Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA denied simply by printing new maps of the world. I began to realize that this incompatibility between two approaches to nature could be terribly important, that it could be an indication of the new directions science had to take to bring it into a deeper understanding of nature. In some ways I felt the situation was not unlike that which faced Einstein at the turn of the century when he considered the incompatibility of Newton's theory of mechanics and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. Preoccupied with these ideas I took a sabbatical in London and spent most of my time with two scientists, David Bohm and Roger Penrose. They were both concerned with these problems but had different creative approaches. My year spent in London was free and stimulating. I spent evenings at the theatre or in pubs near the college talking for hours about these scientific problems. In an eclectic way these talks ranged far beyond science into linguistics, psychology, mysticism and perception, and through them I began to realize that the way to a new science did not lie simply in developing new mathematics or setting up new experiments but would arise from a radically new way of looking at the world. Science in the twenty-first century had to learn a different way of asking questions of nature. The investigation of nature is never a passive process in which facts and theories fall half formed into a scientist's lap and wait to be fitted together. Gathering data isn't like picking up attractive shells on the beach. It is an 'intentional' process in which the phenomena uncovered are, to some extent, a reflection of the way each question is posed. An example may help. Suppose that an international group of physicists build a bigger and better elementary particle accelerator. What secrets of nature will they uncover? In a sense they are asking nature a 'leading question'. For their enquiry is based upon a number of presuppositions - for example that, at its most fundamental, nature is composed of particles, that we can investigate matter by bombarding it with high-energy âprojectiles', that at higher energies newer and more interesting elementary particles will appear. Now all of these presuppositions may be quite correct, or they may be only partly correct. What is clear, however, is that they are not the only suppositions we can make about the ultimate structure of matter. 199
