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Comment by seewhydee

Scientists used to use anagrams to register scientific discoveries without revealing them. Hooke registered his law of elastic extension using the letters "ceiiinosssttuv”, which he later revealed to unscramble into "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the tension, so the force").

People did try to brute-force the anagrams. On two occasions, Kepler unscrambled analgrams from Galileo into the statements that (i) Mars has two moons and (ii) Jupiter has red spots. Bizaarely, both turned out to be true facts, but not what Galileo's anagrams were about!

parent seewhydee 4 years ago

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