Secrets of the Dead (2000–…): Season 18, Episode 1 - Galileo's Moon - full transcript
Using observations of the Earth's moons and Jupiter's moons, Galileo's "Sidereus Nuncius" proves Earth is not the center of the universe.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
- The find of a century:
a proof copy of one
of the most important books
in the history of science...
♪♪
...complete with paintings
by the book's author, himself,
one of the greatest scientific
minds of all time...
♪♪
[ Suspenseful music climbs ]
Galileo Galilei.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
A discovery that set
the rare book market abuzz.
- If it were true, I thought
that this would,
would really change
the historical record.
- How great would that be,
if there were a copy
of "Sidereus Nuncius" that had
Galileo's own paintings in it?
Wow!
I would love to see that.
- When it was published in 1610,
the book opened up
the universe to humanity.
- It implied a different scale
of the universe
than had been commonly
believed before that.
It was an exciting
piece of news.
Nothing like this had ever
been published before.
- But, even after the proof
copy was authenticated,
questions remained.
- Interpreter: In terms of value,
the market is constantly growing
and the means of creating
forgeries and fakes
are constantly improving.
- You generally assume
that the things
that look old, smell old,
are old,
and, generally, we don't live
in a state
of constant skepticism,
where we're
constantly questioning,
you know, "Is this genuine?"
♪♪
- Books by some of the
greatest minds in history,
forged, to be sold
for small fortunes.
♪♪
But more than money is at stake.
These works are the very basis
of our system of knowledge.
If the books can't be trusted,
can the knowledge inside?
- I'm a historian and,
if people start messing
with the tools of my trade,
then I get angry
and have to do something
about it.
♪♪
- "Galileo's Moon."
♪♪
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
- Rare books can fetch
hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of dollars.
♪♪
They are a tangible piece
of history and knowledge.
♪♪
- It's 1631.
- It's a unique book.
- This is 1478.
St. Ignatius was reading this
when he had his conversion
and found the word
"Jesuit" in here,
used for the first time.
- This was
a pharmaceutical manual,
created specifically for doctors
in the 14th century.
It's unique because it
was made for one person,
preserved in its
original binding.
- So, this is 550-year-old paper
and you can hear it and see
- With the dotcom boom
and vast fortunes
being made very quickly,
people are looking for
some kinda culture to buy
and what kind of culture
do they wanna buy?
Tech culture.
And what's tech culture?
It's the history of science.
So, things like Newton,
Copernicus, Galileo.
- The book is US$200,000.
- This is $35,000.
- You have something by Einstein,
by Isaac Newton, by Copernicus.
I mean, these are things
that changed the world.
♪♪
- Galileo Galilei's works
are always popular,
especially his masterpiece,
the "Sidereus Nuncius,"
the "Starry Messenger."
- The "Sidereus Nuncius"
is an announcement
of the most exciting
news imaginable.
It's a really thrilling book.
- Interpreter:
The "Sidereus Nuncius"
is an unusual work,
very unusual.
Only 550 copies
in total were printed.
Of these 550,
today, with certainty,
we are familiar
with no more than 100.
- The market price
for a good first edition,
depending on its condition,
varies between $300,000
and $500,000.
But its worth goes far
beyond the price.
In 2005, a previously
unknown copy was brought
to rare bookseller Richard Ian,
one of the owners
of Martayan Ian
in New York City.
It created a sensation
that moved beyond the insular
world of rare books.
♪♪
Galileo's "Sidereus Nuncius"
has a special place
in the history of science.
- "Sidereus Nuncius"
is important to everyone
because it's one of the few
really revolutionary books
that have ever been written.
It's changed the way
that we think about the cosmos
in about 60 pages,
as though you're witnessing
exactly what he saw
400 years later,
which is a pretty moving
experience, as well.
[Wind blowing]
- But it radically shook up
what seemed to be accepted
truths of all kinds.
- The day after it was published,
someone sent it off
to the king of England.
It was immediately seen
as a startling revelation
that everyone should know about
as quickly as possible,
especially people
in high places.
♪♪
-1610.
Galileo Galilei is 45 years old
and lives in this building.
He is a professor
at the University of Padua,
where he teaches
a number of subjects.
By this point in his life,
he's already constructed
an early thermometer,
designed and improved
a proportional compass,
and he's built a telescope
for himself
and turns it
toward the night sky.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
[ Wind blowing ]
[ Tranquil tune plays ]
"Forsaking terrestrial
observations,"
I turned to celestial ones
and, first, I saw the Moon
from as near at hand
"as if it were scarcely
two terrestrial radii away."
♪♪
The five etchings
in "Sidereus Nuncius"
are based on the drawings
Galileo made
while looking
through the telescope.
[ Chorale joins ]
- You're brought close
to being in the print shop
where Galileo was
delivering his manuscript.
It's as close as you can get
to sitting next to Galileo
and looking through
a telescope with him.
- "From observations of these
spots repeated many times,
I have been led
to the opinion and conviction
that the surface of the Moon
is not smooth, uniform,
but is uneven, rough, and full
of cavities and prominences,
being not unlike
the face of the Earth,
"relieved by chains of mountains
and deep valleys."
♪♪
- Galileo's observations
are the foundation
of our basic understanding
of the universe.
The Sun, encircled
by orbiting planets,
is at the center,
and not the Earth.
- Before 1610,
it was generally accepted
that the universe
was centered on the Earth,
that God had made the Earth,
made humans on it,
and we were the center
of everything.
After 1610, you have
this empirical evidence
that maybe
the Copernican hypothesis,
of the Sun being the center
of rotation of the universe,
is physically true.
- Galileo's drawings
upended the worldview
that had lasted
for at least two millennia.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
In 1543,
Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus
questioned the idea
that the Earth was
at the center of the universe,
but couldn't provide proof.
Galileo did.
- The universe was changing
and this book was the agent
of that change.
It has a kind of deeper
psychological impact, I think,
about where we are
in the universe
and what our... whether
we're anything special.
It starts to shift humanity
from its central,
God-given position, physically,
at the center of the universe,
to a more marginal position,
where we are
third rock from the Sun,
hurtling through space.
It opens up a whole load
of new questions
about what it means to be human.
♪♪
- After observing the Moon,
Galileo shifted the telescope
and was able to see Jupiter.
♪♪
[ Pen scraping ]
-"On the 13th of January,
four stars were seen by me
for the first time,
in this situation
relative to Jupiter.
Three were westerly,
and one was to the east.
They formed a straight line,
except that the middle
western star
departed slightly toward the north.
On the 14th,
the weather was cloudy.
♪♪
On the 27th of February,
four minutes
after the first hour,
the stars appeared
in this configuration.
The easternmost was
10 minutes from Jupiter;
"the next, 30 seconds."
- Galileo had seen three
of Jupiter's moons,
effectively proving the Earth
was not the center
of the universe.
- He realized that
the implication of that was
that they were rotating
around Jupiter
and nobody's conception
of the solar system,
or the universe, in general,
had ever allowed that planets
have smaller bodies
revolving around them.
♪♪
- When it came
to the moons of Jupiter,
[laughing] there was just
no precedent for explaining it
and he's open
about his amazement,
his befuddlement, at first,
how to make sense.
It takes a couple of days
for him to come to,
"Wait a minute, there are..."
There are bodies moving
around Jupiter.
"There's no other explanation."
♪♪
- His observations
of both Jupiter's satellites
and the imperfect surface
of the Moon
would ultimately contradict
Church teaching.
In 1616,
six years after "Sidereus
Nuncius" was published,
the Roman Inquisition
banned heliocentrism,
the belief that the Earth
revolves around the Sun,
from being taught.
[ Sinister chord strikes ]
Horst Bredekamp has studied
Galileo for 20 years
and continues to marvel
at how quickly
the astronomer published
his treatise:
just months after his initial
observations of the Moon.
♪♪
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter: When he sees
that Jupiter has moons,
that we're not the only
planetary system,
he decides,
"I'm going to make a book."
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: He knew that
whoever would be the first
to print the formulation
on a sheet of paper, dated...
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter:
..."The Earth is like the Moon.
The Moon is like the Earth,"
would have formulated one
of the greatest revolutions
in astronomy history.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
- Galileo continued
to study and sketch
the Moon and stars,
even after printing had begun.
- He was in such a heat
to get the book published
that the end was more or less
a first draft,
while the book was on press,
so that he was revising
and there's extra material.
He knew he was on
to something gigantic
and he wanted to have
his name on it.
- Interpreter:
Galileo changed the title
while they were
in the process of printing.
He gave the Inquisition,
which had to allow the book to be printed,
a different title
than the final one.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: During the
day, the printer printed
what he had been
busy formulating
throughout the night.
♪♪
- Interpreter: On March 3rd,
he makes his final examination
and, on the 10th or the 11th,
the book is available:
a speed that, even today,
remains unbeatable.
♪♪
- The result is a masterpiece
that rewrote
the entire understanding
of man's place in the universe.
[ Bell tolling ]
Harvard professor Owen Gingerich
is a noted astronomer
and is also extremely
knowledgeable about rare books.
- I get consulted by the FBI,
every once in a while.
Probably, I shouldn't be
too talkative about this.
- The professor likes to visit
Harvard's oldest telescope,
built in 1847 and the largest
in the world at the time.
Gingerich understands the doors
Galileo opened for him,
as an astronomer, and marvels
at how luck and timing
affected the discoveries
in "Sidereus Nuncius."
- What happened was that
the Moon was reasonably close
and so, apparently, he figured,
after looking at the Moon,
he would have a look at Jupiter
because it was close.
And, lo and behold, he could
see the little satellites
and this wouldn't have
been possible,
if he had done it
six months earlier.
- Gingerich is often asked
to authenticate rare books
and remembers the day in 2005
when the Martayan Ian copy
of "Sidereus Nuncius"
was placed in front of him.
- Richard Ian, who is a New York
rare book dealer,
I had known him for a long time
and he brought
two Italians with him,
who had this book for sale.
So I started looking at the book
and, right at the beginning,
there is Galileo's signature.
♪♪
- The book was signed and
dedicated by Galileo, himself:
"Io, Galileo Galilei fecit,"
"I, Galileo Galilei, made this."
- There aren't that many books
which Galileo signed.
- The book also had a stamp
from the library of Prince Cesi,
founder of the
Accademia dei Lincei,
which was dedicated
to scientific exploration.
Galileo himself was
a member of the academy.
Both items made the newly found
manuscript even more exciting,
but were insignificant, compared
to what Gingerich saw next.
- As we turned the pages of this book,
the striking thing was
the drawings of the Moon.
Only, instead of being
the etchings,
these were obviously
watercolors,
as if this was
a very early stage,
and, therefore,
singularly valuable.
- Was it possible the book
was an early proof,
printed before the etchings
of Galileo's drawings
of the Moon were ready,
one to which Galileo
himself had added
his own watercolor
paintings of the Moon?
- There are authentic surviving
copies of "Sidereus Nuncius"
that just have blanks where
the Moon etchings should be.
- Interpreter: It made headlines
throughout the entire world.
An original manuscript
with drawings by Galilei
had been found.
- Interpreter: It contains
original watercolors by Galileo.
What an exceptional document!
It's like finding
an extremely important
and previously
unpublished manuscript!
- Interpreter: Yes, number zero,
the galley proof, the very first copy.
In other words, in 100 years,
there hadn't been a find
of this magnitude.
- What made it spectacular
was that it had
Galileo's signature on it.
It had these drawings,
supposedly in Galileo's hand.
It had a library stamp linking
it to the Lincean Academy.
- Interpreter: If real,
it would be an exceptional document
and one that would fetch
ex traordinary prices.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
You have to imagine,
his signature, "Io," "I,"
"Galileo Galilei fecit,"
"I have made this."
The pride emanating from that.
All that created
such a sense of immediacy.
Galileo's aura was closer
to those in that room
than it had ever been before,
thanks to that book.
And that really made
an impact on people...
On me, as well...
And fascinated them.
That secured the book's
renown around the world.
- The men who brought
the book to Richard Ian
claimed it had been
lying untouched
for centuries in Argentina
before they found it
and offered to sell it.
- Interpreter:
You can see how the ink here
penetrates through
to the other side.
Everything appears to add up.
Here, in exactly the same way,
the other books have etchings
at precisely these points.
And then here, on this page,
the depictions of Jupiter
and its dancing moons begin.
-[Continues in German]
- If genuine,
the estimated market value?
$10 million.
-[Bangs gavel]
- At the time,
most rare book dealers
did not worry too much
about forgeries
because of the labor involved
in making a believable fake.
- It had generally been assumed
that you couldn't successfully
forge 17th-century books.
17th-century books are produced
using bits of metal type
and a hand press and there are
just too many physical factors
that are difficult to recreate,
nowadays, to make it worthwhile.
- The letterpress
printing process
would require the creation
of identical versions
of each letter and punctuation
mark that appears on every page.
And then, the forger would have
to match the exact spacing
between every letter
in the book.
Book dealers put great stock
in the belief
that their products
simply couldn't be forged.
In addition to the tedious
labor involved,
the pages in early modern books
have a unique characteristic
that rare book dealers believed
was difficult to duplicate.
- Most forgeries
of early modern books
have been done lithographically
or using laser jet.
Neither of those
printing techniques
leaves any print impression
in the page.
The Martayan Ian copy
had this deep impression,
so, almost instinctively,
when you look at it and feel it,
it looks like a genuine
17th-century book
and it doesn't look like
a facsimile.
- It seemed unlikely
that anyone would create
a copy of "Sidereus Nuncius"
as believable
as the Martayan Ian copy,
but it still needed
a thorough scientific
examination for authentication.
Bredekamp put together a team
of international experts
that would analyze
every aspect of the book:
paper, ink, binding.
Until this point, only copies
of the Gutenberg Bible
had been examined so carefully.
It was sent to the
Federal Institute of Materials
Research and Testing in Berlin,
which examined
the Dead Sea Scrolls,
paintings by Durer,
and texts by Bach.
For three days, the Martayan Ian
"Sidereus Nuncius" was subjected
to an analysis
of all its materials,
using infrared light,
3-D microscopes,
and X-ray fluorescence.
♪♪
- Interpreter: At the moment,
we are measuring the paper
and elements such as potassium
or calcium are to be expected.
If it were modern paper,
one would also expect to find
barium and titanium.
- These techniques allowed
for a noninvasive analysis
so that, crucially,
not even a tiny scrap of paper
needed to be removed.
- The most concrete test
that you could do
would be to cut
a square inch of paper out
and burn it
and do a carbon-14 test.
Nobody wants to do that 'cause,
if you've got a genuine book,
you're now missing
a square inch of it.
- Interpreter: If we had found
elements, materials, or substances
that had not fit with those
of the 17th century,
we would have immediately
said it was a fake or a copy.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: The most important
question concerned the watercolors,
for they are extremely
unusual in this book.
And what we learned is that
it was an organic material,
most likely a kind of
bister ink,
which is not unusual
for the 17th century at all.
- Scholar Paul Needham was a part
of Bredekamp's team in Berlin.
- And so I was going
to write a chapter
about the printing
of "Sidereus Nuncius,"
the physical process
of printing, producing,
the 1610 edition.
And so it turned into
just a great opportunity
to deal with both this book
and with early
17th-century printing,
with the book trade,
so on and so forth,
and so it was a very enjoyable
couple of years
of intense study.
- The various elements all seemed
to point to one thing:
the book
and its watercolors
were genuine.
- It is unique.
It is a unique...
It is a unique book.
♪♪
- Spring 2012.
-[Speaking Italian]
- While Bredekamp
and his team in Berlin
finished their examination,
the director of the
Girolamini Library in Naples
was arrested.
Under the pretext
of renovations,
he had been stealing thousands
of valuable volumes
from the Renaissance
library for months.
His name?
Marino Massimo De Caro,
ex-bookseller, and protégé
of Prime Minister Berlusconi's
culture minister.
Vito de Nicola is the current
director of the Girolamini.
- Interpreter: This is what a lot
of the library's rooms looked like.
This was the entrance hall.
The books were heaped
in piles near the door because,
every so often, a van would come
at night to steal them.
♪♪
- Today, it is still unclear
just how many books disappeared
under De Caro's watch.
Many catalogues
were simply destroyed.
♪♪
- Interpreter:
An architectural book
that managed to escape
the massacre.
♪♪
Here, some pages are missing.
These pages generally
have illustrations.
They've been cut out
and sold individually.
♪♪
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter:
Mr. De Caro was sentenced
in accordance with the
allegations against him.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter:
It was a serious blow
that the very person
who committed the crime
was the same person
who had been responsible
for protecting the heritage
of that extraordinary library.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: The Girolamini Library
was the first public library in history.
Its reading room is probably
the most beautiful in the world.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter:
My colleagues here continue
to view De Caro
as one of the worst
of all delinquents
because he is such an expert,
when it comes to books,
to cards,
but, at the same time,
so incredibly attached
to the economic value
of these objects.
♪♪
- In 2012,
Massimo De Caro was sentenced
to seven years
under house arrest.
His case shocked Italy and rare
book dealers all over the world.
[ Bell tolls ]
The National Library of Florence
owns the majority
of original Galileo texts
and received requests
from De Caro.
Before coming to the library
in Naples,
De Caro, as special advisor
to the cultural minister
in Rome,
paid a number of official visits
to national libraries.
Library curator Susanna Pelle
remembers meetings with De Caro.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter: In the world of
research, there were already,
there were doubts
about Massimo De Caro.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: Whenever he
came to the library,
the fact that
he came accompanied,
earlier than expected, always
expected to be welcomed...
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: ...there was something
a bit... dubious about it all.
- Presumably, De Caro looked
at these materials.
We do know that he
was very interested
in the Galileo collection
and, at one point, actually,
when he had a position
in the Ministry of Culture,
was trying to get the entire
Galileo collection...
350 manuscript volumes
like this,
plus a load of printed books...
Sent to Rome
to have them redigitized.
Luckily, the National Library
here refused that request.
Who knows what would've happened
if this entire collection
had gone to Rome?
It's very unlikely
that all of it would've come
back in the same condition.
- Historian Nick Wilding
is another scholar
of Galileo's work.
[ Tender tune plays ]
In 2012, he was writing a review
of a book about the
Bredekamp team's research
on the Martayan Ian copy.
♪♪
Now, several years after his
work on "Sidereus Nuncius,"
Wilding has come to the
National Library of Florence
to see their two copies
of the book.
- This is the first time
I've handled this manuscript.
I've looked at online
reproductions a lot.
We have the famous
observation notes,
where Galileo,
for the first time,
sees the satellites of Jupiter:
one of the most
exciting documents
in the history of science.
You see the night sky here.
He was very interested in
why the dark part
of the Moon at night
wasn't as dark as the night sky
and it's because light
is reflected from the Earth.
So he's very careful to make
the dark side of the Moon
a little bit lighter
than the night sky.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
- Working on his review,
Wilding studied the research
and online copies
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
and began to have doubts
about the Martayan Ian
copy's authenticity.
Here, we had something that
seemed to be Galileo's own copy,
with his own drawings in it,
with a provenance relating it
to the first scientific
academy in the world.
I mean, this is hot stuff.
You want it to be true.
- He learned that,
in 2005 and 2006,
several rare Galileo works
came on the market,
all bearing the same stamp
from Cesi's library.
- If you just went and looked
at examples of this same stamp
in other library collections,
where they'd been
for hundreds of years,
you found that that line
was always broken.
If you looked at any copy
that had come on the market
since 2005, this line
was always intact.
♪♪
I thought, "Well, perhaps
this is, at some level, a fake."
Now, there are multiple levels
at which an object like this
could be sophisticated
or forged.
It's not all or nothing.
- Wilding believed the stamp
was applied much later.
- But that seemed a weird thing.
If the Galileo
inscription was genuine
and the Moon pictures
were genuine,
why would you jeopardize
the value of this great,
already great, book by putting
a fake library stamp on it,
which is relatively
easily traceable?
And my initial working
assumption was that this was
a genuine copy
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
which lacked the illustrations.
There are 10 other copies
like that in the world.
So you get a real thing and then
you put in a fake library stamp.
You put in the inscription.
You put in the drawings
and it's suddenly worth 20 times
as much as a normal copy.
That makes good business sense.
Even though it's a criminal.
It's still an act of forgery.
♪♪
- The historian
then turned his eye
to the Galileo signature.
♪♪
- Everyone's signature changes
over their lifetimes,
but we have examples
from Galileo's correspondence
and from one other copy
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
with a dedication,
where we know exactly
what Galileo's signature
looked like in 1610.
- The signature on the
Martayan Ian copy is Galileo's,
but it's from his recantation
before the Inquisition in 1633,
23 years after "Sidereus
Nuncius" was published.
♪♪
After several more weeks
of research,
Wilding found
additional anomalies
in the text of the
Martayan Ian copy.
♪♪
With that evidence,
Wilding contacted Paul Needham.
- I'd been in correspondence
with Nick Wilding
for a couple of years,
about miscellaneous questions
in and around Galileo.
And I knew that he had
some doubts that he
didn't fully express,
but I kinda knew
they were there.
And I saw this message from him
and he said that,
in November 2005,
an auction house in New York
offered for sale
a copy of "Sidereus Nuncius"
in one of their auctions.
And he said the title page
was just like that of
the Martayan Ian copy,
which had a couple
of peculiarities on it.
This kinda came out of nowhere,
but there should not be
another copy
that has these peculiarities
because, theoretically,
that Martayan Ian copy
was a proof copy,
made just for Galileo
at an early stage of production.
The only way to do this is
to put it side by side
with a definitely authentic copy
and the copy to do it with was,
of course, the copy at Columbia
and, after about 20 minutes,
I saw disparities, having them
alongside each other.
Specifically, it had not been
printed from movable type
and, of course,
for a book in 1610,
that's the only way
to print a book,
so it had to be wrong.
I said that, "I think that,
putting our thoughts together",
we have absolute proof
that it's a forgery,"
[ Melancholy tune plays ]
and, yes, it is a forgery.
- Once Needham agreed
the book was a fake,
Wilding sent a difficult email
to Bredekamp himself.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter: The worst
moment was when I realized
the import
of Nick Wilding's email.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: That was here,
at this table, in this room.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: And, based purely on
the logic of what he had written me...
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter:
...within a short time,
I intuitively saw no way
of refuting his suspicion.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: The ground just
opens up beneath your feet.
That was one of the worst
moments in my consciousness.
Let's put it that way.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
- The work of the century
was a fake.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
[ Vehicle horn blares ]
Bredekamp brought
his team together
for a second time.
The scholars wanted
to understand
how they were tricked.
Richard Ian,
still the book's owner,
agreed to let the book
undergo a second analysis
and, this time,
the team would be allowed
to take paper samples.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
Once we were allowed
to take paper samples,
it was pretty simple:
The paper had been produced
in the 20th century.
But, to see that,
we needed the samples.
That had not been allowed
the first time we conducted
our measurements.
- In 2014, Bredekamp
made an announcement.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
Up until three years ago,
I did not think it was
possible to fake a book.
This is the first case.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter: I'd like to start
off by showing you the object...
the demon.
[ Laughter ]
This book was presented
to me in 2005.
Naturally, it had been
declared authentic
by the dealers in America,
as an original.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: What might have
also played a role was that,
until a few years ago, it just
wasn't considered possible
to forge a historical
book, at all.
- The researchers explained
what Wilding found:
tiny printing mistakes
that would've been impossible
in the 17th century
revealed the forger's
21st-century efforts.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
What led Nick Wilding,
the very first person to do so,
to recognize the book as a fake?
A single little spot.
And that was the moment
in May 2012.
It hit us like a brick.
♪♪
- The title page
of the Martayan Ian copy
has a spot next to the P
in Privilegio.
It matches a spot that appears
on a commemorative version
that was published in 1964,
in the city of Pisa,
but not on any first edition.
Needham also noticed
something odd
about the Latin word periodis
on the title page
of the Martayan Ian copy.
- There's the Latin wordperiodis,
like our word period,
meaning the periods of rotation.
And, in the Martayan Ian copy,
instead of p-e-R-i-o-d-i-s,
it was p-e-P-i-o-d-i-s,
which, sort of theoretically,
would've been a typographical
error of the compositor.
Any compositor eventually makes
some typographical errors,
here and there.
And the idea that there is
a second copy
with that same
typographical error,
which didn't appear
in any of the other
many copies that I'd examined,
both by facsimile
and in the original...
That is, by photographs
and in the original...
That just didn't make any sense.
- But what about the belief
that it was impossible to forge
an early modern book because
of the type impressions?
- They assumed that a forger
would have no type impression,
whatsoever, and that it would
just be flat on the paper.
So, all of these forgeries
have this deep ink impression
and so it was just assumed
that they were genuine.
But if you talk
to a printer and say,
"How would you go about
doing a forgery?"
They say, "Oh,
it's relatively easy."
- Such a believable fake is the
result of new printing methods.
- It's become extremely common,
now, to use photopolymer plates,
which are a kind of
light-sensitive plastic.
You expose a negative,
expose a plate
with a negative over it
and bits of the plate harden
and the rest, you wash away,
and you're left
with a relief plate.
When you print on it,
it gives exactly
the same kind of deep
letterpress impression
as printing with type.
- Photopolymer plates create
the indentation on the paper
that rare book dealers assumed
indicated a genuine book.
- So, when you're making
your forgery,
you press them into the paper
and it makes deep-ish
impressions into the paper,
which, at first, looks authentic
because that's what
printing types do.
- But they can also leave
evidence on the page
that reveals the forgery.
- When you put a piece of paper
down onto that inked type
and then push down, what you
frequently find is that,
while the letters leave a deep
impression, as well as inking,
little bits of ink
also just touch the paper
and you get these little lines
around the...
Especially around the tops
and bottoms
and sometimes in the margins.
But usually in the tops
and bottoms
of a 17th-century book,
you see these very faint
printer's ink lines.
- One can see these lines on the
pages of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
at Columbia University's Rare
Book and Manuscript Library.
- Right here is the shoulder ink
and, because it's right
at the edge,
when they stamped the ink,
a little bit of ink
got caught there.
But that ink is just like
a little trace
and so it's picked up
in the printing process.
- There's no force behind those.
There's no impression because
there's nothing sticking up.
There's just where
the paper's touched
the bits of ink
that've been caught
between the spacing bars.
So, the question is: If you take
a photograph of a printed page
and you don't white out those,
what we call shoulder inking,
and then you turn
that photograph
into a three-dimensional plate,
it occurred to me that
what one should find is
that those,
those little bits of inking
get turned into
a three-dimensional object,
in the same way that any
typographical character does.
And then,
when you print from that,
you should get an impression
of this incidental inking.
And that's impossible with typography,
but it should be...
The prediction was
that one should find that,
if one's looking at a forgery
made with photopolymer plates.
- The spot next to the P
in Privilegio,
with its deep impression
on the page
could only have happened
with a photopolymer plate.
♪♪
Once deemed impossible,
forging 17th-century books
was now a reality,
but once the book was proved
a fake, questions remained.
♪♪
Still serving his sentence
for his theft of the books
from the library in Naples,
Massimo De Caro lives in Verona,
with his wife
and two German shepherds.
-[Barks]
- The house is filled
with a collection of items
related to Galileo
and the exploration of space.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter:
This house mirrors me
and my passion
for Galileo Galilei,
a passion I have
transferred to my wife.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter:
Here are the autographs
of all 12 astronauts
who were on the Moon.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter:
This one is a reproduction
of the portrait
of Matteo Barberini,
when he was still a cardinal.
Later, he would become
Pope Urban VIII:
as we all know, the one
who would sentence Galileo.
♪♪
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: This suit was worn
by the Russian cosmonaut Frienko
during his mission on
the Mir space station.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: I have a
collection of facsimiles
of the "Sidereus Nuncius."
Let's have a look at this one.
But I have to say something:
They're not as beautiful
as the one I made.
This is a facsimile
of the "Nuncius" made in 1977,
but, when you touch it,
you don't feel a thing.
What I mean is the book is cold.
Now, if you take this book
and allow the paper to sing,
the paper sings.
Do you hear it?
[ Rattling ]
-[Continues in Italian]
[ Sniff ]
- Interpreter: Unfortunately,
you can't smell it.
[ Rattling ]
This book sings.
This book speaks.
This book transmits
something to us.
It's not dead,
like this modern book.
♪♪
- De Caro readily admits
he create the forged copy
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
with the watercolors.
♪♪
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter: I had a "Nuncius"
that I bought in Argentina.
It served as the basis
for my own work.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: I jokingly refer to
it as my kid because, to be honest,
I even brought it to bed with me
and leafed through it
[chuckle] before going to sleep.
I truly consider
the book I produced
to be a living creature.
The whole thing took me
more than three years.
Three years!
But, if I'm going to be honest,
I had so much fun.
♪♪
- The photopolymer plates
made quick work
of "Sidereus Nuncius's" text,
but De Caro found it difficult
to create believable copies
of the etchings.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter: I tried to
make etchings of the Moon
because I wanted to make
a normal copy of the Nuncius.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: But then I
realized that the appearance
of the modern etchings made
on paper wasn't all that great.
♪♪
- The 21st-century technology
that created the forged book
couldn't make believable
17th-century etchings.
♪♪
- It wasn't complicated,
but you could see
that they'd been made today.
There was no way
to age them properly.
I had to find something
to distract one's eyes
from the print,
and so I came up with the idea
of making the moons.
The story I wanted to
come up with for this copy
was that it was one of the 25
without any Moon etchings,
but that later,
in the 18th century,
the owner decided
to complete the book
by making watercolor moons.
The circle of the Moon
was drawn with a red-wine glass,
which had precisely
the right dimensions.
But when I learned that
the person who'd helped me
make the moons
could also emulate calligraphy,
I decided, "Let's go ahead
and take the leap."
Let's set the words
'Io Galileo Galilei fecit'
"on the title page."
And I have to say, it worked.
♪♪
- And the stamp
from the Cesi Library?
- Here we are.
As you can see,
this is the very same stamp
you see on the "Sidereus"...
The circle
with an unbroken line.
- De Caro claims again and again
that all of the mistakes
in the Martayan Ian copy
were made on purpose,
as if his work had been
an intellectual prank
to test academics
and antiquarians.
These claims
could help protect him
from legal charges of fraud.
He takes pride in the fact that
he was able to fool so many.
- That was the moment of truth.
Now I'd find out
if I'd done a good job.
Now we'd see whether
the experts would find
the breadcrumbs
I'd left behind in the woods,
but, no, they didn't find
the breadcrumbs.
It's like with a magician.
When he comes onstage,
the magician gives
the audience something to see
in order to cover up
his own tricks.
But I didn't create
a fake "Nuncius."
I created a different "Nuncius."
And that's the problem.
I created a different "Nuncius."
The problem
is the fake historians
who did not recognize
that it was a reproduction.
- Wilding doesn't believe
De Caro's claims.
- But we must never lose track
of the fact that
this was done for cash.
You know, this was a book that
was gonna sell for $10 million,
and that's the only point
that it exists.
All the stuff
that De Caro said about,
you know, this being
an intellectual challenge,
a hoax that reveals
how experts don't know
what they're talking about,
that's just kind of
retrospective attempt
to dissipate the seriousness
of what he's done.
He's committed fraud
on a massive scale,
and he's done it for money.
- This is a book
which automatically
is worth hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
Whatever he might say,
the motive is essentially
a financial one,
and, of course, he did sell it
successfully to a dealer.
♪♪
- Horst Bredekamp is haunted
by the mistaken authentication.
- Neither the group nor I
were able to recognize
the book as a fake.
This is a humiliation...
which is presumably comparable
to a very serious error
by a doctor.
♪♪
For the public
must be able to trust
that an art historian
can differentiate
between a fake and an original.
This is a trauma.
These are real copies
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
which I procured.
- Bredekamp and De Caro
even traded emails
once the forgery was discovered.
- In my correspondence with him,
there is
the unbelievable sentence,
"Dear Professor,
it must have seemed as if,"
once you had the drawings
of the fake 'Sidereus Nuncius'
before your eyes,
you were being confronted
"with the results
of your own work."
In other words, the forger used
my very own research,
and that just floored me.
That explains why I simply
did not want to recognize,
or perhaps could not
recognize, the fake as a fake.
- I feel a bit guilty,
because, in some ways,
I was inspired by him.
- Paul Needham had
a different reaction.
- Oh, I felt great.
- I felt great.
I mean, just...
I was so glad
that I hadn't gone on
believing something false.
To me, it was just thrilling
to be able to sit
with these two books
and find things
that really count as proofs.
- The forged "Sidereus Nuncius"
caused immense damage
to the antiquarian book market.
- Many institutions are refusing
to buy anything
that is coming from Italy,
so it had
a very negative effect.
- People would become concerned
that they were going to end up
buying a fake
or something stolen,
and all you have
is your reputation,
because people can always buy
from somebody else.
- Many dealers continue
to consult Owen Gingerich.
- De Caro is getting out of
arrest in a few months.
- Really?
- Mm-hmm.
- What do you think he's gonna do
when he gets out?
- [ Chuckles ]
- Go back to the old hobby?
Have you received
a personal invitation
to his coming-out party?
- They are very much worried
to have De Caro loose again.
Who knows what he has
squirreled away
and what he will be up to?
♪♪
- In the meantime,
many large libraries,
museums, and foundations
have been asking themselves
whether some of their stamps,
drawings, or even entire books
could be faked.
♪♪
- This book
is a very good fake...
The structure of the layers,
the structure of the paper,
the structure of the watermark,
but it's not the only fake
that exists,
and I assume
it won't be the last.
- We thought that
our case would be
enough of a wake-up call
for someone in the world
to create a database of fakes.
As far as I know,
that has not been the case.
- De Caro, one hopes,
will not make more forgeries,
but other people will.
This is a cheap technology.
I myself could forge an
acceptable "Sidereus Nuncius"
for a few thousand dollars.
- It's like doping.
Along with the ability
to detect doping drugs,
new, undetectable drugs arrive.
Doping and forgeries
are the same...
In terms of methodology,
in any event.
- The story is not over,
it's ongoing.
And in a bigger sense,
the story is ongoing
because the techniques
and technologies
that Massimo De Caro used
are still with us.
And there's nothing illegal
in replicating
a 17th-century book, right?
So we're gonna see
a lot more of this.
It's really...
It's getting to be pretty easy
to make a forgery now.
Once you start
admitting forgery,
or saying basically
that the market can decide
what's true and what's not
and that if the market wants the
forgery to be true, it is true,
then that's fundamentally
pretty disturbing,
because then truth is for sale.
- And for Wilding,
fake books lead
to false history.
- Well, history just matters.
If you start
fabricating the objects,
then you might as well fabricate
an entirely different,
alternative history,
and from there, you can start
denying major historical events,
you can rewrite history...
You're in an Orwellian world
where political power
governs truth.
And I think one of
the first victim of that
is the general public.
- The forging of books
remains far less lucrative
than creating fake Picasso
paintings or Giacometti statues.
But what do these technologies
mean for the rare-book market?
- How much longer will
this market last?
I cannot make any predictions.
I can only express
my
For a long time now,
I haven't bought any books
on the antiquarian market.
- The publication
of "Sidereus Nuncius" in 1610
ultimately led
to Galileo's arrest
and trial
by the Inquisition in 1633.
- He was a lightning rod
for people who were
interested in his work
and people who didn't like
what he was doing
because it's hard to give up
what you've thought
all your life
and what has history
and the general opinion.
- Galileo's influence
remains immeasurable
four centuries later.
♪♪
- That was the beginning
of cosmology
as we still know it today.
- I think that
these Galileo documents
still have something to say.
They continue to transmit
this desire to know.
I think this is what drives
our societies forward,
and, above all, this is
the most important thing,
the very heart
of the human being.
- Galileo's voice comes out very,
very loud and clearly
over more than four centuries.
We have this conversation
that he enabled
by leaving this mass
of papers and writings
and drawings and artifacts.
- Ignition sequence start...
- 6, 5, 4, 3...
- Our modern space program
owes its own debt
to Galileo
and "Sidereus Nuncius."
- We have a liftoff.
- "Sidereus Nuncius"
is the book that showed
that the Moon was
a place you could go to
and stand on when you got there.
- Both hands stand
about the fourth rung up.
- With a little guidance,
our theoretical Galileo
would have gotten himself
up to speed
with today's science
very quickly.
[ Beep ]
- And on the Apollo 15 mission,
the astronauts
paid tribute to him.
- Commander David Scott
did Galileo's experiment
on the Moon.
- Well, in my left hand,
I have a feather.
In my right hand, a hammer.
I guess one of the
reasons we got here today
was because of a gentleman
named Galileo a long time ago
who made a rather
significant discovery
about falling objects
and gravity fields.
And we thought that,
where would be a better place
to confirm his findings
than on the Moon?
And I'll drop
the two of them here,
and, hopefully, they'll hit
the ground at the same time.
How 'bout that?
That proves that Mr. Galileo
was correct in his findings.
♪♪
Superb.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
- The find of a century:
a proof copy of one
of the most important books
in the history of science...
♪♪
...complete with paintings
by the book's author, himself,
one of the greatest scientific
minds of all time...
♪♪
[ Suspenseful music climbs ]
Galileo Galilei.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
A discovery that set
the rare book market abuzz.
- If it were true, I thought
that this would,
would really change
the historical record.
- How great would that be,
if there were a copy
of "Sidereus Nuncius" that had
Galileo's own paintings in it?
Wow!
I would love to see that.
- When it was published in 1610,
the book opened up
the universe to humanity.
- It implied a different scale
of the universe
than had been commonly
believed before that.
It was an exciting
piece of news.
Nothing like this had ever
been published before.
- But, even after the proof
copy was authenticated,
questions remained.
- Interpreter: In terms of value,
the market is constantly growing
and the means of creating
forgeries and fakes
are constantly improving.
- You generally assume
that the things
that look old, smell old,
are old,
and, generally, we don't live
in a state
of constant skepticism,
where we're
constantly questioning,
you know, "Is this genuine?"
♪♪
- Books by some of the
greatest minds in history,
forged, to be sold
for small fortunes.
♪♪
But more than money is at stake.
These works are the very basis
of our system of knowledge.
If the books can't be trusted,
can the knowledge inside?
- I'm a historian and,
if people start messing
with the tools of my trade,
then I get angry
and have to do something
about it.
♪♪
- "Galileo's Moon."
♪♪
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
- Rare books can fetch
hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of dollars.
♪♪
They are a tangible piece
of history and knowledge.
♪♪
- It's 1631.
- It's a unique book.
- This is 1478.
St. Ignatius was reading this
when he had his conversion
and found the word
"Jesuit" in here,
used for the first time.
- This was
a pharmaceutical manual,
created specifically for doctors
in the 14th century.
It's unique because it
was made for one person,
preserved in its
original binding.
- So, this is 550-year-old paper
and you can hear it and see
- With the dotcom boom
and vast fortunes
being made very quickly,
people are looking for
some kinda culture to buy
and what kind of culture
do they wanna buy?
Tech culture.
And what's tech culture?
It's the history of science.
So, things like Newton,
Copernicus, Galileo.
- The book is US$200,000.
- This is $35,000.
- You have something by Einstein,
by Isaac Newton, by Copernicus.
I mean, these are things
that changed the world.
♪♪
- Galileo Galilei's works
are always popular,
especially his masterpiece,
the "Sidereus Nuncius,"
the "Starry Messenger."
- The "Sidereus Nuncius"
is an announcement
of the most exciting
news imaginable.
It's a really thrilling book.
- Interpreter:
The "Sidereus Nuncius"
is an unusual work,
very unusual.
Only 550 copies
in total were printed.
Of these 550,
today, with certainty,
we are familiar
with no more than 100.
- The market price
for a good first edition,
depending on its condition,
varies between $300,000
and $500,000.
But its worth goes far
beyond the price.
In 2005, a previously
unknown copy was brought
to rare bookseller Richard Ian,
one of the owners
of Martayan Ian
in New York City.
It created a sensation
that moved beyond the insular
world of rare books.
♪♪
Galileo's "Sidereus Nuncius"
has a special place
in the history of science.
- "Sidereus Nuncius"
is important to everyone
because it's one of the few
really revolutionary books
that have ever been written.
It's changed the way
that we think about the cosmos
in about 60 pages,
as though you're witnessing
exactly what he saw
400 years later,
which is a pretty moving
experience, as well.
[Wind blowing]
- But it radically shook up
what seemed to be accepted
truths of all kinds.
- The day after it was published,
someone sent it off
to the king of England.
It was immediately seen
as a startling revelation
that everyone should know about
as quickly as possible,
especially people
in high places.
♪♪
-1610.
Galileo Galilei is 45 years old
and lives in this building.
He is a professor
at the University of Padua,
where he teaches
a number of subjects.
By this point in his life,
he's already constructed
an early thermometer,
designed and improved
a proportional compass,
and he's built a telescope
for himself
and turns it
toward the night sky.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
[ Wind blowing ]
[ Tranquil tune plays ]
"Forsaking terrestrial
observations,"
I turned to celestial ones
and, first, I saw the Moon
from as near at hand
"as if it were scarcely
two terrestrial radii away."
♪♪
The five etchings
in "Sidereus Nuncius"
are based on the drawings
Galileo made
while looking
through the telescope.
[ Chorale joins ]
- You're brought close
to being in the print shop
where Galileo was
delivering his manuscript.
It's as close as you can get
to sitting next to Galileo
and looking through
a telescope with him.
- "From observations of these
spots repeated many times,
I have been led
to the opinion and conviction
that the surface of the Moon
is not smooth, uniform,
but is uneven, rough, and full
of cavities and prominences,
being not unlike
the face of the Earth,
"relieved by chains of mountains
and deep valleys."
♪♪
- Galileo's observations
are the foundation
of our basic understanding
of the universe.
The Sun, encircled
by orbiting planets,
is at the center,
and not the Earth.
- Before 1610,
it was generally accepted
that the universe
was centered on the Earth,
that God had made the Earth,
made humans on it,
and we were the center
of everything.
After 1610, you have
this empirical evidence
that maybe
the Copernican hypothesis,
of the Sun being the center
of rotation of the universe,
is physically true.
- Galileo's drawings
upended the worldview
that had lasted
for at least two millennia.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
In 1543,
Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus
questioned the idea
that the Earth was
at the center of the universe,
but couldn't provide proof.
Galileo did.
- The universe was changing
and this book was the agent
of that change.
It has a kind of deeper
psychological impact, I think,
about where we are
in the universe
and what our... whether
we're anything special.
It starts to shift humanity
from its central,
God-given position, physically,
at the center of the universe,
to a more marginal position,
where we are
third rock from the Sun,
hurtling through space.
It opens up a whole load
of new questions
about what it means to be human.
♪♪
- After observing the Moon,
Galileo shifted the telescope
and was able to see Jupiter.
♪♪
[ Pen scraping ]
-"On the 13th of January,
four stars were seen by me
for the first time,
in this situation
relative to Jupiter.
Three were westerly,
and one was to the east.
They formed a straight line,
except that the middle
western star
departed slightly toward the north.
On the 14th,
the weather was cloudy.
♪♪
On the 27th of February,
four minutes
after the first hour,
the stars appeared
in this configuration.
The easternmost was
10 minutes from Jupiter;
"the next, 30 seconds."
- Galileo had seen three
of Jupiter's moons,
effectively proving the Earth
was not the center
of the universe.
- He realized that
the implication of that was
that they were rotating
around Jupiter
and nobody's conception
of the solar system,
or the universe, in general,
had ever allowed that planets
have smaller bodies
revolving around them.
♪♪
- When it came
to the moons of Jupiter,
[laughing] there was just
no precedent for explaining it
and he's open
about his amazement,
his befuddlement, at first,
how to make sense.
It takes a couple of days
for him to come to,
"Wait a minute, there are..."
There are bodies moving
around Jupiter.
"There's no other explanation."
♪♪
- His observations
of both Jupiter's satellites
and the imperfect surface
of the Moon
would ultimately contradict
Church teaching.
In 1616,
six years after "Sidereus
Nuncius" was published,
the Roman Inquisition
banned heliocentrism,
the belief that the Earth
revolves around the Sun,
from being taught.
[ Sinister chord strikes ]
Horst Bredekamp has studied
Galileo for 20 years
and continues to marvel
at how quickly
the astronomer published
his treatise:
just months after his initial
observations of the Moon.
♪♪
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter: When he sees
that Jupiter has moons,
that we're not the only
planetary system,
he decides,
"I'm going to make a book."
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: He knew that
whoever would be the first
to print the formulation
on a sheet of paper, dated...
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter:
..."The Earth is like the Moon.
The Moon is like the Earth,"
would have formulated one
of the greatest revolutions
in astronomy history.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
- Galileo continued
to study and sketch
the Moon and stars,
even after printing had begun.
- He was in such a heat
to get the book published
that the end was more or less
a first draft,
while the book was on press,
so that he was revising
and there's extra material.
He knew he was on
to something gigantic
and he wanted to have
his name on it.
- Interpreter:
Galileo changed the title
while they were
in the process of printing.
He gave the Inquisition,
which had to allow the book to be printed,
a different title
than the final one.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: During the
day, the printer printed
what he had been
busy formulating
throughout the night.
♪♪
- Interpreter: On March 3rd,
he makes his final examination
and, on the 10th or the 11th,
the book is available:
a speed that, even today,
remains unbeatable.
♪♪
- The result is a masterpiece
that rewrote
the entire understanding
of man's place in the universe.
[ Bell tolling ]
Harvard professor Owen Gingerich
is a noted astronomer
and is also extremely
knowledgeable about rare books.
- I get consulted by the FBI,
every once in a while.
Probably, I shouldn't be
too talkative about this.
- The professor likes to visit
Harvard's oldest telescope,
built in 1847 and the largest
in the world at the time.
Gingerich understands the doors
Galileo opened for him,
as an astronomer, and marvels
at how luck and timing
affected the discoveries
in "Sidereus Nuncius."
- What happened was that
the Moon was reasonably close
and so, apparently, he figured,
after looking at the Moon,
he would have a look at Jupiter
because it was close.
And, lo and behold, he could
see the little satellites
and this wouldn't have
been possible,
if he had done it
six months earlier.
- Gingerich is often asked
to authenticate rare books
and remembers the day in 2005
when the Martayan Ian copy
of "Sidereus Nuncius"
was placed in front of him.
- Richard Ian, who is a New York
rare book dealer,
I had known him for a long time
and he brought
two Italians with him,
who had this book for sale.
So I started looking at the book
and, right at the beginning,
there is Galileo's signature.
♪♪
- The book was signed and
dedicated by Galileo, himself:
"Io, Galileo Galilei fecit,"
"I, Galileo Galilei, made this."
- There aren't that many books
which Galileo signed.
- The book also had a stamp
from the library of Prince Cesi,
founder of the
Accademia dei Lincei,
which was dedicated
to scientific exploration.
Galileo himself was
a member of the academy.
Both items made the newly found
manuscript even more exciting,
but were insignificant, compared
to what Gingerich saw next.
- As we turned the pages of this book,
the striking thing was
the drawings of the Moon.
Only, instead of being
the etchings,
these were obviously
watercolors,
as if this was
a very early stage,
and, therefore,
singularly valuable.
- Was it possible the book
was an early proof,
printed before the etchings
of Galileo's drawings
of the Moon were ready,
one to which Galileo
himself had added
his own watercolor
paintings of the Moon?
- There are authentic surviving
copies of "Sidereus Nuncius"
that just have blanks where
the Moon etchings should be.
- Interpreter: It made headlines
throughout the entire world.
An original manuscript
with drawings by Galilei
had been found.
- Interpreter: It contains
original watercolors by Galileo.
What an exceptional document!
It's like finding
an extremely important
and previously
unpublished manuscript!
- Interpreter: Yes, number zero,
the galley proof, the very first copy.
In other words, in 100 years,
there hadn't been a find
of this magnitude.
- What made it spectacular
was that it had
Galileo's signature on it.
It had these drawings,
supposedly in Galileo's hand.
It had a library stamp linking
it to the Lincean Academy.
- Interpreter: If real,
it would be an exceptional document
and one that would fetch
ex traordinary prices.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
You have to imagine,
his signature, "Io," "I,"
"Galileo Galilei fecit,"
"I have made this."
The pride emanating from that.
All that created
such a sense of immediacy.
Galileo's aura was closer
to those in that room
than it had ever been before,
thanks to that book.
And that really made
an impact on people...
On me, as well...
And fascinated them.
That secured the book's
renown around the world.
- The men who brought
the book to Richard Ian
claimed it had been
lying untouched
for centuries in Argentina
before they found it
and offered to sell it.
- Interpreter:
You can see how the ink here
penetrates through
to the other side.
Everything appears to add up.
Here, in exactly the same way,
the other books have etchings
at precisely these points.
And then here, on this page,
the depictions of Jupiter
and its dancing moons begin.
-[Continues in German]
- If genuine,
the estimated market value?
$10 million.
-[Bangs gavel]
- At the time,
most rare book dealers
did not worry too much
about forgeries
because of the labor involved
in making a believable fake.
- It had generally been assumed
that you couldn't successfully
forge 17th-century books.
17th-century books are produced
using bits of metal type
and a hand press and there are
just too many physical factors
that are difficult to recreate,
nowadays, to make it worthwhile.
- The letterpress
printing process
would require the creation
of identical versions
of each letter and punctuation
mark that appears on every page.
And then, the forger would have
to match the exact spacing
between every letter
in the book.
Book dealers put great stock
in the belief
that their products
simply couldn't be forged.
In addition to the tedious
labor involved,
the pages in early modern books
have a unique characteristic
that rare book dealers believed
was difficult to duplicate.
- Most forgeries
of early modern books
have been done lithographically
or using laser jet.
Neither of those
printing techniques
leaves any print impression
in the page.
The Martayan Ian copy
had this deep impression,
so, almost instinctively,
when you look at it and feel it,
it looks like a genuine
17th-century book
and it doesn't look like
a facsimile.
- It seemed unlikely
that anyone would create
a copy of "Sidereus Nuncius"
as believable
as the Martayan Ian copy,
but it still needed
a thorough scientific
examination for authentication.
Bredekamp put together a team
of international experts
that would analyze
every aspect of the book:
paper, ink, binding.
Until this point, only copies
of the Gutenberg Bible
had been examined so carefully.
It was sent to the
Federal Institute of Materials
Research and Testing in Berlin,
which examined
the Dead Sea Scrolls,
paintings by Durer,
and texts by Bach.
For three days, the Martayan Ian
"Sidereus Nuncius" was subjected
to an analysis
of all its materials,
using infrared light,
3-D microscopes,
and X-ray fluorescence.
♪♪
- Interpreter: At the moment,
we are measuring the paper
and elements such as potassium
or calcium are to be expected.
If it were modern paper,
one would also expect to find
barium and titanium.
- These techniques allowed
for a noninvasive analysis
so that, crucially,
not even a tiny scrap of paper
needed to be removed.
- The most concrete test
that you could do
would be to cut
a square inch of paper out
and burn it
and do a carbon-14 test.
Nobody wants to do that 'cause,
if you've got a genuine book,
you're now missing
a square inch of it.
- Interpreter: If we had found
elements, materials, or substances
that had not fit with those
of the 17th century,
we would have immediately
said it was a fake or a copy.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: The most important
question concerned the watercolors,
for they are extremely
unusual in this book.
And what we learned is that
it was an organic material,
most likely a kind of
bister ink,
which is not unusual
for the 17th century at all.
- Scholar Paul Needham was a part
of Bredekamp's team in Berlin.
- And so I was going
to write a chapter
about the printing
of "Sidereus Nuncius,"
the physical process
of printing, producing,
the 1610 edition.
And so it turned into
just a great opportunity
to deal with both this book
and with early
17th-century printing,
with the book trade,
so on and so forth,
and so it was a very enjoyable
couple of years
of intense study.
- The various elements all seemed
to point to one thing:
the book
and its watercolors
were genuine.
- It is unique.
It is a unique...
It is a unique book.
♪♪
- Spring 2012.
-[Speaking Italian]
- While Bredekamp
and his team in Berlin
finished their examination,
the director of the
Girolamini Library in Naples
was arrested.
Under the pretext
of renovations,
he had been stealing thousands
of valuable volumes
from the Renaissance
library for months.
His name?
Marino Massimo De Caro,
ex-bookseller, and protégé
of Prime Minister Berlusconi's
culture minister.
Vito de Nicola is the current
director of the Girolamini.
- Interpreter: This is what a lot
of the library's rooms looked like.
This was the entrance hall.
The books were heaped
in piles near the door because,
every so often, a van would come
at night to steal them.
♪♪
- Today, it is still unclear
just how many books disappeared
under De Caro's watch.
Many catalogues
were simply destroyed.
♪♪
- Interpreter:
An architectural book
that managed to escape
the massacre.
♪♪
Here, some pages are missing.
These pages generally
have illustrations.
They've been cut out
and sold individually.
♪♪
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter:
Mr. De Caro was sentenced
in accordance with the
allegations against him.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter:
It was a serious blow
that the very person
who committed the crime
was the same person
who had been responsible
for protecting the heritage
of that extraordinary library.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: The Girolamini Library
was the first public library in history.
Its reading room is probably
the most beautiful in the world.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter:
My colleagues here continue
to view De Caro
as one of the worst
of all delinquents
because he is such an expert,
when it comes to books,
to cards,
but, at the same time,
so incredibly attached
to the economic value
of these objects.
♪♪
- In 2012,
Massimo De Caro was sentenced
to seven years
under house arrest.
His case shocked Italy and rare
book dealers all over the world.
[ Bell tolls ]
The National Library of Florence
owns the majority
of original Galileo texts
and received requests
from De Caro.
Before coming to the library
in Naples,
De Caro, as special advisor
to the cultural minister
in Rome,
paid a number of official visits
to national libraries.
Library curator Susanna Pelle
remembers meetings with De Caro.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter: In the world of
research, there were already,
there were doubts
about Massimo De Caro.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: Whenever he
came to the library,
the fact that
he came accompanied,
earlier than expected, always
expected to be welcomed...
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: ...there was something
a bit... dubious about it all.
- Presumably, De Caro looked
at these materials.
We do know that he
was very interested
in the Galileo collection
and, at one point, actually,
when he had a position
in the Ministry of Culture,
was trying to get the entire
Galileo collection...
350 manuscript volumes
like this,
plus a load of printed books...
Sent to Rome
to have them redigitized.
Luckily, the National Library
here refused that request.
Who knows what would've happened
if this entire collection
had gone to Rome?
It's very unlikely
that all of it would've come
back in the same condition.
- Historian Nick Wilding
is another scholar
of Galileo's work.
[ Tender tune plays ]
In 2012, he was writing a review
of a book about the
Bredekamp team's research
on the Martayan Ian copy.
♪♪
Now, several years after his
work on "Sidereus Nuncius,"
Wilding has come to the
National Library of Florence
to see their two copies
of the book.
- This is the first time
I've handled this manuscript.
I've looked at online
reproductions a lot.
We have the famous
observation notes,
where Galileo,
for the first time,
sees the satellites of Jupiter:
one of the most
exciting documents
in the history of science.
You see the night sky here.
He was very interested in
why the dark part
of the Moon at night
wasn't as dark as the night sky
and it's because light
is reflected from the Earth.
So he's very careful to make
the dark side of the Moon
a little bit lighter
than the night sky.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
- Working on his review,
Wilding studied the research
and online copies
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
and began to have doubts
about the Martayan Ian
copy's authenticity.
Here, we had something that
seemed to be Galileo's own copy,
with his own drawings in it,
with a provenance relating it
to the first scientific
academy in the world.
I mean, this is hot stuff.
You want it to be true.
- He learned that,
in 2005 and 2006,
several rare Galileo works
came on the market,
all bearing the same stamp
from Cesi's library.
- If you just went and looked
at examples of this same stamp
in other library collections,
where they'd been
for hundreds of years,
you found that that line
was always broken.
If you looked at any copy
that had come on the market
since 2005, this line
was always intact.
♪♪
I thought, "Well, perhaps
this is, at some level, a fake."
Now, there are multiple levels
at which an object like this
could be sophisticated
or forged.
It's not all or nothing.
- Wilding believed the stamp
was applied much later.
- But that seemed a weird thing.
If the Galileo
inscription was genuine
and the Moon pictures
were genuine,
why would you jeopardize
the value of this great,
already great, book by putting
a fake library stamp on it,
which is relatively
easily traceable?
And my initial working
assumption was that this was
a genuine copy
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
which lacked the illustrations.
There are 10 other copies
like that in the world.
So you get a real thing and then
you put in a fake library stamp.
You put in the inscription.
You put in the drawings
and it's suddenly worth 20 times
as much as a normal copy.
That makes good business sense.
Even though it's a criminal.
It's still an act of forgery.
♪♪
- The historian
then turned his eye
to the Galileo signature.
♪♪
- Everyone's signature changes
over their lifetimes,
but we have examples
from Galileo's correspondence
and from one other copy
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
with a dedication,
where we know exactly
what Galileo's signature
looked like in 1610.
- The signature on the
Martayan Ian copy is Galileo's,
but it's from his recantation
before the Inquisition in 1633,
23 years after "Sidereus
Nuncius" was published.
♪♪
After several more weeks
of research,
Wilding found
additional anomalies
in the text of the
Martayan Ian copy.
♪♪
With that evidence,
Wilding contacted Paul Needham.
- I'd been in correspondence
with Nick Wilding
for a couple of years,
about miscellaneous questions
in and around Galileo.
And I knew that he had
some doubts that he
didn't fully express,
but I kinda knew
they were there.
And I saw this message from him
and he said that,
in November 2005,
an auction house in New York
offered for sale
a copy of "Sidereus Nuncius"
in one of their auctions.
And he said the title page
was just like that of
the Martayan Ian copy,
which had a couple
of peculiarities on it.
This kinda came out of nowhere,
but there should not be
another copy
that has these peculiarities
because, theoretically,
that Martayan Ian copy
was a proof copy,
made just for Galileo
at an early stage of production.
The only way to do this is
to put it side by side
with a definitely authentic copy
and the copy to do it with was,
of course, the copy at Columbia
and, after about 20 minutes,
I saw disparities, having them
alongside each other.
Specifically, it had not been
printed from movable type
and, of course,
for a book in 1610,
that's the only way
to print a book,
so it had to be wrong.
I said that, "I think that,
putting our thoughts together",
we have absolute proof
that it's a forgery,"
[ Melancholy tune plays ]
and, yes, it is a forgery.
- Once Needham agreed
the book was a fake,
Wilding sent a difficult email
to Bredekamp himself.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter: The worst
moment was when I realized
the import
of Nick Wilding's email.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: That was here,
at this table, in this room.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: And, based purely on
the logic of what he had written me...
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter:
...within a short time,
I intuitively saw no way
of refuting his suspicion.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: The ground just
opens up beneath your feet.
That was one of the worst
moments in my consciousness.
Let's put it that way.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
- The work of the century
was a fake.
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ]
[ Vehicle horn blares ]
Bredekamp brought
his team together
for a second time.
The scholars wanted
to understand
how they were tricked.
Richard Ian,
still the book's owner,
agreed to let the book
undergo a second analysis
and, this time,
the team would be allowed
to take paper samples.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
Once we were allowed
to take paper samples,
it was pretty simple:
The paper had been produced
in the 20th century.
But, to see that,
we needed the samples.
That had not been allowed
the first time we conducted
our measurements.
- In 2014, Bredekamp
made an announcement.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
Up until three years ago,
I did not think it was
possible to fake a book.
This is the first case.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter: I'd like to start
off by showing you the object...
the demon.
[ Laughter ]
This book was presented
to me in 2005.
Naturally, it had been
declared authentic
by the dealers in America,
as an original.
-[Continues in German]
- Interpreter: What might have
also played a role was that,
until a few years ago, it just
wasn't considered possible
to forge a historical
book, at all.
- The researchers explained
what Wilding found:
tiny printing mistakes
that would've been impossible
in the 17th century
revealed the forger's
21st-century efforts.
-[Speaking German]
- Interpreter:
What led Nick Wilding,
the very first person to do so,
to recognize the book as a fake?
A single little spot.
And that was the moment
in May 2012.
It hit us like a brick.
♪♪
- The title page
of the Martayan Ian copy
has a spot next to the P
in Privilegio.
It matches a spot that appears
on a commemorative version
that was published in 1964,
in the city of Pisa,
but not on any first edition.
Needham also noticed
something odd
about the Latin word periodis
on the title page
of the Martayan Ian copy.
- There's the Latin wordperiodis,
like our word period,
meaning the periods of rotation.
And, in the Martayan Ian copy,
instead of p-e-R-i-o-d-i-s,
it was p-e-P-i-o-d-i-s,
which, sort of theoretically,
would've been a typographical
error of the compositor.
Any compositor eventually makes
some typographical errors,
here and there.
And the idea that there is
a second copy
with that same
typographical error,
which didn't appear
in any of the other
many copies that I'd examined,
both by facsimile
and in the original...
That is, by photographs
and in the original...
That just didn't make any sense.
- But what about the belief
that it was impossible to forge
an early modern book because
of the type impressions?
- They assumed that a forger
would have no type impression,
whatsoever, and that it would
just be flat on the paper.
So, all of these forgeries
have this deep ink impression
and so it was just assumed
that they were genuine.
But if you talk
to a printer and say,
"How would you go about
doing a forgery?"
They say, "Oh,
it's relatively easy."
- Such a believable fake is the
result of new printing methods.
- It's become extremely common,
now, to use photopolymer plates,
which are a kind of
light-sensitive plastic.
You expose a negative,
expose a plate
with a negative over it
and bits of the plate harden
and the rest, you wash away,
and you're left
with a relief plate.
When you print on it,
it gives exactly
the same kind of deep
letterpress impression
as printing with type.
- Photopolymer plates create
the indentation on the paper
that rare book dealers assumed
indicated a genuine book.
- So, when you're making
your forgery,
you press them into the paper
and it makes deep-ish
impressions into the paper,
which, at first, looks authentic
because that's what
printing types do.
- But they can also leave
evidence on the page
that reveals the forgery.
- When you put a piece of paper
down onto that inked type
and then push down, what you
frequently find is that,
while the letters leave a deep
impression, as well as inking,
little bits of ink
also just touch the paper
and you get these little lines
around the...
Especially around the tops
and bottoms
and sometimes in the margins.
But usually in the tops
and bottoms
of a 17th-century book,
you see these very faint
printer's ink lines.
- One can see these lines on the
pages of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
at Columbia University's Rare
Book and Manuscript Library.
- Right here is the shoulder ink
and, because it's right
at the edge,
when they stamped the ink,
a little bit of ink
got caught there.
But that ink is just like
a little trace
and so it's picked up
in the printing process.
- There's no force behind those.
There's no impression because
there's nothing sticking up.
There's just where
the paper's touched
the bits of ink
that've been caught
between the spacing bars.
So, the question is: If you take
a photograph of a printed page
and you don't white out those,
what we call shoulder inking,
and then you turn
that photograph
into a three-dimensional plate,
it occurred to me that
what one should find is
that those,
those little bits of inking
get turned into
a three-dimensional object,
in the same way that any
typographical character does.
And then,
when you print from that,
you should get an impression
of this incidental inking.
And that's impossible with typography,
but it should be...
The prediction was
that one should find that,
if one's looking at a forgery
made with photopolymer plates.
- The spot next to the P
in Privilegio,
with its deep impression
on the page
could only have happened
with a photopolymer plate.
♪♪
Once deemed impossible,
forging 17th-century books
was now a reality,
but once the book was proved
a fake, questions remained.
♪♪
Still serving his sentence
for his theft of the books
from the library in Naples,
Massimo De Caro lives in Verona,
with his wife
and two German shepherds.
-[Barks]
- The house is filled
with a collection of items
related to Galileo
and the exploration of space.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter:
This house mirrors me
and my passion
for Galileo Galilei,
a passion I have
transferred to my wife.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter:
Here are the autographs
of all 12 astronauts
who were on the Moon.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter:
This one is a reproduction
of the portrait
of Matteo Barberini,
when he was still a cardinal.
Later, he would become
Pope Urban VIII:
as we all know, the one
who would sentence Galileo.
♪♪
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: This suit was worn
by the Russian cosmonaut Frienko
during his mission on
the Mir space station.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: I have a
collection of facsimiles
of the "Sidereus Nuncius."
Let's have a look at this one.
But I have to say something:
They're not as beautiful
as the one I made.
This is a facsimile
of the "Nuncius" made in 1977,
but, when you touch it,
you don't feel a thing.
What I mean is the book is cold.
Now, if you take this book
and allow the paper to sing,
the paper sings.
Do you hear it?
[ Rattling ]
-[Continues in Italian]
[ Sniff ]
- Interpreter: Unfortunately,
you can't smell it.
[ Rattling ]
This book sings.
This book speaks.
This book transmits
something to us.
It's not dead,
like this modern book.
♪♪
- De Caro readily admits
he create the forged copy
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
with the watercolors.
♪♪
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter: I had a "Nuncius"
that I bought in Argentina.
It served as the basis
for my own work.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: I jokingly refer to
it as my kid because, to be honest,
I even brought it to bed with me
and leafed through it
[chuckle] before going to sleep.
I truly consider
the book I produced
to be a living creature.
The whole thing took me
more than three years.
Three years!
But, if I'm going to be honest,
I had so much fun.
♪♪
- The photopolymer plates
made quick work
of "Sidereus Nuncius's" text,
but De Caro found it difficult
to create believable copies
of the etchings.
-[Speaking Italian]
- Interpreter: I tried to
make etchings of the Moon
because I wanted to make
a normal copy of the Nuncius.
-[Continues in Italian]
- Interpreter: But then I
realized that the appearance
of the modern etchings made
on paper wasn't all that great.
♪♪
- The 21st-century technology
that created the forged book
couldn't make believable
17th-century etchings.
♪♪
- It wasn't complicated,
but you could see
that they'd been made today.
There was no way
to age them properly.
I had to find something
to distract one's eyes
from the print,
and so I came up with the idea
of making the moons.
The story I wanted to
come up with for this copy
was that it was one of the 25
without any Moon etchings,
but that later,
in the 18th century,
the owner decided
to complete the book
by making watercolor moons.
The circle of the Moon
was drawn with a red-wine glass,
which had precisely
the right dimensions.
But when I learned that
the person who'd helped me
make the moons
could also emulate calligraphy,
I decided, "Let's go ahead
and take the leap."
Let's set the words
'Io Galileo Galilei fecit'
"on the title page."
And I have to say, it worked.
♪♪
- And the stamp
from the Cesi Library?
- Here we are.
As you can see,
this is the very same stamp
you see on the "Sidereus"...
The circle
with an unbroken line.
- De Caro claims again and again
that all of the mistakes
in the Martayan Ian copy
were made on purpose,
as if his work had been
an intellectual prank
to test academics
and antiquarians.
These claims
could help protect him
from legal charges of fraud.
He takes pride in the fact that
he was able to fool so many.
- That was the moment of truth.
Now I'd find out
if I'd done a good job.
Now we'd see whether
the experts would find
the breadcrumbs
I'd left behind in the woods,
but, no, they didn't find
the breadcrumbs.
It's like with a magician.
When he comes onstage,
the magician gives
the audience something to see
in order to cover up
his own tricks.
But I didn't create
a fake "Nuncius."
I created a different "Nuncius."
And that's the problem.
I created a different "Nuncius."
The problem
is the fake historians
who did not recognize
that it was a reproduction.
- Wilding doesn't believe
De Caro's claims.
- But we must never lose track
of the fact that
this was done for cash.
You know, this was a book that
was gonna sell for $10 million,
and that's the only point
that it exists.
All the stuff
that De Caro said about,
you know, this being
an intellectual challenge,
a hoax that reveals
how experts don't know
what they're talking about,
that's just kind of
retrospective attempt
to dissipate the seriousness
of what he's done.
He's committed fraud
on a massive scale,
and he's done it for money.
- This is a book
which automatically
is worth hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
Whatever he might say,
the motive is essentially
a financial one,
and, of course, he did sell it
successfully to a dealer.
♪♪
- Horst Bredekamp is haunted
by the mistaken authentication.
- Neither the group nor I
were able to recognize
the book as a fake.
This is a humiliation...
which is presumably comparable
to a very serious error
by a doctor.
♪♪
For the public
must be able to trust
that an art historian
can differentiate
between a fake and an original.
This is a trauma.
These are real copies
of the "Sidereus Nuncius"
which I procured.
- Bredekamp and De Caro
even traded emails
once the forgery was discovered.
- In my correspondence with him,
there is
the unbelievable sentence,
"Dear Professor,
it must have seemed as if,"
once you had the drawings
of the fake 'Sidereus Nuncius'
before your eyes,
you were being confronted
"with the results
of your own work."
In other words, the forger used
my very own research,
and that just floored me.
That explains why I simply
did not want to recognize,
or perhaps could not
recognize, the fake as a fake.
- I feel a bit guilty,
because, in some ways,
I was inspired by him.
- Paul Needham had
a different reaction.
- Oh, I felt great.
- I felt great.
I mean, just...
I was so glad
that I hadn't gone on
believing something false.
To me, it was just thrilling
to be able to sit
with these two books
and find things
that really count as proofs.
- The forged "Sidereus Nuncius"
caused immense damage
to the antiquarian book market.
- Many institutions are refusing
to buy anything
that is coming from Italy,
so it had
a very negative effect.
- People would become concerned
that they were going to end up
buying a fake
or something stolen,
and all you have
is your reputation,
because people can always buy
from somebody else.
- Many dealers continue
to consult Owen Gingerich.
- De Caro is getting out of
arrest in a few months.
- Really?
- Mm-hmm.
- What do you think he's gonna do
when he gets out?
- [ Chuckles ]
- Go back to the old hobby?
Have you received
a personal invitation
to his coming-out party?
- They are very much worried
to have De Caro loose again.
Who knows what he has
squirreled away
and what he will be up to?
♪♪
- In the meantime,
many large libraries,
museums, and foundations
have been asking themselves
whether some of their stamps,
drawings, or even entire books
could be faked.
♪♪
- This book
is a very good fake...
The structure of the layers,
the structure of the paper,
the structure of the watermark,
but it's not the only fake
that exists,
and I assume
it won't be the last.
- We thought that
our case would be
enough of a wake-up call
for someone in the world
to create a database of fakes.
As far as I know,
that has not been the case.
- De Caro, one hopes,
will not make more forgeries,
but other people will.
This is a cheap technology.
I myself could forge an
acceptable "Sidereus Nuncius"
for a few thousand dollars.
- It's like doping.
Along with the ability
to detect doping drugs,
new, undetectable drugs arrive.
Doping and forgeries
are the same...
In terms of methodology,
in any event.
- The story is not over,
it's ongoing.
And in a bigger sense,
the story is ongoing
because the techniques
and technologies
that Massimo De Caro used
are still with us.
And there's nothing illegal
in replicating
a 17th-century book, right?
So we're gonna see
a lot more of this.
It's really...
It's getting to be pretty easy
to make a forgery now.
Once you start
admitting forgery,
or saying basically
that the market can decide
what's true and what's not
and that if the market wants the
forgery to be true, it is true,
then that's fundamentally
pretty disturbing,
because then truth is for sale.
- And for Wilding,
fake books lead
to false history.
- Well, history just matters.
If you start
fabricating the objects,
then you might as well fabricate
an entirely different,
alternative history,
and from there, you can start
denying major historical events,
you can rewrite history...
You're in an Orwellian world
where political power
governs truth.
And I think one of
the first victim of that
is the general public.
- The forging of books
remains far less lucrative
than creating fake Picasso
paintings or Giacometti statues.
But what do these technologies
mean for the rare-book market?
- How much longer will
this market last?
I cannot make any predictions.
I can only express
my
For a long time now,
I haven't bought any books
on the antiquarian market.
- The publication
of "Sidereus Nuncius" in 1610
ultimately led
to Galileo's arrest
and trial
by the Inquisition in 1633.
- He was a lightning rod
for people who were
interested in his work
and people who didn't like
what he was doing
because it's hard to give up
what you've thought
all your life
and what has history
and the general opinion.
- Galileo's influence
remains immeasurable
four centuries later.
♪♪
- That was the beginning
of cosmology
as we still know it today.
- I think that
these Galileo documents
still have something to say.
They continue to transmit
this desire to know.
I think this is what drives
our societies forward,
and, above all, this is
the most important thing,
the very heart
of the human being.
- Galileo's voice comes out very,
very loud and clearly
over more than four centuries.
We have this conversation
that he enabled
by leaving this mass
of papers and writings
and drawings and artifacts.
- Ignition sequence start...
- 6, 5, 4, 3...
- Our modern space program
owes its own debt
to Galileo
and "Sidereus Nuncius."
- We have a liftoff.
- "Sidereus Nuncius"
is the book that showed
that the Moon was
a place you could go to
and stand on when you got there.
- Both hands stand
about the fourth rung up.
- With a little guidance,
our theoretical Galileo
would have gotten himself
up to speed
with today's science
very quickly.
[ Beep ]
- And on the Apollo 15 mission,
the astronauts
paid tribute to him.
- Commander David Scott
did Galileo's experiment
on the Moon.
- Well, in my left hand,
I have a feather.
In my right hand, a hammer.
I guess one of the
reasons we got here today
was because of a gentleman
named Galileo a long time ago
who made a rather
significant discovery
about falling objects
and gravity fields.
And we thought that,
where would be a better place
to confirm his findings
than on the Moon?
And I'll drop
the two of them here,
and, hopefully, they'll hit
the ground at the same time.
How 'bout that?
That proves that Mr. Galileo
was correct in his findings.
♪♪
Superb.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪