent? That's casual. In it, Information Security Group professor Keith Martin explains that the most common ways of encrypting information that we use will be impacted than that public key encryption that we talked about earlier, the one that Clifford Cox worked on, that's used in messaging and shopping transactions. And public key cryptography is also at the heart of cryptocurrency, which. Cryptocurrency, it's a form of money that's decentralized from different nations currencies. And the public key for that is like your wallet, and the private key can open your wallet. And I know that we need a whole episode on cryptocurrency because I'm not going to make it make sense in an aside, and that's okay. But the point of this is to say that Keith Martin, writing about the imminent crypto apocalypse, answers his own headline question by writing that those in the know fight about it all the time. They fight about if and when quantum computing is going to be up and running. And right now, the most advanced quantum computing is able to handle tiny amounts of info and it's prone to screwing up a lot. But. But Keith says that most experts believe it's a future possibility, but the prognoses range from between 10 to 20 years to well beyond that. And he also writes, my core message is don't panic. Okay, Keith. But also, no one expected AI to go from like putting cat ears on an Instagram filter to effortlessly generating a video of your dead aunt twerking. But here we are. Life comes at you fast. Now let's look back to the past instead. All right. Oh, look, another war. But an interesting story. So, Jordan Crosby, first time question asker, wants to know what's been the lasting impact of the Navajo code talkers. How did they choose Navajo over other languages? And this was also voiced by their patrons, Katy Biardi, John Worcester, Emma Oe, Nikki G. Dawn Smallchek, Dave Brewer H. And Kathy Berrigal. They all asked about ciphers and codes developed from and relying on indigenous languages and going backwards in time a little bit. Jordan Crosby, first time question asker, wanted to know about the lasting impact of Navajo code talkers and how they chose Navajo over other languages. Was that a pretty isolated instance of using language to crack codes in English, or any thoughts on that?

[Simon Singh]

So the first example, I think, was in the First World War, where I think some of the Canadian troops used Choctaw, which was a language which nobody else could understand.

[Alie Ward]

Well, people of the Choctaw Nation could understand it, at least those who were not forced away from their families and cultures in the indigenous genocide upon which our country is built. Also side note, the people of the Navajo Nation didn't call themselves Navajo. That was a name used by the Spanish to describe them. So you may hear the more accurate term dine used by that nation. And we've had some great indigenous ologists who touch on this, and we'll link their episodes in the show notes. But yes, code breaking.

[Simon Singh]

When the Americans thought about using Navajo as a secret language for some of the forces in the Pacific, first they thought, well, what would be the right language to use, what right group to work with? And they needed a tribe that was big enough to supply the men that would be needed. They needed a tribe that had a high level of literacy as well. And they needed a tribe that hadn't been studied by German anthropologists because that would have, again, compromised the code. So that's why the Navajo were chosen. And so you had these Navajo soldiers who would travel with every radio unit, and all the messages would be given in Navajo, spoken to another Navajo speaker at the other end who would then translate them back into English. And of course, nobody in the Pacific arena could understand Navajo. So it was a truly unbreakable code, and it was highly effective. And, yeah, it's one of the great stories of the Second World War.

[Alie Ward]

And yes, they used their languages just spoken, but also as a base for ciphers, substituting words in their native language for letters in the English Alphabet to spell out messages. And North America being home to this broad range of native langu, it was difficult for enemies to learn or guess which ones were being used. But many nations were tapped to lend their heritage and language and skill in Code talking. And were they given parades after World War II? No, of course not. All of this remained classified into the late 1960s. And in the decades that followed, some of the surviving code talkers were awarded Medals of Honor for their services. And for more on this history, we're gonna link the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indians documentary, the Power of Native Languages as Weapons of War. That one focuses on the Hopi nations role. And there's also PBS's 2019 documentary, Secrets of the Code the Warrior Tradition, which also explores how indigenous nations helped win the war by scrambling up sentences. Speaking of words. I don't know. Let's talk Voynich. This is the name of a manuscript written on calfskin. Sometime in the 1400s, it was discovered by a Polish book collector. His name was Wilfred Voynich. Voynich. Voynich. Either way, it was on the minds of patrons. John Buckner, Kurt Swanson, Eric K. Yngwie, Jennifer Grogan, Baz Pugmire, Felipe Jimenez. And how about. Aaron White wants to know if you've heard of the Voynich manuscript. Secret code language horseshit. Any thoughts?

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, there are lots of these very peculiar codes. One off codes. This is an ancient manuscript. Not so ancient. A few centuries old. We don't know why it was written and we have no idea really what it talks about.

[Alie Ward]

So, yes, this priceless and legendarily mysterious text now lives in New Haven, Connecticut. It's at Yale's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. And it was inherited by Voynich's widow friend in the late 1960s. No one was interested in buying it. She was like, I inherited this from my friend's husband. And they were like, annie, nobody wants it, so she donated it to Yale. But now you have to know someone who knows someone important to glimpse it in person. Although Yale was kind enough to digitize the 213 page butte in 2020. No one knows what the writing means or what it says, but there are drawings of flowers and titties in it. And we're gonna link that in the show notes in case you are the code cracking genius that's been waiting 800 years for. Or if you just like drawings of everything from plants to bloodletting. Now, if you love that kind of stuff. Also, we have a recent episode on illuminated manuscripts called Medieval codicology. We also have a mammology episode, but yeah, it's anyone's guess. Yes, some people think it was a hoax or just a really creative or unmedicated person.

[Simon Singh]

And so the Voynich manuscript is One that often gets discussed. There's the Beale cipher, which is about a couple of cowboys in America who discovered gold out west and brought it back. And there are secret messages that say where the gold is buried. But nobody's ever been able to crack the messages or find the gold.

[Alie Ward]

So just a quick note on this. A guy named Thomas Beale supposedly left a lockbox with an innkeeper in 1820. And in it were three coded text describing the location in Virginia of a treasure worth now from what I gather around $100 million. No one has been able to crack the texts one or three. But text two was based on the first paragraphs of the U.S. constitution. And it was a heads up about how much gold and jewels and silver were buried somewhere six feet deep in Bedford County. So how did people even find out about this? Well, years after Beale left the lockbox at the inn and never showed up again, the innkeeper was finally like, enough of this this crap. And opened it up and it contained these three coded texts. And then eventually a friend of the innkeeper was like, let's publish and sell a pamphlet describing that it's the key to treasure. And people who buy this pamphlet can try to decode it. But here's the thing, even the most modern and sophisticated code breakers and programs have not been able to crack texts one and three. And some people think it was all a hoax with text 2 and the inventory of all the treasure easily crackable, but the location text being absolute random numbers and just a good story to sell these pamphlets, essentially. Some people think it's an old timey clickbait prank, but time will tell, who knows.

[Simon Singh]

There's an ancient metal disc called the Phaistos disc, which again, nobody's been able to read. And then there are some ancient languages which still remain unbroken, which we still can't read. One of them is called Linear A. Nobody can make head nor tail of what linear A means or knows can understand what the Alphabet is or even the language.

[Alie Ward]

I looked up this ancient 4000 year old script from the extinct language of ancient Crete, and honestly, it looks like the alien squid language from the movie Arrival, or like abstract brushstroke art in a hotel lobby, like, what the heck is this shit?

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

Several people all head down on this.

[Simon Singh]

Linear B and John Chadwick. I interviewed him shortly before he died and I said, John, you had. How did you know? You're a classic scholar at Cambridge. How did you get into deciphering ancient languages? Why was that the thing that obsessed you? And he told me that he'd worked at Bletchley park with the code breakers in the Second World War alongside Alan Turing.

[Alie Ward]

Oh, wow.

[Simon Singh]

And he never told anybody that he'd been a Bletchley park code breaker because all of those people were sworn to secrecy. Again, everybody keeps their secrets.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah.

[Simon Singh]

But that work in the Second World War led directly to inspiring Chadwick to crack linear B.

[Alie Ward]

What a flex that he kept hidden. You know what I mean? Some people be bragging up and down in the pubs about that.

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, no, it's an incredible thing, the story of Bletchley Park. You know, when the war ended, everybody went back to their lives and got on with their day to day work. Alan Sherman, for example, went to work on computing. You know, as well as being an incredible code breaker, he's the father of computer technology, computer theory, computer science. And the thing was that later on he was a homosexual and the government was aware of that. And so he wasn't given the clearance required to work on certain projects. He was sidelined. He went to Manchester and did some incredible work in Manchester and then he was arrested because he was fine with a man and I guess found guilt of indecent behavior or some such accusation. He was found guilty. He was given hormone treatment and chemically castrated and eventually just took his own life. And when he died, virtually nobody was aware, not even his family were aware of the incredible work he'd done in terms of changing the course of the Second World War. And now he's celebrated and recognized and people are aware of the crime that was committed against him. And in fact, I was very proud to be part of a panel. The Governor of the bank of England, Mark Carney, who I think now is hoping to be Prime Minister of Canada.

[Alie Ward]

Mission accomplished.

[Simon Singh]

He was Governor of Bank of England. He wanted to have a scientist or a mathematician on the new 50 pound banknote, possibly one of our last ever banknotes, depending how money goes. We were on a panel and our proposal to him was that Alan Turing beyond the new 50 pound note. So it's great that if you're lucky enough to have a 50 pound note in Britain, Alan Turing is the person on it, because, you know, not only did he change the course of the Second World War, not only was he a mathematician of epic, you know, epic achievements in mathematics, not only did he, you know, was he the father of computer science, but he also pioneered, you know, a lot of the concepts within artificial intelligence. So, you know, it's great that he's now on our 50 pound note, but.

[Alie Ward]

The fact that he did so much for the world and suffered so greatly is something that no one should forget. Especially as we see LGBTQ people under baffling and increasing hostility from political regimes. And the future can only get better if people learn from the past. Speaking of darkness and the future, you know, on the topic of artificial intelligence, two more listener questions, if you don't mind. You know, we talked a little bit about quantum computing, but several people wanted to know what role AI might have in modern cryptology. On the real life squishy brains of Dave Philip Meter, Cass the Dog nerd, Megan Walker, Stephanie Coombs, Kate E. Quinn West Corey and Sarah Rosera, who asked, can AI solve secret codes? If so, so should we unplug it now? And are we getting much closer to that?

[Simon Singh]

I think the modern codes are so utterly unbreakable that artificial intelligence won't make any difference. It's just the sheer computing power is just not there to have any impact on secure communication. But AI could have an impact on trying to crack ancient codes, ancient messages, or ancient languages, where it's not about lacking computer power, it's about lacking that vital insight, or it's about getting all of the techs that are available and looking for patterns. Code breaking is about pattern recognition. And AI is terrific at pattern recognition.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah. Some people wanted to know, why do some people really excel at escape rooms and things like that? Some of us are just great at that. Some of us myself are not. But let's talk about stuff he hates, or at least his least favorite patron. Kat, you're gonna love this one.

[Simon Singh]

So there's a code which I didn't actually write about in the code book because the code book was published. There was another book out at almost the same time. In fact, it was at the same time. Cause we were both kind of in the top 10 bestseller lists and we were kind of competing against each other. And it was called the Bible Code. So there was my book, the Code Book, and then there was the Bible Code. And the Bible Code was getting a lot of attention. And the idea in the Bible Code code was that there are encrypted messages in the most ancient Hebrew manuscripts. And it's a very intriguing idea. The book was written by a guy called Michael Drosnin. Right. So Michael Drosnin wrote this book called the Bible Code. And the way you Find these encrypted messages in the ancient Hebrew text is you put all the letters out in the form of an array, in the form of a grid. And you look for Hebrew letters that are equally spaced, spaced in a straight line. Okay. So you don't read it left to right or right to left. I suppose you're looking for diagonals. You're looking for lines going in all different directions that are equally spaced. And when you do that, something really weird happens. You find these messages, not just messages, but predictions that actually turned out to be true. You find the word Newton crossing with gravity. It's kind of extraordinary. You find the word Kennedy, Dallas, assassinate.

[Alie Ward]

No.

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, yeah. 100 true. Absolutely no word of a lie. Take the most ancient Hebrew text, put them in a grid, look for these patterns, and these predictions emerge. Literally hundreds and hundreds of predictions. Every single one has come true. True. I've got goosebumps now. A mathematician in Australia said, you know, I'm not sure I quite believe this. So he got another book, not the Bible, but he got Moby Dick. He said, you know, Moby Dick is a huge text. It's about the same size as these ancient manuscripts. What happens if I apply the same algorithm to Moby Dick? And he looked at Moby Dick, he put all the letters in Moby Dick in a grid, in an array. He looked for letters that are equally spaced in a straight line, and exactly the same thing happened. He found hundreds and hundreds of predictions, all of which came true. There's one about the death of Diana, Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, Rhodes, Skid. The passenger who was killed with her, Dodie. Dodie. The name of the driver, Henri Paul, they all appear in Moby Dick. So the bottom line is that books are big objects. They contain millions of letters. That's millions of starting points, millions of ways you can jump around millions of different diagonals. You can find. And when you have so many possibilities, you will find anything you want to find. It's purely. It's about the law of large numbers or the laws of large combinations. So you'll find everything that's ever happened, everything that won't happen, everything that will happen. It's all there in any large tech. So that's kind of one of my favorite codes and one of the code I really hate, I suppose.

[Alie Ward]

Could it point to a simulation or it's really just chance you get enough letters? Yeah, you're gonna get some messages. That's really the point. Right?

[Simon Singh]

My favorite coincidence. You put your finger on it, it's really about coincidences. If you take Shakespeare's Hamlet quotation, to be or not to be, that is the question. If you take that wonderful, you know, soliloquy and you juggle the letters around, you get the following anagram. You get the anagram, which is in one of the Bard's best thought of tragedies. Our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten, which is a perfect summary of the entire play built from an anagram of its most famous soliloquy.

[Alie Ward]

So, yes, Seattleite graphic designer and anagram enthusiastic Corey Calhoun sat down about 15 years ago and thought, I wonder if you can anagram Hamlet's speech. And within just a few hours took the Shakespearean text, to be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And then he anagrammed that, and it spells out, in one of the Bard's best thought of tragedy, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten. Way to go, Corey. Who knew all of those letters could spell all of those words. I now follow Corey Calhoun on Instagram because I think that that's so cool. And he is probably wondering why a podcast lady wants to see pictures of his kids and cakes. Let him wonder and you can either.

[Simon Singh]

Say why, gosh, wasn't Shakespeare amazing that he could build in these incredible puzzles, but he just wrote so much stuff that eventually these weird coincidences will happen.

[Alie Ward]

Oh, I've never heard that and I love it. Is there any codes that you ever keep an eye on, like, when are they going to crack that one?

[Simon Singh]

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

[Alie Ward]

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

[Simon Singh]

To which, you know, the reply is, well, if you've cracked the Beall cipher, then show me where the gold is. You know, that's the ultimate whether someone's cracked it or not. So, yeah, that's the one that people still seem to pursue.

[Alie Ward]

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

[Simon Singh]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Or maybe somebody's found the treasure, stolen it, and as we say, the whole world of cryptography is full of secrets. And so maybe shout about it when you have discovered, covered the gold.

[Alie Ward]

I would keep that under a tight, heavy lid. I don't think I'd tell. I wouldn't go out tweeting about it. Well, this has been so wonderful to talk to you.

[Simon Singh]

Thank you so much for my pleasure. It's been nice to kind of think about cryptography all over again. We started off talking about ancient Sumerians and their pottery glazes and we've come all the way up to the Internet in padlock boxes. So that's great.

[Alie Ward]

So ask cryptological people cryptic and sometimes illogical questions because what fun is a cat unless it's out of a bag. So thank you so much Dr. Simon Singh for humoring me with so many not smart questions. You can enjoy some of his other work like the BBC documentary and book Farma's Last Theorem, other books such as the Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets and Trick Or Treatment Alternative Medicine on Trial. His social media is linked in the Show Notes, as is his website which is just his name.net and we are Logies on Bluesky and Instagram. I personally am Le Ward on both. We have shorter kid friendly episodes called Smologies you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. They're also linked in the show Notes. Join our Patreon and submit questions before we record at patreon.com ologies we have [e-mail] including hat and bathing suits and totes and gifts for the cute little weirdos in your life. Thank you to Erin Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Avileen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwyer does the website, Noel Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer. Susan Hale puts it all together as Managing director. And deciphering my transcripts into an actual episode are our brainiac editors Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Extra editing by the wonderful chair of mindjam Media who helped out in a pinch for me because I had a mic malfunction late at night on some of the asides. You may have noticed it, you may not have because he is great at helping out and also he's married to me, so he had no choice. Nick Thorburn orchestrated the theme music and if you stick around to the end of the episode, I'll tell you a secret. And first off, if you are stuck and annoyed about that pig Latin clip from earlier, what are you studying at college? Piglet? You wouldn't know a thing about that, would you? Oh, one two fun facts about it. It's from an old Three Stooges clip called Three Little Pigskins and the pig Latin spoken was what are you doing tonight and then she says no. And it features a little known actress in a part one of her earliest roles. Her name was Lucille Ball. She was blonde in it, which really threw me. Also, I could not not sign off with another little message. Don't work on this if you're driving. 5225182528914791911953185202114291225152112511814920 Bye Bye. Pachydermatology Homeology Cryptozoology Lithology Nanotechnology Meteorology Cold Factology Mapology Serology.

[Simon Singh]

Now you can break the code.

[Alie Ward]

What's up podcast listeners? It's Tanks, host of the It's Me Tanks podcast. Join me weekly on It's Me Tanks as I dive into topics like relationships, why it's okay to feel lonely, fighting, summer comparison, and pop culture's hottest takes. I don't shy away from getting candid about my personal experiences and I want to share all the advice I have learned with you. I'm even joined by some of my friends like Claudia Ashray, Connor Wood, and Amanda Hirsch each Friday for our new Office Hours episodes. You can listen to It's Me Tanks every Monday, Wednesday and Friday wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to follow the show so you don't miss an episode.

[Simon Singh]

Hey everybody, Conan o' Brien here with an ad about my podcast. Conan o' Brien needs a friend. I've had so many fantastic conversations with people I truly admire.

[Alie Ward]

People like Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Maya Rudolph, Tom Hanks.

[Simon Singh]

New episodes are out every Monday and we have a really good time.

[Alie Ward]

So subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.