The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise

These forgery stories are all the same, be it about rare wines, paintings, books, anything. A clever man produces "impossible" objects that at first surprise everyone, and then are accepted as exceptional finds.

Experts are contacted, who go to great lengths to prove that the objects are indeed genuine, and quote many irrefutable machine analysis.

Then later another man comes along that disputes the experts' findings, only to be scoffed at. But eventually we learn he was right all along.

("Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell opens on a similar story about a sculpture, IIRC).

This will continue to happen for a very long time, because it's just human nature. People only hear what they want to hear.

The compounding factor is that "experts" have a vested interest in participating in the deception: they earn more money if they declare the thing genuine, and it then sells for millions, than if they prove it's a fraud.

In a way it's difficult to feel much empathy for the "victims"; collectors of old bottles of wine or the 15th copy of some famous book don't seem to add much value to the world.

(In this particular case the perpetrator also stole rare books from libraries in Italy, to resell them in auctions in other parts of the world; that's very different and much more shocking, to me, than forgery).

For anyone interested in Galileo's story and more generally the history of science, I think that "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" [1] is a great read. It is a multi-part series of blogposts that covers the story leading to Galileo's conflict with the curiae and the historical context.

Also, it is written in a really easy to read and funny style. If you have the time, it's great.

1: http://tofspot.blogspot.de/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smack...

Just want to say I read this when it came out and it's a fabulous story. More on this appeared in the LA Review of Books a bit later:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/faking-galileo/