There is something wonderfully appropriate about the fact that the Whipple Museum of the History of Science should mount an exhibition about deception. Scientific instruments are objects upon which trust depends. A telescope must provide a reliable image; a balance must measure accurately; a clock must keep time; a thermometer must register temperature; a calculating instrument must produce a dependable result. Yet when these objects become historical artefacts, their function changes. They are no longer primarily tools for producing knowledge. They become evidence about knowledge. Their value lies partly in their age, provenance, manufacture, association and historical significance. Once an object becomes collectible, however, another possibility emerges: someone can manufacture an object designed to deceive those who want to believe it is old, rare or important. This is the central premise of The Art of Deception, the Whipple Museum’s current exhibition, which opened in January 2026 and runs through the end of the year (make sure you go and visit). It brings together more than one hundred objects associated with scientific forgery, including apparently antique scientific instruments, globes and striking medical prints. Crucially, the exhibition does not simply display the fakes. It also presents the investigative work that exposed them, turning the museum gallery into something resembling a detective laboratory. The visitor is therefore encouraged to ask not merely ‘Is this real?’ but ‘What evidence would allow me to decide?’

The exhibition’s title, The Art of Deception, is consequently carefully chosen. Forgery is not simply a matter of making a fake object. The successful forger must create a convincing story around it. The object needs to look appropriate for its supposed date, resemble the work of the claimed maker, and possess the physical characteristics expected of an authentic example. It may need convincing wear, appropriate materials, plausible inscriptions and a provenance capable of surviving questioning. The most successful deception therefore combines craftsmanship with historical knowledge. This is one of the exhibition’s most interesting ideas. A sophisticated forgery is itself a historical document, although not necessarily in the way its creator intended. It can reveal what a twentieth- or twenty-first-century forger believed a seventeenth-century instrument should look like. It can expose contemporary assumptions about historical technology, craftsmanship and scientific practice. In this sense, a fake can tell the truth about the period in which it was created even while lying about the period it purports to represent.

Scientific instruments are particularly vulnerable to this form of deception because many are relatively obscure. A forged painting by a famous artist may be scrutinised by specialists who know the painter’s style intimately, but a rare astrolabe, sundial, compass or mathematical instrument may be unfamiliar even to experienced museum professionals. The specialist knowledge required to authenticate such objects is narrow and highly technical. This makes the Whipple’s experience especially valuable. The Museum has in fact been identifying suspicious objects within its collection since at least the 1950s. Some questionable objects had apparently remained unnoticed for years, effectively ‘hiding in plain sight’. The exhibition therefore represents the culmination of decades of institutional experience with the problem. One of the great strengths of The Art of Deception is that it does not portray museum professionals as infallible guardians of truth. Instead, it acknowledges that experts can be deceived. This is an important and refreshing position. Museums are often perceived by the public as places where objects have already been definitively authenticated. Once something has been placed behind glass, labelled and catalogued, visitors naturally assume that its identity is beyond question. The exhibition exposes the uncertainty that can exist behind the label.

This is particularly important in a museum such as the Whipple because its objects are often valued precisely for their historical authenticity. A brass instrument may be interesting as an example of scientific design, but if it can genuinely be demonstrated to have been made in the seventeenth century by a particular instrument maker, its historical significance changes dramatically. If it was made two hundred years later by a forger attempting to imitate that maker, the story is entirely different. The problem is complicated by provenance. Provenance is the documented history of an object’s ownership and movement through time. An unbroken chain of ownership can provide powerful evidence for authenticity. Yet provenance itself can be fabricated, embellished or misunderstood. A convincing object accompanied by an apparently convincing story can be considerably more dangerous than a poor imitation that immediately looks suspicious. The exhibition’s emphasis on detective work is therefore particularly appropriate. Authentication involves assembling clues. Experts may examine the materials from which an object was constructed, the techniques used to manufacture it, the style of engraving, the terminology employed in inscriptions, signs of wear, repairs, chemical composition and documentary records. No single clue is necessarily decisive. Instead, authenticity emerges from the accumulation of evidence.

This is where the exhibition becomes an unexpectedly good introduction to the methodology of history. Historical research frequently involves precisely this process of triangulation. A historian does not simply accept one document because it looks convincing. Sources are compared, contextualised and tested against independent evidence. The same principle applies to objects. Scientific instruments provide especially rich opportunities for this kind of investigation because they contain multiple layers of evidence. Their materials can reveal when and where they were made. Their construction techniques can be compared with known examples. Their inscriptions can be checked against historical terminology. Their makers’ catalogues can establish whether a particular design was actually produced. Their wear patterns may reveal whether an object was genuinely used or artificially aged. The exhibition’s Bos astrolabe is an especially evocative example of the problem. The astrolabe was originally attributed to the Flemish instrument maker Joannes Bos and regarded as an authentic sixteenth-century, whose name is recorded on a number of genuine mathematical and astronomical instruments. However, investigations in the 1950s established that this particular astrolabe was a modern fabrication rather than an original Renaissance instrument. Its presence in the exhibition demonstrates how easily rarity, beauty and apparent craftsmanship can reinforce one another. A visitor confronted with a highly elaborate historical instrument is naturally inclined to assume that its complexity is evidence of authenticity. Yet complexity can be part of the deception.

The medical prints included in the exhibition provide another fascinating dimension. These are described by the Museum as ‘eye-popping’ examples, and their inclusion demonstrates that scientific forgery is not restricted to mechanical instruments. Printed scientific and medical images can also be manipulated or fabricated. Their historical significance may depend upon claims about their date, authorship, rarity or association with particular developments in medical knowledge. This breadth prevents the exhibition from becoming a narrow study of antique instrument manufacture. Instead, it reveals forgery as a phenomenon affecting scientific collecting more generally. Objects become deceptive when they are presented within a false historical framework. The exhibition is also concerned with the people who created these objects. The forger is an intriguing figure because successful deception requires knowledge. A convincing fake scientific instrument cannot necessarily be produced by someone with no understanding of historical technology. The maker must know enough about the appearance and construction of historical objects to reproduce their characteristics. This means that forgery can require considerable technical and historical expertise.

Within The Art of Deception, the Whipple highlights the work of Lloyd Evan Williams (a gunsmith by trade), whose illustrations were used in the production of forged instruments from his shed. These drawings offer a fascinating glimpse into the preparatory work behind deception. They also help transform the forger from an abstract figure into a craftsman engaged in a process of design and manufacture. There is an uncomfortable paradox here. The forger may possess many of the qualities traditionally admired in an instrument maker: patience, technical skill, familiarity with materials and attention to detail. What distinguishes the legitimate maker from the forger is not necessarily craftsmanship but intent and representation. One produces an object and honestly identifies it, while the other produces an object intended to be mistaken for something it is not. That distinction raises larger philosophical questions about the nature of authenticity. Is an object authentic because of its physical age, its maker, its use or its story? What if a modern object is deliberately constructed using historical techniques? What if it is accurately made but falsely attributed? What if an old instrument has been extensively restored? At what point does restoration become reconstruction, and when does reconstruction become forgery? It all comes down to intent and how money exchanges hands in the process.

The exhibition does not offer simplistic answers. Instead, it encourages visitors to recognise that authenticity exists on a spectrum of evidence and interpretation. This is perhaps its greatest intellectual achievement. The subject is especially relevant to the Whipple because the Museum’s collections themselves are exceptionally diverse. Its holdings are strongest in scientific material dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, particularly instruments produced by English makers, but they extend from the medieval period to the present. Astronomy, navigation, surveying, drawing, calculation, sundials, mathematical instruments and early electrical apparatus are particularly well represented. Such collections inevitably contain objects that are difficult to authenticate. The historical scientific-instrument trade was itself international and commercially sophisticated. Instruments were made, sold, repaired, modified and sometimes repurposed. An object might therefore contain components from different periods or have been repaired by later craftsmen. Authenticity cannot always be reduced to a simple distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’. This complexity makes The Art of Deception considerably more interesting than a conventional exhibition of counterfeit objects. It challenges the visitor to recognise that historical objects have biographies. Their identities can change through use, repair, restoration, collecting and reinterpretation.

The exhibition also exposes the psychology of collecting. Why do people want old objects? The answer is partly intellectual. A historical instrument can provide a tangible connection to the past. Holding or viewing an object made hundreds of years ago can produce an immediacy that no written account quite replicates. Collectors are often attracted by rarity, beauty and craftsmanship, but also by the possibility of possessing something that has survived from another age. Those desires can become vulnerabilities. The rarer an object appears, the more compelling its story may become. A spectacular object accompanied by an exciting provenance can be emotionally persuasive before any scientific examination has taken place. The collector wants the object to be genuine, and that desire can unconsciously affect judgement. The exhibition therefore has a lesson for museums and private collectors alike: scepticism is not cynicism. Questioning an object’s authenticity does not diminish its value as a historical curiosity. Instead, it protects the integrity of the collection. However, sometimes people get caught up in the story behind a piece and this clouds their judgement regarding the authenticity of the item.

One of the most engaging features of The Art of Deception is the invitation to visitors to test their own judgement. The museum asks, in effect, ‘Could you spot the fake?’ This transforms the exhibition from a passive display into an intellectual game. Visitors can examine objects, consider the evidence and discover whether their initial impressions were correct. Importantly, the museum makes a humorous distinction between replicas and fakes: the replicas are not deceptive because the museum is honest about what they are. This is an excellent educational device because it demonstrates that deception depends upon context. A replica of a sixteenth-century compass is not inherently fraudulent. It becomes a fake when it is presented as an original sixteenth-century compass. The distinction may appear obvious, but it goes to the heart of museum ethics. Museums routinely use replicas, reconstructions and reproductions for teaching. Their legitimacy depends upon transparency. Visitors must know whether they are looking at an original object, a reconstruction or a modern interpretation.

In this respect, The Art of Deception can be read as an exhibition about museum labels. A label is an assertion of authority. It tells the visitor what an object is, when it was made, who made it and why it matters. The exhibition reminds us that these assertions are the conclusions of research rather than immutable facts. The Museum’s detective work consequently becomes part of the story. Discovering that an object is fraudulent does not simply remove it from the collection. It creates a new research question: who made it, when and why? How did it enter the collection? Who believed it was genuine? What evidence eventually exposed it? The Whipple’s history of discovering forged instruments demonstrates how such research can unfold. Its scholars have published work on fake antique scientific instruments, including Boris Jardine’s study of the discovery of forged instruments in the Museum’s collections. The existence of this scholarship is significant because it demonstrates that identifying a forgery is itself a legitimate historical discovery. Indeed, a fake object may sometimes become more interesting after its deception is exposed. A supposed seventeenth-century instrument that turns out to have been manufactured in the twentieth century becomes evidence for the history of collecting, antiquarianism and the commercial value of scientific heritage. Its story has simply changed.

This is one of the most sophisticated ideas in the exhibition. A forgery is not necessarily a useless object. It is a historical object of a different kind. The exhibition also encourages visitors to think about the relationship between science and material culture. Scientific instruments are usually valued for their capacity to produce reliable observations. Yet historical instruments are themselves objects of interpretation. They must be scrutinised using methods that can resemble scientific investigation: observation, comparison, measurement, testing and the evaluation of competing hypotheses. In this sense, the exhibition turns the tools of science upon the history of science itself. There is also an important connection between deception and the wider history of scientific expertise. Scientific instruments helped make knowledge credible. The Whipple’s collections contain many objects that were designed to establish authority. Telescopes demonstrated the ability to observe distant phenomena; microscopes revealed invisible worlds; measuring instruments transformed subjective impressions into numerical data.

Forged instruments exploit exactly the same culture of credibility. They borrow the visual language of scientific authority in order to create an illusion of historical authority. This gives the exhibition an unexpectedly contemporary resonance. We live in an age of manipulated images, fabricated documents, artificial media and misinformation. The problem of distinguishing genuine evidence from convincing fabrication is no longer confined to antique markets. The Art of Deception therefore offers a historical lesson in information literacy. It demonstrates that appearances have never been sufficient evidence. Its lessons are particularly valuable because the exhibition avoids becoming a moralistic story about dishonest criminals and gullible victims. The reality is more complicated. Deception can succeed because the surrounding culture makes it plausible. Collectors develop expectations; dealers develop markets; museums inherit assumptions; scholars create classifications. A fake succeeds when it fits into an existing narrative. This makes the exhibition ultimately a study of belief.

The most memorable objects are therefore not necessarily the most beautiful. The great astrolabes, telescopes and mathematical instruments of the Whipple’s permanent collections represent the achievements of historical instrument makers. The objects in The Art of Deception reveal something different: how easily our confidence in material evidence can be manipulated. That contrast makes the exhibition particularly effective when considered alongside the Museum’s permanent galleries. Visitors can move from authentic historical instruments to fraudulent imitations and suddenly begin to look differently at everything around them. The Grand Orrery, William Herschel’s Newtonian telescope and the Museum’s other celebrated instruments acquire a new significance because the visitor has been taught to ask what evidence supports their identities. The Main Gallery currently includes these major instruments alongside themed cases and research displays, while The Art of Deception occupies the Special Exhibitions Gallery.

The exhibition also benefits from the Whipple’s atmosphere. Housed in a historic Cambridge setting and surrounded by centuries of scientific material, the Museum already feels like a place where objects possess stories. If only they could speak. The Art of Deception introduces the possibility that some stories may be false. The resulting tension is remarkably effective. Ultimately, the exhibition is not really about fake objects. It is an exhibition about how museums know what they know. It asks visitors to reconsider the authority of labels, the reliability of provenance, the value of expertise and the seductive power of beautiful things. It works hard to replace certainty with informed curiosity. Rather than telling visitors simply which objects are genuine and which are fraudulent, it demonstrates the reasoning that allows experts to reach those conclusions. In doing so, it makes the process of scholarship visible. The exhibition also offers an important corrective to the traditional image of the museum as a place of unquestionable authority. Museums are research institutions, and research involves uncertainty, revision and occasionally discovering that previous conclusions were wrong. The willingness to expose those mistakes is a sign of scholarly strength rather than weakness.

Robert Stewart Whipple created the institution because he believed that scientific instruments were worthy of preservation and study. More than eighty years later, The Art of Deception demonstrates just how complicated that responsibility can be. Preserving an object means preserving not only its physical form but also the evidence surrounding its identity. The exhibition is consequently both entertaining and intellectually serious. It has the ingredients of a detective story: mysterious objects, skilled forgers, deception, clues and eventual revelations. However, beneath the surface lies a much deeper exploration of historical methodology. It asks us to consider how knowledge is established, how authority is constructed and how easily our desire to believe can overcome our instinct to question. For anyone interested in museums, antiques, scientific instruments, collecting or the history of science, The Art of Deception is therefore an unusually rewarding exhibition. It encourages visitors to look more carefully, to question more intelligently and to recognise that the most convincing object is not necessarily the most truthful one. I cannot recommend it enough and I wish I had more time to really give it the attention it needs during my last visit to the Whipple Museum.

Perhaps the most fitting lesson is that authenticity is not something an object simply possesses. It is something that must be investigated, demonstrated and continually reassessed. A scientific instrument may survive for centuries, but the story attached to it can change dramatically when new evidence emerges. In that sense, the Whipple’s forged instruments are not failures of the Museum. They are evidence of the Museum doing exactly what a museum should do: questioning its own assumptions and using objects to generate new knowledge. The Art of Deception ultimately turns the Whipple Museum itself into part of the exhibition’s argument. The institution exists to preserve material evidence of humanity’s attempts to understand the world. The exhibition reminds us that understanding the past requires the same qualities that science itself demands: observation, scepticism, comparison, evidence and a willingness to admit when we have been fooled. I am looking forward to seeing what the next exhibition the Whipple puts on and seeing if it is as engaging as The Art of Deception has been. There is still time if you want to visit and experience this interesting and thoroughly enjoyable exhibition if you wish. If you do visit, please let me know what your favourite item was, and why.

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