Re: Tesla Receiver Coil

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Tesla list wrote:

> I thought since Tesla was "just" an electrical engineer, he had a cheek
> trying to play with the great physicists like Thompson and Maxwell.

And mere patent clerks should not be allowed to publish crazy speculations
about the speed of light?  :)

Don't forget that "great" physicists are only "great" in hindsight.
Great men don't have new ideas, instead it's the ability to have new ideas
which causes us to say that certain men are "great." Don't forget Clarke's
First Law: if an elderly and distinguished scientist states that something
is impossible, he's very probably wrong. Don't forget that science history
is full of crazies who were shown to be "great" only later, crazies who
dared to question.  And Science itself is based on Skepticism, on
questioning everything (including especially questioning what one has been
taught.)

The parable of the Emperor's New Clothes is built into science, where
prestige is not so important when compared to discovering new truths; to
having new ideas.  The new ideas are far more important than the person
presenting them, and scientists will listen to "little kids" such as
patent clerks who dare to question "Emperors" in the form of their
textbooks and all their elders who firmly believe that light waves travel
through Aether.


> But the other day I thought: What if the boundaries
> between disciplines didn't exist back in 1899?
> Electrical engineering probably didn't exist, since
> Tesla, Edison and Charles Steinmetz were just in the
> process of inventing it. You certainly couldn't go and
> study it at university.

Yes you could.  The young Tesla wanted to be an Electrical Engineer, and
had to convince his father to let him go to college for that degree.

And on the contrary, inter-discipline studies are a more recent invention.
Long ago minds were more rigid, and if you were, say, a physicist, you'd
have to fight barriers if you wanted to combine physics with biology, etc.


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William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
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