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.<p>Experts are contacted, who go to great lengths to prove that
the objects are indeed genuine, and quote many irrefutable machine analysis.<p>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.<p>("Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell opens on a similar story about a sculpture, IIRC).<p>This will continue to happen for a very long time, because it's just human nature. People only hear what they want to hear.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(In this particular case the perpetrator also <i>stole</i> 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.<p>Also, it is written in a really easy to read and funny style. If you have the time, it's great.<p>1: <a href="http://tofspot.blogspot.de/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html" rel="nofollow">http://tofspot.blogspot.de/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smack...</a>
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:<p><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/faking-galileo/" rel="nofollow">https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/faking-galileo/</a>