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Can past nuclear explosions advance art history?
A former curator from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg believes they can. She has developed a new method for dating paintings in collaboration with Russian scientists which, she says, provides “indisputable” evidence of whether a painting was made before or after 1945.
According to the inventors, the new patented technology is based on the idea that man-made nuclear explosions in the 1940s and 1950s released isotopes into the environment that do not occur naturally. The tiniest traces of these isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, permeated the planet’s soil and plant life, and eventually ended up in all works of art made in the post-war era because natural oils are used as binding agents for paints.
Therefore, they believe that any work of art originally believed to pre-date World War II, but which registers trace amounts of Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, can be “definitively” declared a post-1945 forgery.
Here is the full story. It's worth noting that many categories in the art world show rates of forgery approaching 50 percent or higher.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 29, 2008 at 07:18 AM in The Arts | Permalink
Comments
Smart. Hope she gets her patent.
The value of superannuated stocks of artists materials - I do not think that traditional dealers ever clear out the warehouse voluntarily - has just risen sharply.
Posted by: Diversity at Jun 29, 2008 8:47:57 AM
I definitely remember hearing about this years ago in my highschool chemistry class, when we did carbon dating. I thought they figured this out a long time ago.
Posted by: Phill at Jun 29, 2008 11:37:39 AM
This was also done for judging bottles of pre-1945 wine as genuine or counterfeit. The New Yorker article on fakes of Thomas Jefferson's wine explained the technique.
Posted by: Adam Hyland at Jun 29, 2008 12:19:31 PM
Carbon dating can not be used to test such recent samples. Because C-14's decay rate is logarithmic, radiocarbon dating has significant upper and lower limits. It is not very accurate for fairly recent deposits. So little decay has occurred that the error factor (the standard deviation) may be larger than the date obtained.
Posted by: at Jun 29, 2008 12:21:42 PM
Can you grow the plants in question hydroponically? In a greenhouse in Antarctica? By digging up soil from an old mine shaft? Can you genetically engineer bacteria to produce the natural oils in question? If there's enough money at stake, someone will probably find a way.
Posted by: at Jun 29, 2008 12:41:21 PM
I'm sure forgers could get around this testing method. The simplest way would be to obtain painting oil from pre-1945. It's probably not too hard to obtain, linseed oil is a common wood finish that woodworkers keep in big tins in the garage. I'm sure there are also ways to filter out radioactive trace elements from modern oil if you work hard enough. But, the forgeries that are in circulation now didn't do these things and so are detectable.
Posted by: Nathan Whitehead at Jun 29, 2008 12:56:43 PM
I'm not entirely sure exactly what is novel and patentable here. I know for certain that a French physicist named Philippe Hubert has put alleged vintage wines into a rather sensitive gamma spectrometer, found traces of Cs-137 and Sr-90, and put fraudsters in jail.
(One actually sees an increase in the levels of these isotopes from 1945 to 1963 (due to atmospheric nuclear tests), then a fall-off, followed by a second, smaller peak in 1986 from Chernobyl.
I'm sure there are also ways to filter out radioactive trace elements from modern oil if you work hard enough.
Yes, there are. It's sufficiently difficult that it would be unlikely to be economical for the fraudster, though.
Posted by: Sam at Jun 29, 2008 2:18:08 PM
Nope, not a particularly novel method. The proper term for the period from the first atmospheric nuclear explosion in 1945 until they were banned in 1963 is "bomb pulse."
Googling "bomb pulse isotope" gets lots of hits, including this abstract for a method of dating drug busts and wine:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TJN-4CDWMNK-F&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4a6f8f9a1d71fb4cf389a287b8522822
Posted by: Bob Knaus at Jun 29, 2008 8:59:50 PM
When cosmic rays strike the atmosphere, they produce a radioactive isotope of carbon called carbon-14. This carbon gets absorbed from the atmosphere by living things. Once they die, they stop absorbing it. Since it continues to undergo radioactive decay after death, the ratio of carbon-14 to ordinary carbon declines in a predictable way in dead organic matter. This is the basis for radiocarbon dating.
When the great powers started testing nuclear and thermonuclear bombs during the Cold War, they doubled the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere. One consequence is the need to avoid contamination when radiocarbon dating. Another odder consequence is that you can determine the age of any person born since the tests began by looking at how much carbon-15 is in various layers of their tooth enamel. You just need to know whether they lived in the northern or southern hemisphere.
Of course, there are usually easier ways to determine the age of a living or dead human. This is just a demonstration of the extent to which the nuclear age is literally imprinted upon all those who live within it.
Posted by: Milan at Jun 30, 2008 11:34:58 AM
*how much carbon-14 is in various layers of their tooth enamel.
Posted by: Milan at Jun 30, 2008 11:36:03 AM
Sunken battleships are actually essential in making deep space probes, MRIs etc. - this is because they're one of our best sources of surplus pre-Hiroshima steel, and therefore not contaminated with various isotopes capable of buggering up your background noise.
Posted by: PreachyPreach at Jun 30, 2008 4:25:36 PM
At the Savannah River National Lab, they have a room built out of pre-1945 steel for making sensitive radiation measurements.
Posted by: Clay B at Jun 30, 2008 5:09:46 PM
As seen on TV!
This method was mentioned in either "Law & Order" or "Hustle" a couple years ago.
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