Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER TWO tures and wrote papers. But as I gained confidence in my abilities I began to take a closer look at the direction I was taking. I wondered how my research and that of my colleagues would look in a historical perspective. From many other scientists I gained the impression that the great days of discovery were over. That in most cases, they would say, we knew the rules which made nature tick. If it was fundamental problems that I was after then I had arrived on the scene fifty years too late. In the first decades of this century physics had been in a turbulent state. The first tentative probes at the quantum theory and Einstein's theory of relativity had shaken its foundation. Out of that confusion had grown a new science of greater beauty and power, a physics which reached deeply into the heart of nature. For many who worked in the second half of this century it seemed sufficient to do homage to the 'new science', to evaluate its implications. The highest ambition would be to dot an 'i' or correct the punctuation in the book of nature but never to dream of rewriting it. For those interested in experiments there were still speculative fields like astronomy and biology but, for the theoretician, modern quantum theory was here to stay. It had been better tested than any other theory in the history of knowledge and scientists were stuck with it for decades or even centuries into the future. Yet I had not entered science simply to wander along well-trodden paths and clean up in the wake of giants who had gone before me. For the excitement as a boy had lain in unexplored worlds and in theories which made me giddy by their audacity. I began therefore to study the foundations of modern physics and after some hard thinking came to the conclusion that the modern attitude of acceptance of quantum theory was far from appropriate. I saw that there were difficulties deep within the heart of physics, that the new science had been built on two incompatible theories, two behemoths who were in a state of eternal and sluggish war. Einstein's theory of relativity and the quantum theory had been created almost at the same historical period yet they were based on very different views of the world and on different intuitions as to the way nature works. It was the general feeling amongst scientists that the differences between the two theories could be resolved through ingenious mathematical manipulations, rather as if a cold war between two superpowers could be 18
