clue to the labyrinth: Francis Bacon and the decryption of nature, The

Cryptologia, Jul 2000 by Pesic, Peter

ABSTRACT: Francis Bacon was among the first to argue that human ingenuity can discover the hidden laws of nature, under the metaphor of solving the encrypted Book of Nature. He was familiar with diplomatic uses of ciphers and presented a novel scheme for encryption; he also read ancient myths as coded messages. Despite the skepticism of his contemporaries, Bacon pointed to new possibilities of decryption both for human texts and the "alphabet of nature." His concept that nature requires interpretation and his inductive use of tables also parallel emergent cryptanalytic methods.

KEYWORDS: Francis Bacon, Book of Nature, cryptanalysis, experimental science

Modern scientists often describe the search for nature's hidden laws using the metaphor of solving a code.1 In this way of speaking, the laws of nature are the plaintext and natural phenomena are the cryptogram. As familiar as this figure of speech may be, the notion that nature is a kind of ciphered discourse is an important concept in the evolution of modern science. It represents a profound departure from Aristotelian science, which held that nature is fundamentally open to human knowledge, whereas modern science seeks the fundamental laws hidden behind the manifest phenomena. The metaphor of codebreaking helped to bring the new science to life, giving a much-needed articulation of the novel processes by which the hidden laws might be brought to light. In this story, Francis Bacon is a central figure. His striking formulations often hold the mirror up to science, revealing its most singular characteristics as they appear. Bacon inherited the notion that the world may be a kind of cryptogram, but he was the first to suggest that the cipher of nature is not limited by the bounds of natural human language, and that the plaintext comprises scientific laws. In contrast to some of his contemporaries, Bacon anticipated that human ingenuity would solve nature's cipher through a new approach to natural philosophy closely analogous to practices of decryption, an art that had then only recently been methodically formulated. His work not only reveals nature to be encrypted, but also outlines the detailed process that will, he expects, ultimately lead to the decryption of nature.

THE SECRET BOOK OF NATURE

The concept that nature is a kind of intelligible text was long established by Bacon's time; Ernst Robert Curtius judged that it derived from the Latin Middle Ages.2 Bacon uses the image of the "Book of Nature" with the common understanding that nature and the Bible both bear divine messages that men can and should seek to understand. As he remarks, before us lie "two books or volumes to study if we will be secured from error; first the Scriptures revealing the will of God, and the creatures expressing his power; for that latter book will certify us that nothing which the first teacheth shall be thought impossible."3 However, the language in which the Book of Nature was written was hard to determine. The medieval treatments presume that this Book is somehow in a natural human language, though mysteriously expressed, since the creatures are not transparently "readable" as words or characters. The Bible offered the prime candidate for the archetypal language; the Hebrew scriptures themselves display three simple ways to disguise words by substitution that are among the earliest known ciphers.4

The few references to secret communications in ancient sources utilize only the simplest sorts of codes or secret writing.5 Curtius argues that Islamic-Spanish culture was the source for the later concept of cipher, drawing on the Arabic word sifr, meaning zero, the cipher par excellence.6 He also points to the late medieval fashion in France for devices, hieroglyphic images capable of representing without words. This fashion led to Italian emblems (impresas), whose pictorial part was called cifra in Spanish (the explanatory motto was called mote or letra, as if the plaintext behind the cipher).7 The celebrated polymath Leon Battista Alberti, the philosophers Desederius Erasmus, Angelo Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino, among many others, turned their attention to these emblems, inventing new hieroglyphs on the model of the ancient Egyptians.8 The kabbalah indicated ways in which Hebrew letters could be considered formative elements of creation and also influenced the development of cryptology. For instance, the kabbalistic Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation, ca. third-sixth centuries C. E.) seems to have been an important source for Ramon Llull's Ars inventiva veritatis, his "art of finding truth" through the symbolic use of letters to stand for philosophical concepts. Llull generated various propositions by using rotating wheels to give the combinations of letters indicating attendant pairs of concepts. As David Kahn has argued, Llull's wheels may have stimulated the elaboration of polyalphabetic substitution, complex ciphers in which each letter of plaintext is encrypted by a different cipher alphabet. Leon Battista Alberti's cipher disks show a telling resemblance to Llull's wheels.9