Subject
Response re Tesla and ADA]
From
Date
Body
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: Query: Tesla and ADA
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 10:15:55 -0500
From: "Johnson, Kurt" <JohnsonK@Coudert.com>
To: "'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
This is interesting and elicits a couple comments from me. In
scientific circles, and I've been lucky enough to have cross-talked with
people from many disciplines (and especially "systems" or "foundations
research" folk), the situation with Tesla electricity (versus the
conventional electricity we pay for over wires today) is cited as a
major (but largely not talked about) paradigm constriction where, for
purposes of being able to create profit alone for one sector of the
society, mankind went for the kind of electrical system where one group
can make money off another by controllings its channels and availability
(Westinghouse was the major vector of this paradigm). This truncated
all the possibilities that "free" Tesla electricity might have had for
mankind and the topic, along with numerous other things about Tesla,
have generally gone untalked about. Tesla was the only man to ever turn
down the Nobel prize [unless there is a newcomer to that list] (out of
anger at the hypocrisy of how it had been awarded before etc.). Tesla
also openly connected the mystical to the empirical re: his own manner
of scientific inquirey (as did the Nobel- winning discoverer of
cyclo-chemistry (he dreamed about it)). I guess the world has no
shortage of "mad geniuses". Regarding the Siberian disaster, however,
there appears to be ample evidence today, from both Soviet, post-Soviet,
and partnered investigations that the bulk of the damage, artifacts etc.
at the site are well explained by an in-atmosphere detonation of some
kind of a bolide (comet, meteor etc.). The precise angle of the way
the trees fell etc. and the debri field has allowed calculation of the
trajectory and height of the explosion in a number of computer models
and also explains what artifacts (congealed carbon, radioactive
materials etc). are or aren't apparent in the on-ground artifacts etc.
Some of this appeared to be "contradictory" data before, but now its
seems fairly clear to scientists what probably happened there; a bolide
exploding along a certain tangential trajectory to the earth etc.
best,
Dr. Kurt Johnson
-----Original Message-----
From: D. Barton Johnson [mailto:chtodel@gte.net]
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 10:02 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Query: Tesla and ADA
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Tesla
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 10:52:41 +0100
From: "Michael Maar" <michael.maar@snafu.de>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
----------------- Message requiring your approval (38 lines) ------------------
Hello,
Reading the strange and thrilling book of the "Jane's Defence
Weekly"-Aerospace Consultant Nick Cook, "The Hunt for Zero Point. One Man's
Journey to Discover the Biggest Secret Since the Invention of the Atom Bomb"
(Century, London), I find one passage not without possible connection to
Nabokov. In chapter 25, Cook writes about the Serb engineer Tesla who in
1884 emigrated to America and worked, having left Edison's Company, on the
field of wireless transmission of energy. To quote Cook: "Tesla's wireless
energy transmission system was initially based upon technology for sending
power through the air, but he soon developped a far more efficient
transmission medium: the ground. In a series of experiments in Colorado,
Tesla showed that the earth could be adapted from its customary role as an
energy sinkhole - a place to dump excess electricity - into a powerful
conductor; a giant
planet-wide energy transmission system that obviated the
need for wire." And then Cook quotes a strange legend which, if known by
Nabokov, could have been with some influence on "Ada". "One of the wilder
theories that still cling to his memory revolves around a supposed
experiment to beam some kind of message to the Arctic explorer Robert Peary,
who in mid-1908 was making an attempt to reach the North Pole. According to
legend, Tesla, who had built a powerful transmitter at Wardencliff on Long
Island, beamed the 'message' on 30 June and awaited news from Peary. The
explorer saw nothing, but thousands of miles away, in a remote corner of
Siberia, a massive explosion equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT devastated
500,000 acres of land centered on a place called Tunguska. The Tunguska
'incident' is generally ascribed to the impact of a comet or a meteorite,
but the absence of evidence for the impact theory has enabled Tesla
proponents to maintain the line that it was Tesla's 'dea
th ray' that caused
the blast. Certainly, Tesla himself seemed to believe he was resposible, for
immediately afterwards he dismantled the 'weapoon' and reverted to other
pursuits." Could Nabokov have heard of that story? Certainly it would have
supported his thoughts about electricity about which, as about time and
space, he believed Man to know "nothing". And, curious enough, in Antiterra
electricity is prohibited after some unspecified desaster. Could he have
alluded to Tesla?