Keeping up with the theory (was is Corum and Corum forbidden topic?)

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

Comments at bottom


> I'm glad that these silly lumped vs tline debates have died out now,
> but every so often someone will come across the 'Class Notes' and
> we'll have to bring it all up again.
> 
> > http://www.abelian.demon.co.uk/tssp/
> > seems to pass that high standard of "it works"...
> 
> Yet there are links from numerous web sites to the Corum paper, and
> virtually none to tssp?
> 
> Terry wrote:
> > However, in the last few years I think the general consensus is
> > that more modern ideas and theories have taken their place.
> 
> You're being very kind, I've only read two papers by Corum(s) and
> the other one was worse.  Both were downright wrong in the era they
> were written.  The problem is not really the Corum papers - folk
> will post wrong things all the time, and that's ok.  The problem is
> the almost complete lack of critical review of work in this 'Tesla
> field'.  We all need to be a lot more hard-nosed about each others
> work.  Any kid on a high can come up with fancy ideas, the hard work
> is in sifting out the junk as efficiently as possible, turning the
> survivors into well defined testable theories, and then trying hard
> to *disprove* them.  That so many sites seem to link to 'Class Notes'
> as a token authoritative document suggests that this process isn't
> taking place, even now.  The real progress that may be occuring
> is a shift towards a less credulous culture, and that improvements
> in models, equations, and experiments, are an inevitable consequence
> of this.
> 

I would suggest that simple inertia (mental, not physical) is the primary
reason why the old Corum links are still there... As you know, it's a pile
of work to keep a web site up to date.A lot of web sites are more in the
nature of a stream-of-consciousness historical journal (append only), once
something's there, it tends to stay there (like the pictures of my kids'
vegetable garden from two years ago, etc.).  Certainly, my own HV website
is sadly, sadly deficient on tesla coil stuff (mostly because I think there
are lots of other better places to go for information).

This phenomenon isn't limited to the Corum papers (or any of the many
forbidden topics for the list (have I posted yet about the scheme that
Tesla and Marconi gave me personally showing how to extract free energy
from the zero-point?  They demonstrated it in Tunguska to Elvis and me,
honestly!), and is both a curse and a blessing of the web (and why peer
reviewed journals and librarians are more important now than ever......
vanity publishing is now easy and free!).

When I first read your post, my first thought was.. Let's do a search for
"Corum AND Tesla", find all the sites, send nice emails to the people
explaining why it's obsolete, and hope they update the pages (the same
could apply for 1/4 wave stuff...).  At the very least, one would need to
create a simple explanatory web page showing where the failings are, why it
was a seductive approach at first, etc. to provide backup for your
request...  Then I thought... This is sort of rude, isn't it?  Presuming to
tell someone that their site is defective? Who am I to tell them (other
than confident, and a true believer in my own wisdom)...

The other thought was that you could set up some form of peer reviewed
journal on "tesla coil theory", but, who would would the reviewers be?
Maybe you could rope in some folks of appropriate stature and skill to
rigorously review the accuracy of the papers (although it's unlikely that
they would be able to comment on the tesla coil specific stuff...).  Maybe
one could get peer reviewed publications in other journals (Rev Sci Inst
type, but even that probably isn't the right venue.), but, on the other
hand, I recall having seen some papers on TCs in peer reviewed journals
that had severe problems (making me wonder just how rigorous the review was...)


Overall, a problem that is difficult.....