Who/Where are the Modern Day Teslas?

Hi all,

I watched a documentary about Tesla the other night and I was totally blown away by the man.

The inventions he discovered and the ideas he had were pure genius and some were so far out there, he was labelled a bit of a mad scientist by many.

Apart from Tesla there are several other names we are all familiar with suach as Einstein, Da vinci etc etc.

What I would like to ask all of you is this -

Who/Where are the modern day equivalents of these people?

If Tesla had such wondrous ideas over 60 years ago, why is it that we are not seeing absolutley breathtaking inventions right now?

Your thoughts please....

G.

I would guess this.

One - many are at DARMA

Two - many of the rest are at NSA

A fair number are working for agencies you've never heard of, yet

reply to post by Truth1000


Not only that. Those agencies might be dealing with technology that are not meant for man.

The real geniuses will be known a century from now just like Tesla.

All others are on the payrole of corporate industries and so will they not get credit for there work.

You mean like the scientists that are heading up the LHC in Cern?
Or are you talking about the unnamed groups of brilliant individuals that have made extreme leaps in Astro Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and String Theory?
On a more readily recognizable scale, did you overlook the development of the internet, solid state technology, quad core processing, LCD screens, and smart phones?

The problem that I think you are having is that you are looking at individuals in history and seeing the accomplishments they have been created with. However, you are missing the fact that the next big leaps in science and technology are in process and being done in groups. Very few people step up individidually and take all the credit for an idea because the more advanced things become the harder they are to advance.

Perhaps someone will pop up one day and take credit for holographic storage or a realistic means to use FTL technology. I just dont think it is as likely to happen any longer. More likely it will be a consortium, group, or team of teams.

Excellent post, WTT.

Go back to Edison, for example, and he was using the brain power of enormous teams of researchers, yet still taking credit for all of the positive outcomes of their efforts. Even a century ago, many of the top inventions were team efforts, with solitary media hounds as the leaders.

Research today is far too complex for the garage mechanic to invent the next microwave beam breakthrough.

This is one of the things many people don't understand about why we spend money on the space program, medical research, military programs, basic scientific principle studies, and so forth. It is the side effects of these programs that bring us our advances in technology.

Microwaves were based on radars. Velcro, Air-Jordan's, and long-shelf life foods came from the space program. The list would go on and on.

If we don't have a "project" to build towards, we Americans don't tend to spend money on R&D. It's a cinch the Russians, Germans, Japanese, and Chinese are doing their fair share of R&D.

In 1992, there was a large corporate study that showed that for every dollar the Government spent on the Apollo program, we had gained back seven dollars in technology. When else did the Government otherwise get back a profit on its spending?

All the really eye-popping crap that happens these days is happening in places you'll never hear about for the next 20 years.

You can't do so much Rutherford wax-and-string inventing these days, it takes horribly expensive equipment and teams of specialists.

Plus, there was a real right turn mid WW2 that taught the US to hide basic science advances in the wake of the fission bomb debacle.

If Edison, Farnsworth, or Tesla had invented the Mach drive, you'd have heard about it ad nauseam. Since it happened (more or less) during WW2, at IAS, it fell into the war blackout along with "how we do nuclear shaped charges" and the like, never to be discussed again. Sim, salabim.

Did you ever wonder that maybe they are being aborted?
IMHO

Some may be. However, only the non-aborted geniuses get hired.

reply to post by grantbeed


I mean this in all seriousness -- probably working for wallstreet.

Why? Because financial engineers recruited the top physicists and mathematicians throughout the 90's and probably into the 2000's from all the best schools, looking for the BEST in the field.. and they could pay them millions a dollars a year, which is a hell of a lot more than they'd ever make doing anything actually related to physics or science.

I think our generation was robbed, a little bit, of people specifically in the field of physics. In fact, if you ever read through any physics journals in the 2000's, you could have read an article in every other issue about the lack of students going into physics, or working in physics related careers... I don't know if it's still that way or not -- but it probably is.

reply to post by Truth1000


The reason we got so much stuff out of the space program is because capitalism doesn't work well with R&D, so the state intervenes to subsidies research in various programs (like NASA, but also through universities).

Anytime you invent something, the first thing you want to do is intervene in the free market and establish a private monopoly on your invention -- otherwise known as patenting things.

The government has, for a long time, subsidized research for all sorts of things, in order to help make up for this deficit in capitalism -- Noam Chomsky is on their pay role, and he is how I found out about this (btw).


What's a bit shocking is that after the state spends your taxes on this research, when a proven, viable product is discovered, it's immediately handed over to private enterprise. You've probably heard this phrase before: Socialize the losses, privatize the gains. That maxim applies to R&D programs funded by the pentagon, as well as other aspects of big business in America.

Grigory Perelman is the first name that popped into my mind. Just like Tesla he seems to be insane as well

Another one is.. me. Like Perelman I'm more about theoretical stuff and don't bother about applying it to real life.

[edit on 21-4-2010 by rhinoceros]