Skip to main content

Stop Teslaing me

When I ask not to be Tesla'd, I am not referring to the electronic stun guns of the TV show Warehouse 13, but pointing out that I really would prefer it if those of you who like to put 'memes' (yuck, horrible word) on Facebook would stop sticking up the kind of guff illustrated on the right, which purports to be Tesla 'describing a cell phone.'

There are a number of problems with this. One is that Tesla didn't have a good grasp of electromagnetic radiation, nor did he accept quantum theory, so he would have had serious problems with the mechanisms required to make a mobile phone work.

More to the point, though, Tesla's handwaving remark was in a long tradition of broad predictive comments which certainly show that an individual is open minded, but do not necessarily indicate that they are inventing something ahead of its time.

For instance, I dearly love the thirteenth century friar Roger Bacon - so much so that I've even written a book about him. But no one sensible would suggest that Bacon understood television or aircraft. If, however, I use the 'Tesla foresaw X' approach, he seemed to predict both. In one short burst in a letter to an acquaintance, for instance, he listed self-powered ships, the horseless carriage, the flying machine, something that sounds like a pulley system, and a diving suit or diving bell, most of which would not become practical for another 600 years.

Elsewhere he wrote:

We may read the smallest letters at an incredible distance, we may see objects however small they may be, and we may cause the stars to appear wherever we wish. So, it is thought, Julius Caesar spied into Gaul from the seashore and by optical devices learned the position and arrangement of the camps and towns of Brittany.
Such devices are very unlikely to have existed in Bacon's day (let alone Julius Caesar's) - the first microscopes and telescopes would not come along for about 300 years. And to make some of Bacon's claims true would need TV rather than a simple optical system.

Admittedly it's possible that Bacon achieved something like a crude telescope and/or microscope by messing about with lenses - but certainly nothing capable of what he described, nor would he understand how to do it. Bacon was not 'describing a telescope' any more than Tesla was 'describing a cell phone.' Tesla was speculating, given the knowledge of the time, as many others did, what was possible in principle. And that's a very different thing. Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest electrical engineers ever, but this kind of myth building doesn't do science any favours.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...