Nikola Tesla Books
TESLA AFTERWORD and radically changing the way people relate and communicate. Some researchers now believe that the brains of young people brought up in the world of the Internet (along with the use of video games) are wired in different ways so that they now learn in different ways. Virtual reality and telepresence also appear to be changing the limits of consciousness. All this was made possible by the harnessing of electricity and Nicola Tesla was one of those geniuses who made it possible. But our modern technology has also been moving in other directions. We are, for example, in the midst of a new and directed form of evolution where animals and plants are being designed with new properties. Reading the human genome opens up profound possibilities to change the human body and even human consciousness. Revolutions in nanotechnology and nanobiology take us to the very fringes of life. Nevertheless, with all the power of modern science and all the wonders of technology Tesla still appears as a visionary. The earth, for Tesla, was a vast living thing pulsing with bursts of energy, rippling with electrical discharges - all this long before Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. To Tesla, electricity was not reduced to a property that could be studied and subsumed under abstract laws of physics. It was something elemental, a force of vast potential that could be tamed and harnessed, just as he had tamed the enormous power of Niagara Falls. Tesla also dreamed of communication with planets, of a machine that could destroy great buildings through the property of resonance. He built his giant Tesla towers and planned to transmit energy over vast distances without loss and without the need for cables. In so many ways Tesla anticipated the sorts of technology that have been explored under the umbrella of Star War's Defense. Tesla the Alchemist Tesla was the archetype of the reclusive, eccentric inventor and there are times when I find myself asking what was his underlying motivation? What was the deeper nature of his psyche that led him to work with with extremely high voltages, thunderstorms and massive electrical discharges? 146
