Infinitum

Laplace’s Demon

Laplace strongly believed in causal determinism, which is expressed in the following quotation from the introduction to the Essai:

This intellect is often referred to as Laplace’s demon. Note, however, that the description of the hypothetical intellect described above by Laplace as a demon does not come from Laplace, but from later biographers: Laplace saw himself as a scientist; and while hoping that humanity would progress to a better scientific understanding of the world, he recognized that, if and when such an understanding were eventually completed, a tremendous calculating power would still be needed to compute it all in a single instant. While Laplace saw foremost practical problems for mankind to reach this ultimate stage of knowledge and computation, later interpretations of quantum mechanics, which were adopted by philosophers defending the existence of free will, also leave the theoretical possibility of such an “intellect” contested.

Tags: determinism, theory, universe

Something to lighten the mood on a Friday

Tags: Funny, writer

Vigenère cipher

The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of different Caesar ciphers based on the letters of a keyword. It is a simple form of polyalphabetic substitution.

The Vigenère (pronounced /ˌviːdʒɪˈnɛəɹ/, “veedj-ih-nair” in English; [viʒnɛːʁ] in French) cipher has been reinvented many times. The method was originally described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his 1553 book La cifra del. Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso; however, the scheme was later misattributed to Blaise de Vigenère in the 19th century, and is now widely known as the “Vigenère cipher”.

This cipher is well known because while it is easy to understand and implement, it often appears to beginners to be unbreakable; this earned it the description le chiffre indéchiffrable (French for ‘the unbreakable cipher’). Consequently, many people have tried to implement encryption schemes that are essentially Vigenère ciphers, only to have them broken.

History

The first well documented description of a polyalphabetic cipher was formulated by Leon Battista Alberti around 1467 and used a metal cipher disc to switch between cipher alphabets. Alberti’s system only switched alphabets after several words, and switches were indicated by writing the letter of the corresponding alphabet in the ciphertext. Later, in 1508, Johannes Trithemius, in his work Poligraphia, invented the tabula recta, a critical component of the Vigenère cipher. Trithemius, however, only provided a progressive, rigid and predictable system for switching between cipher alphabets.

What is now known as the Vigenère cipher was originally described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his 1553 book La cifra del. Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso. He built upon the tabula recta of Trithemius, but added a repeating “countersign” (a key) to switch cipher alphabets every letter.

Blaise de Vigenère published his description of a similar but stronger autokey cipher before the court of Henry III of France, in 1586. Later, in the 19th century, the invention of Bellaso’s cipher was misattributed to Vigenère. David Kahn in his book The Codebreakers lamented the misattribution by saying that history had “ignored this important contribution and instead named a regressive and elementary cipher for him [Vigenère] though he had nothing to do with it”.^[2]

A reproduction of the Confederacy’s cipher disk. Only five originals are known to exist.

The Vigenère cipher gained a reputation for being exceptionally strong. Noted author and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) called the Vigenère cipher unbreakable in his 1868 piece “The Alphabet Cipher” in a children’s magazine. In 1917, Scientific American described the Vigenère cipher as “impossible of translation”.^[3] This reputation was not deserved, since Kasiski entirely broke the cipher in the 19th century and some skilled cryptanalysts could occasionally break the cipher in the 16th century.^[2]

The Vigenère cipher is simple enough to be a field cipher if it is used in conjunction with cipher disks. ^[4] The Confederate States of America, for example, used a brass cipher disk to implement the Vigenère cipher during the American Civil War. The Confederacy’s messages were far from secret and the Union regularly cracked their messages. Throughout the war, the Confederate leadership primarily relied upon three keywords, “Manchester Bluff”, “Complete Victory” and, as the war came to a close, “Come Retribution”.^[5]

Gilbert Vernam tried to repair the broken cipher (creating the Vernam-Vigenère cipher in 1918), but, no matter what he did, the cipher was still vulnerable to cryptanalysis. Vernam’s work, however, eventually led to the one-time pad, a provably unbreakable cipher.

Vigenère cipher. (2008, November 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:54, December 4, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher&oldid=253364431

The Greenwich Observatory

Went to Greenwich park on Saturday.

What a fine day out that was, the whole of Greenwich park and the observatory, Maritime museum etc was a great inspiration to the infinitum thought process.

In the main you can still picture how it would have been back in the days of Cook and Halley.

And as long as you ignore the tourists and the looming vision of the 21st century city in the background it has still got some of the magic that I’m looking for …

Also it’s free.

Greenwich Observatory 1

Tags: Greenwich, Maritime, Observatory

The Hyperboreans of Atlantis/Mu

The passage of Pliny (Hist. Nat. 4:26) on the Hyperboreans is worth quoting:

“Beyond the Aquilon one finds a blessed nation called, according to tradition, the Hypeboreans. Among them, men reach an extreme age. Many marvels are told of this people. Some say that the hinges of the world and the limit of the course of the stars lie in their region… The country is bathed in sunlight and enjoys a pleasant temperature…”
“Discord is there ignored, and so is disease. People there do not die but from the satiety of living. After a festive banquet, full of the joys of old age, the one who wants to die jumps into the seas from a lofty rock. Such is for them the happiest way to die. One cannot doubt the reality of this country, described by many authorities.”
Pliny, in the above passage, also adds that Hyperborea was the realm of Apollo and that the Hyperboreans sent, from the island of Delos, the first-fruits of their crops to Greece, to be dedicated to the Sun God

Pliny’s Hyperborea also evokes the description of the island of Emain Abalach (Avalon) in Celtic poems:.
Treason is there unknown and so is sadness.
There no pain, no regret, no death, no grief,
No disease, no weakness, ever afflict anyone.
For such is the fortune of Emain.

Another a similar Celtic poem adds:
What a wonderful country is this one!
There the young never grow old at all!

Avalon, Hyperborea, Thule, Taprobane, Eden, Paradise, Emain Abalach, the Garden of the Golden Apples, the Garden of Idun  etc. are all one and the same thing. Their connection with the “first fruits” is an allegoric reference to the fact that Atlantis.MU  was indeed the very first site of human civilization, the same as the legendary Paradise or Garden of Eden.
These pleasant, luxurious gardens all lay at the extremity of the world which, from the Celtic perspective in Brittany was  located on the side of the world opposite to their own misty islands. This Paradise was destroyed by a cataclysm, and they were forced to leave it, emigrating to the far Occident, under the leadership of Hu Gadarn, the Celtic Noah, the Judeo-Christian hero of the Flood
The sinking of this realm is told in the legend of the Flooding of Ys, another central tradition of Celtic mythology. And their sunken Paradise became the Land of the Dead, the “Tomb of Glass” (Glastonbury) or “Island of Glass” (Ynis Wydr) that we encounter so often in their Celtic legends. This dismal Hades is the same as the Cimmeria of the Greeks, the Hanebut of the Egyptians, the Sheol of the Jews and the Nefelheim of the Germanic Nations.

When this blonde haired/red haired, blue eyed race  survived the Atlantean/Mu  cataclysm they emigrated to the distant Occident in their ships — under the guidance of admirals like Aeneas, Hercules, Phoroneos, and Hu Gadarn and, perhaps, Noah, Canopus and Jason — they settled in colonies along the way, on every coast and every island that looked promising. The legends are certainly founded in actual fact, and these fleets of ocean worth vessels are the ones allegorized as the Ark of Noah in the Bible or as the Argonavis in Greek legends.

It was thus that Mauritania was settled by the Berbers, Lebanon by the Phoenicians, Crete by the Minoans, Italy by the Etruscans, the British Islands and Brittany by the Celts and, of course, the Canaries by the Guanches. Many of these emigrants were, as is usually the case, mere passengers who never knew how to sail or, even less, how to design and build sea-worthy ships strong enough to sail the open, rough ocean, a feat very hard to accomplish in antiquity. Such huge sailships — the “ships of Tarshish” of Biblical traditions — are attested from remotest antiquity, for instance in the Gerzean ceramics of pre-Dynastic Egypt,

In this way, the Guanches were stranded on the Canaries, and the enigma which has defied solution for millennia is naturally explained. The ancient peripluses like those of Hanno and Himilco relate similar expeditions and even the establishment of such insular colonies. Such is also the meaning of myths like the one of Aeneas and his fleet fleeing from the destroyed, sunken Troy or, also, of the Biblical relate of Noah and his clan repeopling the Islands of the Nations, and founding the different nations of mankind.

Ref:  Arysio Nunes dos Santos, Forbidden Research

Tags: Atlantis, Hyperborea

The start of something interesting

This is my attempt to sort out my own website, and create an environment for the worlds of infinitum, a story concept that will evolve over time