The story apparently started on March 5 of last year, when an envelope addressed simply to “Fermilab” arrived there. In the envelope was a single sheet of paper with strange markings, apparently in code (click on it to see it larger):
An even higher resolution version can be found here.
An article in Fermilab Today, today, indicates that the top and bottom sections with the I II and III marks have been decoded to read
FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE
and
EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN
Symmetry magazine’s online site has an article on it, and you can find links to the decryption, and sort of follow the logic so far. The amount of stuff on the net is expanding rapidly today…but I think it has not yet been fully decoded.
Firstly, who is Frank Shoemaker? He was a faculty member at Princeton for many years, and made many contributions to experiments at Fermilab, including to the one I worked on for my thesis back in the 1980’s. He was a very genial and fun colleague, great with electronics and hardware. He was also known for designing and building demonstration spark chambers that are to be found in various physics departments and museums, and give a vivid image of cosmic ray muons passing through.
Frank is now retired (and asks not to be disturbed as a result of all this).
Hmmm…so what would Frank consider noise? As a particle physicist, we think noise is anything that our detectors say is a particle or a real signal when in fact it was not. For example a random coincidence, or an upward fluctuation of a background would be called “noise”.
As for the bottom section, every Fermilab employee and user since 1967 (?) or so has been issued an ID with a sequential number; mine is V02833, for example. The V means “visitor”. It used to be V2833 before they got to five digits.
Just above the bottom section are three symbols. The second and third are apparently decoded by the middle section to read “FC”. So does this mean the Fermilab ID number S00252? I believe that is the ID of Pierre Piroue (also of Princeton!) and also now retired but apparently denies being the author. There is also speculation that the first of the three symbols is part of the Fermilab user ID number, if it’s not “S”. And why “BASSE” and not “BASE”?
And what is that whole middle section for? Is it a key, part of the message, or both?
So…it’s a mystery! Any ideas?
May 20th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I’ve been following this since it was first published on slashdot, and have dabbled with the second section.
One of the interesting connections that has supposedly been made is that the building that Dr Shoemaker worked in was built in the Basse style, and that you need a certain badge to access the 16th floor.
Personally, I think that the three character line is a separate message. The S character can possibly match up with the hex 1 or A, as those are the only two values which aren’t defined in the two lines of the middle section (assuming that they are actually hexadecimal).
May 20th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Interesting! Since you ask for ideas:
What if “Employee Number Basse Sixteen” contains “noise”. If you remove one “S”, then it would read “Employee Number Base Sixteen.”
The three symbols above the bottom section might suggest that as one removed the “s” noise from “BASSE” to read “BASE,” one might also remove the symbols that followed the S (which correspond to “F” and “C”) from the middle two lines as corresponding noise in the middle section. Their location might also suggest breaks in words or numbers.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
My guess? It’s AFC (employee number 2812), who works on the AFC [...] – a coincidence Frank Shoemaker would call noise.
From here, via Slashdot.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Well, shit. Closing tags must be more difficult than it looks.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:33 am
It could be the present-day equivalent of the Beale cipher.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:15 am
ALL YOUR BASSE ARE BELONG TO US!
May 21st, 2008 at 5:25 pm
On the face of it this message, and the way it was sent anonymously, seems to me like the act of a disordered mind. But then who knows, maybe it is or has been part of the culture at Fermilab for the super-smart people there to exchange and crack coded messages as a pastime!
Also, if accurate, the text “Frank Shoemaker would call this noise” has a potential air of reproach or disgruntlement, perhaps of someone bitter at an accusation of contributing only noise to some discussion or project.
But psychobabble aside, the three characters below the middle section (the first being “S”) read “S F C”". If we assume the “S F” is Frank Shoemaker’s initials backwards (and the left-pointing triangle is further evidence that it is meant to be read right-to-left) then maybe the middle section should be tackled on that assumption.
At first I wondered if the hex digits should be expanded into binary and treated the same way as the upper and lower sections have apparently been cracked, with zeroes perhaps corresponding to spaces. But then I decided this was too much like hard work for what is probably a trivial (kook?) message, and in any case the presence of a zero indicates it probably isn’t the right approach.
I then tried a few combinations of hex pairs, on the assumption these are meant to be ANSI bytes, and found what looks quite a promising start by grouping the digits in 2 by 2 squares (not sure how well the following will align in proportional spacing, but I’ll try a couple of tags):
[code]
F 0 B E 5 8 F 2 F D 6 3
6 C 7 9 D 2 E 4 9 3 E 6
[/code]
Treating these squares from right to left, and making hex digit pairs in alternating order I came up with:
[code]
36 = '6'
6E = 'n'
3D = '='
9F = Y
2F = /
4E = N
[/code]
But then the system runs into the weeds. So either the remaining squares are noise (unlikely), or a variation on the same theme is required (possibly taking diagonal pairs?).
So my best effort is 6n = Y / N, if that formula rings a bell (possibly as part of a longer formula).
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Another code type is simply code, not computer code. Thus I replaced the first with the last and the right with the left and the top with the bottom, and finally transferred symbols at a 45 degree angle, and the message is, Shoemaker should take a flying f**k at a rolling donut, with the absense of zero being zero. …heh
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 am
It is employee 11510.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:24 am
Or 10151?
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:52 am
508 or 764?
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:54 am
Why if the middle section is just noise?
If I had sent the letter, I think it would be very funny to watch a lot of very intelligent people trying to extract a meaning out of randomly selected symbols.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I think the middle 24-hex digit part is a 96-bit cryptographic hash code. If I had to guess on the algorithm, I would say 3-way, but that’s partly because I once was paid to implement this in digital logic (i.e. hardware). The people who selected the algorithm were European academics so this algorithm is probably popular with that set, and it’s got the right number of bits.
You take a document and compute a hash code from it and publish the hash code. For a general block encryption such as 3-way, this can be the final 96-bit block. Then later, you can prove the existence of the document at the time of the publishing as the problem of writing a message that would have that hash function is impossible except for the solution known to the author.
When the author first wrote the letter, he encrypted the hash code as well as the first sentence. Then he realized that encoding a hash code was a waste of time and in addition made it possible for many more messages to match the hash. So he translated the hash code for us.
The 3 code letters below this are “sFC” where F and C are in code while “s” is not. I think these are the signature of the letter. “s” stands for “signed.” This is a common library abbreviation. When the author translated the encrypted hash code for us, he forgot to translate the FC because that line began with “s” and “s” does not need to be translated.
After having completed the first two parts of the letter, the author had another second thought. What if he was unable to prove he was the author of the letter? Was FC enough? So he added the final passage. Since this was an afterthought, he was barely able to fit it on the sheet.
In general, when a physicist gets a weird letter in the mail, it would be a better use of time to just ignore it. Nut cases write stuff like this all the time.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
“In general, when a physicist gets a weird letter in the mail, it would be a better use of time to just ignore it. Nut cases write stuff like this all the time.”
Yes, in general, perhaps. However generalizations tend to be made rules, and rules have exceptions. And when the exception could report a restoration of funds by Senate and an extra tip of $5 million by anonymous donation… But really nobody has done a news search for Fermilab?
So nut == chiflado? Is a common association in spanish: Un científico chiflado. Results 1 – 10 of about 520 for “Un científico chiflado”. (0.29 seconds) . I think this other phrase would express better the situation: Scientifics with nothing better to do write stuff like this all the time. In fact, scientifics aren’t so bizarre, so different from the rest of people.
PS: After writing I see it seems I’m suggesting… Wrong. Mi thought is that Fermilab side has been honest and only omitted some details about the contextual situation.
May 26th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Could it be that BASSE refers to Base e?
That is, instead of a number in base 2 or base 8, its in base e?
Just the first thing that came to mind. Never heard about the cipher before.
Face Front, True Believers!
May 27th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
The words “base” and “bass” are related words in English and they are easy to confuse. Both mean low, among other things. “Bass” is used in music as an adjective for a musical instrument. The French spelling of bass is basse. I would think it would be easy to confuse base with basse for someone who is French, especially if they are involved in music in the US where the word basse appears.
It turns out that Pierre Piroue was educated in Geneva, in the French speaking part of Switzerland. And he teaches music.
The author of the letter encrypts his signature for a reason, presumably plausible deniabliity. So having someone deny being the author is not necessarily proof that he is not the author. I think the bullk of the evidence is in favor of Piroue as having written the message. I would presume it has to do with the failure to announce the Higgs and that somewhere there is an email message that has a check ID of that 24-digit hex sequence.
June 19th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[...] number starts with V for “visitor” i.e. grad students or N for others) This is from a guy who worked with Frank Shoemaker and is still a V there. They are up to 5 digits now. But i think this is a 4 digit or less [...]
June 21st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Well about the “SFC” line , it could be an ancronym for ‘Sequential Function Chart’, a programming language used in PLC’s. According to John, frank shoemaker was good with electronics and hardware. So my guess would be that the middle section if decoded and used in PLC’s might generate noise given that the top code actually means what it is supposed to.
Anyways i tried some different approach and added the lines in a group of 3. for eg. the first 3 lines added gives 8..the second also gives 8 and so on…to my surprise each digit is in the middle section. dont known what it means yet…but its a good pasetime.
July 15th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I think that the middle section contains hexadecimal numbers, and that the symbols above them are just a distraction. The First sentence about noise is a hint about the symbols, and the last sentence is a hint about the hexadecimal numbers leading to an employee ID, and not a text message. The puzzle is what algorithm to use to reduce 12 base-16 digits to an employee number.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I think there is far more to the middle than people are concluding, especially on the sFC part (I doubt it’s as easy as comparing the symbol and writing the corresponding letter).
Why are ‘1′ and ‘A’ missing from the middle? Why use the symbol, lower case phi I believe, and does it have anything to do with the upper case phi above the ‘7′?
July 17th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Carl, my first thoughts were “music” and “french”.
The other thing Im thinking is that it hints about a code for the center. 24 characters should be brute forceable, but I always dread the codes that are encoded using a foreign language. This makes me think that enough of the characters repeat, but it could be in french. Or, it could be based on a musical scale and then in french…
I dont know, actually…
July 18th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I think there is more to the top and bottom. The “Frank would call…noise” part is just that– Noise. There has to be more to than that. That was way tooooo easy to figure out.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
The way the top part is is written is a clue. The person who wrote it made an effort to make columns, 47 of them. The columns are at a slight slant. I do not see an effort to do that in the bottom part, not much of an effort anyway. I think there are multiple messages in the top.
I have also noticed that if the image is stretched 2x horizontaly, the top part could make letters, still jumbled, but someone look at that.
Someone figure this out please!
January 14th, 2009 at 12:04 am
sine waves are easy when you know the frequency 28,000 decibills light can e bent and thought can be contained in a electro manetic field that’s all i only read hexidecimal a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7
January 19th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
It seems most logical to me that the extra “S” in base links up with the FC in the last line of the second section. From my internet research, I believe that Frank Shoemaker’s middle initial is C (I could be mistaken though). So the middle section may be signed with initials FCS.
I also found it interesting that the middle section of the cipher generally uses the letters B through F. I believe that each letter B through F possibly represents a vowel (For example: B=O; C=E; D=I; E=U; and F=A) and each number 1 through 9 represent a consonant. I think the odd numbers are all in the run of letters Q through W. For example, 2=B; 3=T; 4=G; 5=R; 6=N; 7=W; 8=L; 9=S. The second and third lines of the middle section are linked to the letters and numbers in some fashion, and may be the meaningless “noise” referred to in the first section. However, I believe they may have some collateral function in the cipher. The first 2 letters of the middle section may be reversed (IF instead of FI).
I am no physicist or even a scientist, but I believe the middle section is simply a humorous statement. Perhaps something that Frank Shoemaker did when he was unhappy that Fermilab was not getting enough news coverage.