Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 19

in the late nineteenth century that the equations were to assume the form we find them in today.⁵⁷ Even with their simplifications, we know that Maxwell’s theory was not systematically taught at Cambridge University until after around 1900.⁵⁸ Because Hertz’s famous experiment was inspired by Maxwell’s work, which Tesla most likely did not understand, it seems plausible that Tesla might cling to an electric circuit theory paradigm in explaining what was called wireless communication. Note however, this was not canonical circuit theory — Tesla had added some bizarre features of his own to force it to explain wireless telegraphy.

Maxwell’s theory and its experimental verification by Hertz is not the only paradigm shift in Tesla’s era that he was unwilling to accept and understand. Throughout his life, he spoke often of particles that moved faster than light — a direct contradiction of Einstein’s theory of relativity.⁵⁹ In an interview with Time magazine on the occasion of his 75^th birthday in 1931, he claimed to have “split atoms” with no release of energy — again a contradiction of relativity. He also asserted that he had, using “pure mathematics,” come up with a theory that “tend[s] to disprove the Einstein theory.” There is no indication that Tesla ever had the knowledge to derive a competing theory.

Circa 1930, Tesla wrote a poem for his friend George Sylvester Viereck in which he muses about science.⁶⁰ One stanza addresses Newton and contains these lines:

“Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teaching all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable.”

Note the “long haired crank” — Tesla’s name for the man who overthrew the Newtonian paradigm of mechanics.

Much has been written about opposition to Einstein’s theory of relativity; this hostility reached its peak in the two decades following the confirmation of the general theory of relativity via the measurement of the bending of starlight by the sun’s gravitational field in 1919.⁶¹ Some of this opposition was rooted in anti-Semitism, as the preceding reference shows, and we do know that Tesla had anti-Jewish tendencies.⁶² In addition, Hertz, whom he diminishes, was, like Einstein, of Jewish origin, — only partly in Hertz’s case — but it seems more likely that the statement to Time magazine derives more from an almost pathological narcissism that compelled him to be in the public eye.

Tesla has been called a scientist, engineer, and inventor. While the confusion and angst that can befall a scientific community having difficulty in adapting to a paradigm shift has been much written about, especially after Kuhn’s seminal publication, the effect of a scientific paradigm shift on