Thermoluminescence dating, developed at Oxford in the 1960s, became a commercial forgery detector for antiquities a generation after chemistry unmasked van Meegeren

Thermoluminescence (TL) dating measures the light released when a fired-clay object is reheated — a signal proportional to the radiation dose the object has accumulated since it was last fired, and therefore a proxy for its age. The physicist Martin Aitken developed the technique at Oxford's Research Laboratory for Archaeology from the 1960s. It has since become a live commercial industry: per the source, Oxford Authentication Ltd tests roughly 3,000–3,500 antiques a year, about 90% of them Chinese ceramics, specifically to catch forgeries in a market where "almost 75 percent of the so-called antiques marketed through Hong Kong are said to be copies." [unverified-quant — the throughput, ceramics share, and Hong Kong copy figure rest on a Tier-3 magazine; needs a primary] Forgers have countered by artificially irradiating fakes to fake an ancient TL signal, detectable because genuine burial dose accumulates as a depth gradient while artificial irradiation deposits a uniform dose.

This makes physics a second, independent hard science recruited as art's forgery police — a generation after chemistry unmasked van Meegeren in 1945 and in a different medium (fired ceramics rather than oil paint). The two methods share the underlying logic — authenticate an object against its own claimed date — but neither descends from the other, an instance of the same social function being reinvented across unrelated fields. That authentication instinct also connects to the data-pattern forensics of claim-hirsch-forensics-drove-dias-superconductivity-retraction and the founding of document authentication in claim-mabillon-1681-founded-diplomatics-to-refute-forgery-charge.