I have spent more time than is good for my blood pressure in the company of “geniuses”, and I mean truly world-class, intelligent people. They are masters of the theory, but you also need the people who twist spanners for a living to tell why something may not work for very mundane reasons that you never considered, like it violates local fire or building codes.
Many great ideas have died in the hand-off from the researchers to the engineers, or the engineers to the technicians, as the limitations of the “real world”, the crappy existing infrastructure that things have to actually deal with to be viable.
Alas, the hypocrites are part of the “real world” in the US, and you have to deal with them to get anything done in Congress. They are obviously dumber than a brick, but they get to vote.
]]>Very true and I’m the same. π
Don’t get me wrong on Tesla, he certainly had (and created) his share of *issues*. I simply know that many who came after wouldn’t have made the breakthroughs they did without his groundbreaking. *shrug* Many highly regarded Scientists of the 20th century have stated that the #1 ingredient in any scientific endeavor is a good imagination. Tesla had that in spades. π He wasn’t much of a *people person*, and most certainly didn’t suffer fools at all well (his definition of *fool* was fairly broad, as is mine these days). π
I suppose I sympathize with him.
As for ‘Pascal’s Wager’… I suspect at least half the USA is guilty of that one, and possibly half the World. π Certainly, all the ‘Sunday Christians’ (which we also have here, and I’ve seen in other countries) fall into that category. I just prefer to call them all hypocrites and leave it at that. π
]]>One of my heroes in the husband of one of my Mother’s first cousins.
She wanted storage closets in her basement, which is perfectly reasonable and a good use of space as their house is on a hill and the basement is always dry. The problem was where she wanted the closet built and the doors she wanted on it.
He tried to change her mind, but she was adamant, so he built the closet and installed the doors to her specifications. The space is useless because the pipes in the basement prevent the doors from opening,as he knew they would.
She finally agreed that he was right, and suggested she would accept sliding doors, but he refused to change anything, and that closet has been unused for decades. He can be just as hard-headed as she is, and uses the closet to resolve other disputes over her projects.
Your example calls to mind Pascal’s Wager – if there is a G-d won’t S/He/It [or Sheit, if you will] be annoyed that that your belief is a matter of covering your bet. Nobody, even G-d, likes a smartass.
]]>Yep! The good ol’ days before standards and safety regulations were invented to insure nothing was done without a lot of people, who had nothing to do with the actual work, made a lot of money.
“Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mindparalysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea… and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.”
]]>Tesla was a jerk on a personal level, from all reports of those who worked with him, which made collaboration or cooperation nearly impossible. Consolidated Edison wasn’t exactly thrilled about the cost of stringing copper wire all over, it was a lot of work. My grandfather did some early electrification, and I’ve seen it in attics, including my families old farmhouse in New York – bare copper wire running through ceramic insulators hammered into roof beams could make a trip to the attic pretty exciting. Early light bulbs were replaced with a screwdriver, as there were terminal connections on the ceramic base. Knife switches were standard. Early “fuses” were nothing more that thinner copper wire running between two terminals in-line with the main. If you were lucky, the knife switch was on the proper side of the fuse link to make replacement safe.
]]>“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” — Carl Sagan
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” — Neils Bohr
]]>I worked on radio-wave propagation for various projects. It’s a very hairy subject, even with several very good theoreticians and engineers, it was difficult.
I suspect that many scientists (and engineers) dislike Telsla mainly because he didn’t fit into the mold of either. I think he was very *intuitive*. I think he needed a bit more formal science, but from what I read, I think he found it difficult to get the education he needed. *shrug*
Pure Science can be more cutthroat than a knife fight. LOL
]]>Actually, the technology to make the system work, the accurate resonance tuning, wasn’t available to Tesla at the time, so he would have ended up like Babbage – a great idea that couldn’t be built.
Based on what I’ve read, you really need accurate frequency control for the system to have acceptable levels of efficiency, otherwise you end up with the situation of old AM radios, i.e. they would drift out of tune as they heated up.
]]>βThink of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?β
I have to admit, I prefer his version. π π
]]>Speaking of Tesla, he said: “Todayβs scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality”
(or, as Ernest Rutherford put it: “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”)
I’m reminded of a a prophetic statement Carl Sagan made some years ago:
“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
How did he know? That’s the scientific mind for you. Isn’t it amazing how much more demonstrably accurate scientifically reasoned prophecies are than their purely religious counterparts? π π
Thomas Henry Huxley once said:
“Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
Or, Albert Einstein:
“Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.”
Hmmm. I read too much. π
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