A lot of misinformation is floating around about Nikola Tesla. I've been reading too many pseudo scientific and weak metaphysical claims that quote him. I would like some clarification on one thing that I see cited a lot, and that's Tesla's association with Vivekananda. I don't think it really proves one thing or the other, but I'm still curious to know how much about his friendship with him is true. I could only find this very old article about it on the Tesla Society page. http://www.teslasociety.com/tesla_and_swami.htm

Any input would be appreciated.

Welcome to the forum Ike!

Thank you!

Vivekananda or however you spell it claimed to have met Tesla in a letter once. I haven't seen any clear evidence that Tesla ever claimed to have met Vivekananda. That isn't terribly surprising. Tesla was a consummate showman and met a hell of a lot of people, though he didn't like to shake hands with them. It seems most probable that they did meet casually at least once but weren't really homies.

Incidentally, Tesla was brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant. He was a genius electrical engineer and elite hacker. He invented a lot of stuff, and he did get screwed by corporations.

But he was no scientist, and he had no idea how half of his inventions worked, including radio, which misunderstanding was the basis of all of that wireless transmission of energy stuff. It does work, and we do it all the time to power RFID devices, but it doesn't work for the reasons Tesla thought; it's horribly and unavoidably inefficient (unless it's a microwave chamber or a light bulb or something); and the idea of it being self-regenerating is complete bunkum.

(ETA: Or, you know, like a fire, which is really the same thing.)

Still, a lot of what he invented did work, and fabulously well. That includes some stuff that was never put into production, but not everything. The stories of the building-shaking device or the death ray that vaporized Tunguska are almost certainly either nonsense or huge exaggerations. They only make sense as extrapolations of idealized principles of engineering, which largely ignore minor terms that become pretty important when you scale them up. Approximations that work just fine for popping a balloon or shaking a table don't really scale like that. Vacuum tubes are great and you can pump a lot more power through them than you can transistors, but you do run into problems, even at much smaller scales than Tesla imagined, which you can even see in the screens and suppressors in high-quality audio tubes. And when you get to the tubes used to be used to talk to submarines with very low frequency, the ones that are put together with nuts and bolts, things get extremely hairy, and that is still a few orders of magnitude short of what you'd need to fry a noticeable area of Russia. (Anyway, blue jeans work better.)

I don't know about any meeting, but I do know the whole Tesla fanboi contingent and it's pseudo-science claims make me crazy.

I had no idea Tesla didn't understand the principles which allowed his inventions to work.

One of his crazier ideas was transmitting electricity wirelessly by resonance. Yes that does work on a small scale, but he was going to try and transmit it across the Atlantic from the Wardenclyffe Tower.

Hi

I think there is some misinformation on this thread, Tesla understood electrical principles very well, he defined many of them. The big misunderstanding with teslas work is all the pseudoscience babble that has been latched onto him. One of his big interests was Radiant energy and Radiant Electricity. This is not pseudo science, and still today people havent caught on. The key and interesting thing to his work was what was termed a radiant energy pulse, an impulse scalar wave. This is generated at bunching points in a circuit when switches are opened, a momentary charge is built up and is seen most concentrated on sharp points of conductors, this is at the zero point. This is an intense impulse wave that expands out from the charge bunching point outwards. This charge bunching point strips the immediate atoms around it of electrons leaving a +ve charged atmosphere. These positive charges were seen as the static charges that appeared on all the none earthed surfaces in his laboratory. The trick is collecting the charge. One way is too either guide it with magnets onto collector circuits, or just let it drift onto polished metal surfaces which are not grounded. The positive charges lift electrons from the surface of the electron rich metal and leave the conductor with a +ve charge. This charge can be used to draw -ve charges out of the negative terminal of a battery, effectively cooling a battery, or it can be used to charge a plate of a capacitor. Too much positive charge on the negative terminal of a battery causes the apparent voltage to drop or the battery voltage to flip. Cars have negative earthing on to their metalwork, a car subjected to massive amounts of radiant charges will lose its battery power and stop. Does this sound familiar UFO's cause cars to stop and lights to go out. Teslas technology is possibly covered up because it is UFO technology. He talked about veritable ropes in the sky, gravity according to Teslas ideas was caused by vibrations in space or the ether. He may well have used his flat pancake coils especially the double biflar to excite space or the ether and cause a gravitational reversal in the direction he wanted to go. This would allow free fall acceleration with no G force, crazy fast turns that would crush you if G force was involved etc. Einsteins theories today would be rejected they dont include an accelerating universe, ether theory and quantum theory are almost one and the same. Ether theory predicts an accelerating universe.
The double bifilar coil creates pinch points when running at very high frequency as outgoing pulses past incoming pulses, cancelling the respective magnetic fields as the pulses pass each other, and so create a momentary impulse scalar wave. From a technical point of view I suspect it is a cover up, without any techno babble or pseudo science. To state Tesla did not know what he was talking about, is complete crap, the man was a genius ahead of his day. People need to read exactly what he wrote not what other people state he wrote which is largely wrong. The impulse scalar wave could well have caused an avalanche effect as it travelled outwards releasing more electrons from the atoms as it travelled.

Debunk that

Kind Regards

Andy

'Kind regards'.

I thought that would amuse you all. It is good to test all things, and push limits. An open mind is required with much of Teslas stuff. His inventions did work, the double bifilar coil mentioned above is being used by nasa on experiments, ref quantum matter. He was a man ahead of his time, and people are only just beginning to understand today, what he was into. As for being stupid he gave many lectures at the IEE and various other respected institutions, to say the man did not know what he talked about his ludicrous. He was however a businessman as well, so some of his claims may have been self advertisement, to raise funds, an open mind is required discount nothing.

Like the hat.

Andy

Handy andy wrote:Hi

I think there is some misinformation on this thread, Tesla understood electrical principles very well, he defined many of them. The big misunderstanding with teslas work is all the pseudoscience babble that has been latched onto him. One of his big interests was Radiant energy and Radiant Electricity. This is not pseudo science, and still today people havent caught on. The key and interesting thing to his work was what was termed a radiant energy pulse, an impulse scalar wave. This is generated at bunching points in a circuit when switches are opened, a momentary charge is built up and is seen most concentrated on sharp points of conductors, this is at the zero point. This is an intense impulse wave that expands out from the charge bunching point outwards. This charge bunching point strips the immediate atoms around it of electrons leaving a +ve charged atmosphere. These positive charges were seen as the static charges that appeared on all the none earthed surfaces in his laboratory. The trick is collecting the charge. One way is too either guide it with magnets onto collector circuits, or just let it drift onto polished metal surfaces which are not grounded. The positive charges lift electrons from the surface of the electron rich metal and leave the conductor with a +ve charge. This charge can be used to draw -ve charges out of the negative terminal of a battery, effectively cooling a battery, or it can be used to charge a plate of a capacitor. Too much positive charge on the negative terminal of a battery causes the apparent voltage to drop or the battery voltage to flip. Cars have negative earthing on to their metalwork, a car subjected to massive amounts of radiant charges will lose its battery power and stop. Does this sound familiar UFO's cause cars to stop and lights to go out. Teslas technology is possibly covered up because it is UFO technology. He talked about veritable ropes in the sky, gravity according to Teslas ideas was caused by vibrations in space or the ether. He may well have used his flat pancake coils especially the double biflar to excite space or the ether and cause a gravitational reversal in the direction he wanted to go. This would allow free fall acceleration with no G force, crazy fast turns that would crush you if G force was involved etc. Einsteins theories today would be rejected they dont include an accelerating universe, ether theory and quantum theory are almost one and the same. Ether theory predicts an accelerating universe.
The double bifilar coil creates pinch points when running at very high frequency as outgoing pulses past incoming pulses, cancelling the respective magnetic fields as the pulses pass each other, and so create a momentary impulse scalar wave. From a technical point of view I suspect it is a cover up, without any techno babble or pseudo science. To state Tesla did not know what he was talking about, is complete crap, the man was a genius ahead of his day. People need to read exactly what he wrote not what other people state he wrote which is largely wrong. The impulse scalar wave could well have caused an avalanche effect as it travelled outwards releasing more electrons from the atoms as it travelled.

Debunk that

Kind Regards

Andy

Which parts do you want debunked - the bits that almost appear to make some kind of sense - or the bits that are total gibberish?

How can you turn an electromagnetic wave into a scalar wave? I don't think that makes any kind of sense. How does a scalar wave cause electrons to move? How do they know which way to move? GR tells us about how gravity can cause ripples in spacetime, the recent LIGO results show GR is hard to beat, really hard, I mean really really really hard, harder even than generating the energies required to induce said ripples.

I love Tesla, he's fascinating, he did a lot of great things and had a shitload of great ideas, so what if he was a little crazy? One of my favorite things is how he made a schmuck out of Edison by having the far better and safer AC method for transmission of electric power over wires.

I visited Vivekanada's shrine in '73.

Just thought I would mention it.

Have got his biography by Swami Nikhilananda. Haven't read it but there is no mention of Tesla in the index.

Alan B wrote:I visited Vivekanada's shrine in '73.

Just thought I would mention it.

Have got his biography by Swami Nikhilananda. Haven't read it but there is no mention of Tesla in the index.

ANOTHER cover-up!

Scalar waves are basically pseudoscience. While they have a use in real-world physics, such as quantities that only contain magnitude, this definition is rather vague and is often used by free energy folks as the new quantum, which is basically physics abuse.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scalar_wave

A scalar wave is a purported type of electromagnetic wave that works outside physics as we know it.

The central conceit is that scalar waves restore certain useful aspects of Maxwell's equations "discarded" in the 19th century by those fools Heaviside, Hertz and Gibbs.[1] Nikola Tesla was also interested in them, in his more-than-a-little-odd period.

Free energy advocates have pushed the concept since the 1990s,[2] particularly Thomas E. Bearden. It has since been adopted by some alternative medicine practitioners as the new "quantum": a universally-applicable sciencey handwave to support any arbitrary claim whatsoever.[3] Conspiracy theorists hold that it is behind weather-changing superweapons that brought down space shuttle Columbia.

Tesla discovered AC voltage that allowed transmission lines plus many more. He is over shadowed by the show man Edison who pinched everyone else's ideas.

Nikola Tesla’s 10 Major Contributions And Accomplishments

One wonders what would happen to either end of over the air transmission of power during a thunderstorm. I imagine the results would not be good.

RS

It would be dramatic.