Seconded. I’ve been away for a week+ and it’s great to see how this thread has developed. I’m especially glad that **wbeaty **is back amongst us and actually provoking thought.
I like to think of myself as having a scientific mindset even though that’s not my occupation. Yet Bill holds up a very clear mirror showing me a somewhat uncomfortable reflection. Scepticism can be as arbitrary-belief-based as any other religion.
Agreed.
I understand Mr. Beaty’s point about allowing the *possibility *of a garage full of unicorns. And it is a valid point. But where do you draw the line? At what level of confidence can I proclaim a spade is a spade? Should we preface every seemingly-factual comment with “we believe” or “current evidence suggests”? At what point does it become ridiculous?
Instead of saying, “Ghosts don’t exist,” should we say, “Current evidence suggests ghosts don’t exist”? :rolleyes: Instead of saying, “Magnetic bracelets are worthless,” should we say, “We believe magnetic bracelets are worthless”? :rolleyes:
Pardon the sidetrack, but on page 94 of Margaret Cheney’s Tesla: Man Out of Time, she wrote: “It is thus possible to entertain the suggestion of a contemporary electrical engineer that Tesla’s hypersensitive vacuum tube might make an excellent detector not only of Kirlian auras but of other so-called paranormal phenomena, including the entities commonly called ghosts.” Which makes me think “Great! We can ask Tesla about our outstanding questions directly”. The only problem being that I doubt that Tesla believed in ghosts…
Instead of indulging in things that can’t be proved, why not turn the discussion around to those that can?
A simple, direct question. In the 67 years since Tesla died, what of his scorned inventions have been brought forth to the public as usable products?
Look for earliest mention of “wave-complex.” This apparently was Tesla’s term for his freq-hopping spread-spectrum devices. I recall it’s in his World System proposal, but as secure comm rather than as guarding against power theft. He’d patented the switched-cap-coil clockwork version, the infamous “AND gate.” But he probably was keeping secret another simpler idea: an overcoupled transmitter broadcasts a line-split spectrum, and an identical receiver should be able to strongly absorb that signal. It’s radio, but with two tuning knobs (and a 2D crosshair display?!! Stations appear as places on a grid?) Add more tank circuits with identical tuning and various values for coupling, and you should get a complicated signal very similar to a molecular IR spectrum. A radio with many tuning knobs? No synchronized rotating switches needed.
All this is just my untested speculation. I haven’t built even a “two dimensional” transmitter/receiver, as opposed to current radio tech with its one-dimensional tuning spectrum.) I strongly suspect that Tesla’s “Static Eliminator” 2-disk device was a spread-spectrum adapter intended to retrofit a normal radio set. It “eliminates static” in the same sense that FM radio does. If true, and if the guy had any interest in selling products, we could have had something like FM radio before we had vacuum tubes. Maybe.
I think it is more accurate to say that for the most part Tesla’s theories about power distribution were correct and form the basis for what we do today. He invented polyphase power and induction motors and generators. These things are at the heart of power distribution. I don’t remember if it is fair to say that he invented alternating current, but he certainly created many of its advantages. The bit about the big towers radiating power doesn’t seem to have been much use, but it hardly represents his main work.
The SD addiction hasn’t lost it’s power! I still may have to go cold turkey to preserve employment, and perhaps sanity. 
(Even worse than Stumbleupon.)
The holy book of RPF SurelyYou’reJoking gives a solution (or perhaps it was in Cargo Cult Sci.) When you’re “being a scientist,” you adopt a bizarre set of inhuman behaviors. If you tried to maintain them constantly throughout normal everyday life, you’d become insane. When you close the office door and go catch the bus, you have to revert to “normal guy.” To make certain of the mode switch, go hang out in nudie bars. Chat up Vegas show girls. Hottubbing with female New Age Believers in California communes.
On wikipedia “Pseudoskepticism” page we came up with a great definition: Skeptic organizations are the police arm of science. We’re out in the trenches, dealing with the bad guys in real time. Science itself more resembles the court system. A beat cop can’t be sacrificing confidence and decisive action for proper scientific tenativeness and shades of gray viewpoint. It’s up to the courts to define what crime is and what it isn’t. If Bigfoot or Tesla becomes part of science, then the police don’t arrest their henchmen anymore. But all of this guarantees that some woo-woo-looking innocents are going to get clubbed in the riot, and some serious criminals dressed in spotless scientific garb are going to be helped along. And the police had better stay on guard against creeping internal corruption. When critics accuse skeptics of improper scientific attitude …they’re right. Skeptic groups aren’t the organism; they’re the immune system. In that light, constant self-training and increasing skill in enemy-recognition is critical. It becomes very important to analyze embarrassing mistakes rather than covering them up. (Heh, too bad someone deleted that WP entry.)
Um… why “can’t?”
Rather than “can’t”, I’d say “easily” proved. But not by hobbyists. We’d just need normal funding for a medium-sized research project. On the other hand, past events show that this doesn’t work if results support Tesla. Ohio State’s Dr. JF Corum wrote extensively on electrical engineering analyses of Tesla’s stuff. He shows that when Tesla is taken seriously, some of his ridiculed claims and devices look quite workable in theory. Corum’s reward is to be ignored, since obviously he’s become a True Believer, and you can’t trust anything from those guys. The subject is dominated by circular cause, self-fulfilling prophecies. So I suspect that, if good experimental research on Tesla’s remaining claims was performed, it would be immediately accepted, but only if it proved Tesla wrong. To do otherwise would require finding overwhelming evidence and getting it widely published: enough to cause a large group of long-time scoffers to reverse their views and offer apologies. Max Planck says that instead such people don’t change, but must die off and clear the way for others who are still curious and unconvinced.
List the scorned ones? There was some independent rediscovery. Spread Spectrum secure radio. But for freq-hopping switching capacitors we don’t use Tesla’s patent with its rotating commutators. Also, his recovered secret “Death Ray” docs indicate that he’d discovered the Electrospray effect, and was using it to generate a stream of liquid metal atomic clusters which could be focused and deflected like electrons. This was rediscovered and used in early ink-jet printers, as well as in contemporary mass spectrometers (even got someone the Nobel.) Whether the original hypervelocity atomic-cluster beams are currently part of military particle-beam weapons is probably difficult to learn.
Of course there’s an earlier history of scorned Tesla inventions. The brushless motor. Highly scorned at the time (Tesla’s physics teacher, European investors, Edison.) The spark transmitter. Marconi et. al. did a good job in applying the derogatory label “Tesla Coil” to Tesla’s high-power single-freq radio transmitter breakthrough, while applying a different label to his stolen version. (What good is a “tesla coil?” Not good for much. Unless you name it “spark transmitter.”) The Alexanderson Alternator: hooking a high-freq multi-pole AC generator to an antenna. Nobody had anything to do with that device …until Tesla’s patent ran out two decades later, and Alexanderson presented his own faster version as the breakthrough solution to voice transmission. A critical advance was a closed-loop RPM control to keep the transmission frequency from wandering around. I recall that NT wrote of this, but didn’t patent it.
You see, any “scorned” invention, if proved valid and usable, is then by definition a non-scorned invention. Only inventions yet remaining in the untested/unknown category can remain “scorned,” and the untested/unknown ones, by definition, aren’t being sold as products. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a form of circular reasoning.
Possible exception: the vacuum-tester or “violet wand” device. Not strictly Tesla-approved (descrptions lead me to suspect his own version used hard vacuum button-lamps, and sterilized surfaces via soft xrays.) Violet Wands sold tens of thousands, if not far more. Success? They’re widely used as leak detectors in chem and physics labs. They “cure all known ills” and are tarred with quackery, so they remain scorned. But they certainly have genuine effects: injecting ozone and nitrogen oxides and perhaps altering skin flora. (They don’t seem to kill off skin fungus. Athlete’s foot. Damn. Perhaps try a hard-vaccum x-ray version? That type might kill everything execpt the skin fungus.)
Brain fag! My antique Violet Wand booklet insists that the device is a sure cure for “Brain Fag.” Today we have Starbucks. Less carcinogenic nitrogen oxides.
Or start the tape recorder during a seance and ask Tesla your questions. Play back the tape and listen for answers. 
Hmm. I bet this only works if you use …a WIRE RECORDER! Or perhaps an AM radio tuned to a blank spot …at the very bottom of the band.
For some real fun we need psychic Remote Viewers to tell us the location of the lost voice recordings made of Tesla. There was also mention somewhere of an “Edison” (meaning film,) made of the interior of his CS laboratory.
Here are some excellent fake films of Tesla rants, w/pigeons:
You have this right.
How easily we forget. Names like Westinghouse and Edison are remembered, but Tesla was the man who made the 20th century possible. So what if later in life his notions didn’t pay off? Even if they are utter nonsense, that shouldn’t diminish the contributions he made. If he his to be measured only by success, he had plenty of those.
Well, if you start speaking and thinking in E-prime, the answer is “never”. It’s an interesting mental discipline, at least!
If you’re goal is to be precise, then you add the qualification. It’s usually only required when bickering in GQ and GD though.
I’ve never really understood why the uncertainties of improbable events bother people so much when there is so much uncertainty in every football game, driving in traffic, the weather, etc. The fact that magnetic bracelets may actually cure arthritis and we just don’t know it doesn’t enter my train of thought very often.
So Tesla believed that he could transmist power, without losses, by directing it at thye earth’s resonant frequency.
What were his claims about “free energy”? Was he thinking about sometyhing different?
I don’t understand these claims (if in fact he made them). Why did he tinker with steam turbines, if he he thought he could tap some huge energy source?
Paranoid and secretive Tesla left behind huge gray areas where anyone can insert their own guesswork and fantasies. (Perhaps some small fraction of them are even correct?)
Much of the “FE” crackpot community insists that Tesla had a secret free energy device. But Tesla himself only speculated, saying that someday we would harness thermal and subatomic motion; in other words “Type-II perpetual motion machines.” This was from his comment about “harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature.” I’ve never seen any writing where he actually announced success with this. The giant tower was for energy broadcasts. It was connected to the AC grid, and when he ran out of money, he turned it on full blast and locked himself in the building. To stop the week-long giant electrical display, authorities had to locate the buried power cables for Wardenclyffe, and pull the plug. (This from the Marc Seifer book “Wizard.”)
Apparently he intended his Tesla Turbine project to replace automotive gasoline engines, and thus to generate funding for a second attempt at the Wardenclyffe device. I’ve seen some docs that give evidence that he did try this years later, in Canada.
DOH! I completely forgot that I’d written up a response to Cecil’s article. It points out the slow erosion of the case against Tesla, and the need to maintain neutral language when poking holes in crackpot ideas. See:
Was Tesla REALLY a crackpot?
http://amasci.com/tesla/teslabad.html
From your linked article:
I asked you earlier for examples in which the notions and inventions that are now called crackpot have been shown to be viable products. You answered with obfuscation. Any close reading, however, shows clearly that no examples were forthcoming.
That linked article says no more than Tesla could, maybe, if, making several assumptions, discounting all his actual words, might have been thinking in the right direction about some things that nobody has yet turned into a viable, functioning product that conforms with his claims.
It has been 67 years since Tesla’s death. Nobody has yet had to eat any crow. I find that significant. You are free not to, but these are not even the “extraordinary claims” that require “extraordinary evidence.” Just plain evidence will do. If you think your linked article provides this evidence, we are talking across different worlds.
You didn’t understand my earlier answer? Or perhaps I didn’t understand your question. I thought I was quite clear. Not understanding a response is very different than “you’re intentionally obfuscating.” WP says “Assume good faith.”
So, which part of my answer was unclear? (And no, it wasn’t about generalized “the notions and inventions.” You had asked about Tesla’s inventions.)
Again: an invention which is called crackpot by mainstream science is, by definition, not vindicated by mainstream science. And an invention which has been vindicated by science is not crackpot. What you’d asked for is a logical impossibility. So, instead I gave examples of Tesla inventions which had earlier been ridiculed, but which currently are known to be genuine.
I guess I don’t understand what you’re asking for. How can a known viable product be a known crackpot mistake?
Instead, do you mean products which today are widely regarded as crackpot, and yet have never been shown to be viable, actually are secretly viable and genuine, but the scientific mainstream doesn’t know this? (Or in other words, Tesla’s products or ideas which I personally have seen work, but which are widely regarded as crackpot?)
Bah, let me know when a band names themselves after one of them and goes multi-platinum. 
I have long been interested in the Tesla Turbine. On firts glance, it appears to have many advantages-simple design, cheap to manufacture-with none of the complexity of a conventional turbine. But nobody (commercially) used it-because it still has lots of unsolved problems (such as the tendency of the rotor discs to fly apart). I also think that the reduction gearing (necessary to use in a car) would be pretty cost prohibitive.
Anybody know how Chrysler’s 1960’s gas turbine cars worked out? As I recall, test vehicles were given to people to drive-they must have been OK cars.
They tested 55 cars. The cars did prove to be reliable, though they did have some problems at higher elevations. The biggest complaint was that the engine sounded annoyingly like a really big vacuum cleaner. The turbine whine was enough to kill the project, and in the end 46 of the cars were scrapped (which was standard policy at the time for prototype cars).
I can’t imagine that a high speed turbine like that would be too safe if it ever experienced a catastrophic failure. It’s probably a good thing that they never went into full production.