Epilogue

A painting hung on a wall inconspicuously for years has recently been identified as possibly the work of Michelangelo. The tempera, the layering, and the pigments all seem to point to the style of the Renaissance artist. An unknown poem, discovered centuries after it was written, gives away the name of its famous writer to a scholar with expertise in the style of that poet. Given a printed copy—to eliminate identification from the composer’s handwriting—of a newly discovered piece of music, a musicologist specializing in Beethoven can not only identify it as the work of the master, but also determine the period of the composer’s creativity in which it belongs. The creation of an artist bears the style of its creator. Not so in science!