Re:Your analogy is incomplete (Score 4, Informative)

There's no direct evidence that the document is forged. There's also no direct evidence that it's genuine, or even what "genuine" would mean. There are stories vaguely associating it with various interesting people, such as John Dee and Roger Bacon, but they're all pretty vague.

People have been studying this document for the better part of a century, because it's fascinating, enigmatic, and beautiful. (You can find some pictures of it at www.voynichinfo.com) We know a bit more than we did about what kinds of hypotheses are plausible and what kinds are not. For example: we can be pretty sure that it is not written in any natural language. We can also be pretty sure that it isn't just a simple substitution cipher. Finally, we can be pretty sure that it isn't a 20th century forgery: it has been given a rough date, it really does look like a manuscript from the 15th or 16th century, and it probably was once owned by Rudolf II. The Roger Bacon rumors are almost certainly false, because the manuscript doesn't appear to be that old. The John Dee rumors may be true.

At present the two most plausible guesses are that it is a real 15th or 16th century treatise on an occult subject, written in a code that has yet to be broken, or that it's a good imitation of an encoded occult text. If the latter, it was probably written specifically for the purpose of fooling Rudolf. It is known that he was fascinated by the occult (there's even an opera where that's a crucial plot point), and it is known that many of the astrologers and alchemists he patronized were quacks and that many of the texts he bought were forgeries.

What's interesting about this research isn't that it's a new argument against the possibility that the manuscript is genuine, but that it's a good counterargument. Until now, many people argued that the manuscript wasn't likely to be a forgery because the text followed a certain statistical property of natural languages (Zipf's law) that weren't known until the 20th century. Thus, the argument goes, it's unlikely to be a 16th century fake because a 16th century forger, inventing a fake code or a fake language, wouldn't have known to match this statistical distribution.

The reason this work is interesting is that it shows that this argument is invalid: there is a plausible method that a 16th century forger might have used that might have produced such a document. This doesn't show that it really is a 16th century forgery, it only shows that there's one fewer argument against that possibility than we once believed.

In the end, of course, we're unlikely to ever have decisive evidence that the manuscript is fake. Either someone will come up with a believable decryption (several people claim to have done it already; none of their claims have stood up), or people will keep trying and failing. The longer scholars bang their heads against the wall trying to get a translation, the less likely people will think it is that there really is one. Messy, but that's the way the world works. Sometimes you don't get to learn for sure whose guess is right.