Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jason's avatar

Tesla was a brilliant engineer who pioneered the use of alternating current (AC), something which anyone with a modicum of knowledge and practical experience would greatly prefer over direct current (DC). This was portrayed as an epic engineering battle of the ages but truth be told, if both Edison and Tesla were both run over by a street car thus removing them from history, someone else actually many people would have reached the same conclusion. This isn't magic folks. Someone would have gotten tired of the overheated wires and fires.

Tesla was a great engineer but most of his life was failure and disappointment. Unable to do physics because of his lack of the requisite mathematical expertise and washed up as an engineer, it's not surprising he turned to fantasies of power and escapism in occult studies. That too proved to be a dead end of course but it helped poor Tesla winnow away the time. Too bad.

Einstein the great physicist was unable to muster enthusiasm for quantum mechanics which he understood very well and quite powerfully. He was convinced there had to be a better way. Maybe there is. I certainly think so but no one has really found it. There have since been equivalent reformulations of QM particularly that discovered by Richard Feynman which has proven to be extremely useful in particle physics. Mathematically, Feynman's integrals leave something to be desired. Moreover, Einstein missed the General Relativity Renaissance in the 1950s due to death, in which massive strides forward we made in terms of our understanding of relativistic gravity, cosmology, gravity waves and solutions to Einstein's equations. He was a tottering old man then and probably couldn't follow the advanced that were being made. There's also the fact that Einstein had rejected his own theory to a degree because he didn't like Black Holes and other such things we now know to be artifacts of how one chooses coordinates to describe the spacetime around a massive object. Did Einstein ever learn differential forms, Cartan's reformulation of tensors which proved useful? I doubt it. Einstein for all his earlier brilliance might as well have gone fishing at some point.

Which leads us to the present moment today, how do we relate to these two "towering" figures so shrouded in mythology which brings with it the fringe nonsensical detractions and sensational speculations? IMO the guiding light is experience, disciplined judgement and sharpening your skills. Will people still both to refer to Einstein or Tesla in the future much like they don't both discussing Brahmagupta or some other forgotten luminary in the past? It's more important to have a generation of highly trained and skilled, independent thinkers capable of innovation than to curate a museum of great scientists of the past, a place where the layman can venerate the bones of the saints which has lately come to resemble Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum picketed by shrieking flat Earthers.

Expand full comment
Awaken The Lions In Truth's avatar

I find it difficult to wrap my mind around the facts that you so effortlessly and regularly churn out top shelf research essays and audio like these two concerning buried truths about Newton, Crowley and Tesla.

Never ever stop your valuable work Mr. Matt Ehret. Ever!

Expand full comment
89 more comments...

No posts