Science Plays God

[Monte Davis]

"The machinations of those who profited from his genius..." and "science
that challenges power," coupled with your earlier "Tesla wanted to solve
mankind's energy challenge much more than to get rich..." strongly suggests
that you see him as an altruistic figure. Interesting,  when juxtaposed with


1) Tesla's own claim that Edison promised him $50K (1885 dollars) for
electrical design innovations, and that Tesla left Edison (and started his
own electrical firm) because E. didn't pay up. Edison denied it, and no one
familiar with Edison's business practices has ever found it plausible.   

2) Tesla licensed his 1888 motor and transformer designs to Westinghouse for
$60K plus a royalty of $2.50 per HP produced -- at the time, a deal on the
order of Zuckerberg's share in the Facebook IPO. 

3) In 1899, Tesla raised $100K from John Jacob Astor IV, purportedly for new
lighting designs, and spent it on his wireless power-transmission
experiments instead. A year later, he got $150K from J.P. Morgan for the
Wardenclyffe tower (an investment aborted when Marconi demonstrated distance
radio first). 

I could go on with the many lawsuits and patent claims by (as well as
against) Tesla, or with his repeated attempts in the 1930s to get government
funding (US, UK, USSR, Yugoslavia) for a particle-beam weapon he claimed
"will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200
miles from a defending nation's border... [and] cause armies to drop dead in
their tracks." (Doubtless you can explain to me why that was a much more
ethical proposition than the Reaganaut version of the same scam.)

Suffice it to say that while he *said* a great deal about benefits for all
mankind from his work (and I have no reason to call that insincere), what he
*did* leaves no doubt whatsoever that like Edison, Westinghouse, Marconi,
and many other electrical innovators of the time, he was very much
interested in turning his ideas into large financial ventures and great
personal wealth. Nothing wrong with that -- until you portray him as the
people's scientist, standing foursquare against the Man.

As for "Whether Tesla could successfully do what he claimed will probably
never be known"... well, it will probably never be known whether ancient
astronauts built the Pyramids, or whether Roger Bacon's philosopher's stone
could in fact change lead into gold, but the smart money's against it. There
is *zero* evidence that Tesla ever produced experimental results that aren't
explained by "consensus" electromagnetic theory. And outside the precincts
of UFOlogy, akashic energy, zero-point antigravity, etc., there has been
*zero* sustained scientific interest in the, ahh, idiosyncratic theories of
his later years. Not because he was a bold humanitarian rebel disdained by
the greedy Establishment, but because he went off the fucking rails
mentally.         
 
Feel free to go on about quantum field theory, the Casimir effect, Ebola,
and other "mysteries." I see no evidence that you have enough grasp of what
*is* known and understood about them to say much of interest about what
isn't. I'm sorry if you take "ill-informed" as a personal attack, but on
these matters -- which you, not I, brought into the discussion of Pynchon
and science  -- you are. As your notion of "civil conversation" seems to
require that I pretend otherwise, I'd best bow out of this one.