ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine a controversy involving the works of William Shakespeare, the contributions of Thomas Jefferson, and a critical moment in the life of John F. Kennedy.
Sir Francis Bacon (Figure 5.1) is best known as a philosopher and advocate of applied science and the scientific method, which he called the New Instrument. His views became more influential following his death. In particular, he provided inspiration to the men who founded the Royal Society. Bacon earned a place in these pages because he also developed a binary cipher-that is, a cipher in which only two distinct symbols are needed to convey the message. An example of his updated biliteral cipher follows:
One could use this to encipher a message, sending the 25-letter string aabbb aabaa ababb ababb abbba to say “hello,” but this is a particularly inefficient way to do a monoalphabetic substitution! The strength in this cipher lies in its invisibility. Let a be represented by normal text characters, and let b be represented by boldface characters. Now observe the message hidden behind the text that follows:
Joe will help in the heist. He’s a good man
and he knows a lot about bank security.
