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Re: Theory and Practice

Subject:  Re: Theory and Practice
  Date:   Tue, 13 May 1997 00:13:50 -0400 (EDT)
  From:   richard hull <rhull-at-richmond.infi-dot-net>
    To:   Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>


At 11:44 PM 5/9/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Subject: Re: Theory and Practice
>  Date: Fri, 09 May 1997 08:23:54 -0500
>  From: David Huffman <huffman-at-FNAL.GOV>
>    To: Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
>
>
>Hi Richard, All,
>I can't leave this one alone either. How can you separate theory from
>practice? The idea must come first before practice begins. I'll
>concede that sometimes the results of a theory put to practice will
>yield a surprise result, but then you will theorize new things to put
>to practice. Where would we be without Tesla's theories that he put
>to practice.
>Dave Huffman


All,

Tesla never formally published a theory in his lifetime!!!!  He
published
virtually zero in the open literature.  He was quoted a lot. 
Interveiwed a
lot and his work followed in the media.  His patents are somewhat
nebulous
and no theory is expoused in them other than an explanation of a how a
specific device is supposed to function.

Tesla just did!  He just brought into being!

Somehow we have been brain washed that all advances must come from some
sort
of cogitation firmly rooted in convoluted theoretical machinations.  The
math must be done... the theoretical models run in our minds, etc.

  Blind luck and intuition based on hunch is shunned as the stuff of
hairbrains.  True I wouldn't want to engineer anything for day to day
use
this way, but I would not be ashamed of disovering the cure for aids or
cancer while making my own soda pop.  Blind luck and hairbrained schemes
will never be funded by the established order, and self funding will put
a
lot of well meaning inventors in the poor house, but every so often, the
greatest leaps are made by sheer serendipity or dogged determination
which
was never meant to be on the theoretical mainline.

Most nineteenth century discoveries came only after the doing was done
and
the doing didn't jibe with current theory or there was no precident for
the
result.  Only then were the theoretician and mathematician sent to work
in a
frenzy to try and figure out what happened and why.  Some of this
theorizing
reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when
the
theory became THE THING.

>From what I see and the questions still ringing in my ears, I must agree
with the Physicist Dr. Thomas Phipps... "Nineteenth century physics was
never completed in the nineteenth century."

Richard Hull, TCBOR