ATDTDA (1): De Forest and Kimura (29:32-3)

Monte Davis monte.davis at verizon.net
Wed Jan 31 12:43:24 CST 2007


> You left out evil Edison.

It's fascinating to look back at the multiple stories there, all of them
true -- Young Tom the Telegraph Boy, fizzing with solo ingenuity -- and the
Edison who built full-scale corporate R&D parks with thousands of employees
in West Orange as well as Menlo Park -- and Edison the sharp-elbowed wielder
of patents and licensing agreements -- and Edison the creator of recorded
and mass-marketed sound and moving images... a version for everyone, each
with its baggage about what American science and technology meant or should
mean...

I guess what nags at me about the Tesla mythology is that its version -- in
which energy (power) is really *just the same* as information (signal) -- is
much *less* rich and pregnant (and weird, if that's what you're after) than
the real thing: energy and entropy, Gibbs and Boltzmann and Maxwell,
Maxwell's demon who *seems* to offer free energy just by knowing which
molecules to let through his gate, and so on. Figuring out that energy and
information are *not* the same, yet deeply connected in ways we're still
teasing out, has been a great 150-year adventure. For the life of me I can't
understand why anyone would forego that for a single paranoid drone: step
right this way for your suppressed broadcast power, your suppressed
everlasting light bulb, your suppressed 200-mpg carburetor, your suppressed
cancer cure...





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