I greet you, double knob, children of Mars
s m a i s m r m i l m e p o e t a l e u m i b u n e n u g t t a u i r a s
Now rotate your decoder ring two half turns left…..
Actually, the above mish-mash of letters is an anagram.
An anagram. A, how d’you say? a word scramble. This one was written by none other than Galileo himself (Galileo sometimes wrote in anagrams to keep his discoveries secret).
The correct solution to the anagram is “Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi”. That is Latin for “I have observed the highest (most distant) planet [Saturn] to have a triple form.” He was referring to Saturn’s rings.
However, Johannes Kepler, in his attempt to decode Galileo’s anagram, failed to solve the puzzle correctly. Instead he got, “Salue umbistineum geminatum Martia proles,” which translates as “Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars”, or “I greet you, double knob, children of Mars”.
I wonder if Martians would take offense to that, you know, being called Double Knobs and all.
Some say that Kepler’s misunderstanding led to Jonathon Swift’s writing of the two moons of Mars in Gulliver’s Travels over a hundred years before the discovery of the moons (as I talked about in the previous post). Or, perhaps, Dr. John Arbuthnot, a close friend of Swift’s, lent him a great deal of ideas and calculations about Mars and the approximate positions of its possible moons. Perhaps a lucky guess?
Photocredit: reedwade
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