Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER ELEVEN As I began to surface into the calmer waters of revisions and rewrites, I took time to read the telephone messages and letters which I had allowed to accumulate. One of them gave me a burst of pleasure as I read it. It was from an old friend of mine, David Schrum, and said that he would be dropping in to see me the following weekend. Several years ago Dave had been a research student of mine and we had shared an office in a large room at the National Research Council. Our time together had been stimulating and profitable. We shared a vision of the goals of physics, but our approaches and personalities differed so that the discussions were challenging and tiring. Every so often we would begin a casual conversation at the blackboard only to have it blossom into a fullscale voyage of discovery, often carried out at the tops of our voices until we found ourselves in the dark, deserted building several hours later. We would laugh and step out into the night full of good humour and with every intention of taking up the battle again on the following day. A year or two later we met in London while I was on my sabbatical and Dave was on a fellowship. Over pints of Guinness in pubs close to the college, or in the staff common room, our dialogue continued as before. It took us from physics to the nature of perception, from art to archetypes, and from music to religion until I would glance at my watch and run down Tottenham Court Road to catch my last train home. On his return from England Dave felt the need to examine the roots of his scientific motivation so he rejected any chance of an academic position by retiring to a cottage some miles outside a small village in Ontario. During that period I heard little from him beyond an occasional letter or phone call. At times he mentioned a book he was working on and, at others, hinted at ongoing games of poker with the locals, nights spent reading scientific papers from the turn of the century or long walks in the country. A year or two later he moved to the mining town of Sudbury, Ontario, and renounced his isolated life for teaching at a local college. We continued a sporadic exchange of letters and from time to time he would visit me in Ottawa. During these trips, he would explain to me that his interest in a scientific account of the universe was still as deep but he now felt that the thinker himself - the creator of science - had been left out of the picture. He concluded that an investigation of nature should not only relate 98
