Einstein×Tesla

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, on On the bad habit they trained out of themselves, and how long it took.
2. 00:10
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   So, Nikola, I have been thinking about this question all morning. Bad habits. I have had many, of course—I don't sleep enough, I forget to eat when I work—but the one I really had to train out of myself? Mmm. The need for absolute certainty before I spoke.
3. 00:26
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Certainty! Yes, I know this demon intimately. But for me it was the opposite problem entirely. I had to stop trusting what I could see.
4. 00:36
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   What do you mean, what you could see? You are an experimentalist—seeing is your business, no?
5. 00:40
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   I mean the visions. The complete, perfect machines that would appear in my mind, rotating, functioning, every gear and coil visible in three dimensions. I could walk around them like physical objects. For years I believed these visions were infallible. If I could see it working perfectly in my head, it would work perfectly in the world.
6. 01:06
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Ah. And it didn't?
7. 01:07
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Not always. The AC motor, yes—that one I saw complete in a park in Budapest, and it worked exactly as I envisioned it. But others—the bladeless turbine, some of my wireless power configurations—the vision was too clean. Reality has friction I did not see. Resistance. Impurities in materials. I wasted years building things that my mind had already proven, only to watch them fail in small, humiliating ways.
8. 01:42
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   How long did it take you to stop trusting them? The visions?
9. 01:45
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   I'm not sure I ever did stop completely. Even now, even talking to you, I can see a device for broadcasting this conversation directly into the human nervous system without wires, without speakers—perfect clarity. But I learned, eventually, to test the vision against mathematics. To calculate before I built. It took me perhaps... fifteen years? Twenty? Too long.
10. 02:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Twenty years is a long time to unlearn something.
11. 02:14
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And your certainty? You said you needed it before you spoke. This seems like a virtue, not a vice.
12. 02:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It seems like a virtue, yes. And maybe in some areas it is. But in physics—especially in the work I was doing—it was paralyzing. I would have an idea, you see, a thought about space or time or light, and I would turn it over and over in my mind, looking for the flaw. Looking for the place where it contradicted itself. And I would not talk about it, not publish it, not even really discuss it with colleagues, until I was absolutely certain it was correct.
13. 02:50
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This sounds reasonable to me.
14. 02:52
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Except that in physics, you can never be absolutely certain. Not really. There is always another experiment, always another implication you haven't considered. I held onto my ideas about special relativity for more than a year after I should have published—not because they were wrong, but because I kept thinking, what if I'm missing something? What if there's an error I haven't seen?
15. 03:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But you were vindicated. You were correct.
16. 03:15
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Eventually, yes. But I could have been part of the conversation a year earlier. Other people were working on similar problems—Lorentz, Poincaré—and I was sitting in my apartment in Bern, checking my work for the fiftieth time. The habit came from insecurity, I think. I was not a professor, not even in a university. I was a patent clerk. Who was I to challenge Newton? I needed to be more than right. I needed to be perfect.
17. 03:41
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And how did you break this habit?
18. 03:44
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I didn't, really. Not fully. Even now I sit on papers too long. But what changed was I realized that certainty is not the same as truth. You can be uncertain and still be right. You can publish something tentative, something that says 'I think this might be how it works,' and let other people push on it. Science is a conversation, not a series of pronouncements from on high.
19. 04:08
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Mmm. This is where we differ, perhaps. I always believed science should be pronouncement. Vision. You see the future, and you build it.
20. 04:18
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you just told me your visions failed you.
21. 04:20
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    They failed me in the details. Never in the direction. I was correct about alternating current. I was correct about wireless transmission of energy—the world simply wasn't ready. I was correct about the rotating magnetic field, about radio—
22. 04:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Nikola, being correct about the direction is not the same as being correct about the thing itself. This is what I learned. I could see that Newtonian mechanics had problems at high speeds—I was right about the direction—but the details, the actual mathematics of special relativity, those came from working through the uncertainty. From admitting I didn't know and then figuring it out step by step.
23. 05:00
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    How long did it take you? To learn this?
24. 05:02
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Oh, I'm still learning it. But the real breakthrough came maybe ten years after I published the relativity paper. I was working on general relativity—the gravity problem—and I got stuck. Completely stuck. For months I couldn't see the solution. And I had to accept that maybe I wouldn't figure it out. Maybe someone else would. Maybe the answer was beyond me.
25. 05:22
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This sounds like giving up.
26. 05:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No, no—it sounds like giving up, but it's the opposite. Once I accepted that I might not solve it, I could actually work on it properly. I could try things that might be wrong. I could collaborate. I could ask for help with the mathematics from Grossmann. The need for certainty was strangling my ability to think.
27. 05:41
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And you did solve it.
28. 05:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Eventually. But it took years longer than it should have because I kept waiting to be certain. I would have an equation, and instead of testing it, I would sit with it, worrying about whether it was elegant enough, general enough, perfect enough.
29. 05:54
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I understand this more than you might think. I spent three years perfecting the design of my wireless power tower at Wardenclyffe. Three years of calculation and refinement before I would allow construction to proceed past the foundation. And by the time I was ready, Morgan had withdrawn funding. The moment had passed.
30. 06:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So you learned the same lesson?
31. 06:17
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I learned a lesson. Whether it was the same one, I don't know. I learned that perfection in the mind means nothing if it never enters the world. I learned that timing matters more than completeness. But I'm not sure I learned to embrace uncertainty the way you describe. I still trust my visions, Albert. I just know now that I must build them faster, before the world moves on.
32. 06:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps this is the difference between theoretical and experimental physics. I can publish a tentative idea, and if it's wrong, I publish a correction. But you—if you build the wrong tower, you have a very expensive mistake sitting in Long Island.
33. 06:57
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. Exactly. The cost of error is different for us. Your mistakes are made in pencil. Mine are made in steel and copper and debt.
34. 07:08
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But maybe this is why you needed to trust your visions so completely. The stakes were too high for uncertainty.
35. 07:15
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Perhaps. Though I wonder now if I would have had more success if I had been more uncertain. If I had built smaller, tested more, been less convinced of my own visions. The polyphase motor succeeded because I could build it small first. Wardenclyffe failed because I tried to build the complete vision all at once.
36. 07:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So we both learned the same thing, just from opposite directions. I had to learn to speak before I was certain. You had to learn to test before you were convinced.
37. 07:48
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And neither of us learned it quickly.
38. 07:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. These things take time. I think maybe they have to. If you learn too easily not to trust yourself, you lose the confidence to do anything original. The trick is to hold both—confidence and doubt—at the same time.
39. 08:04
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is the hardest thing. To believe completely in your vision while also accepting that it might be wrong. To see the future clearly while admitting you might be seeing a mirage.
40. 08:15
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. And I think this is why most scientists never do truly original work. Not because they're not smart, but because they can't hold this contradiction. They either doubt everything and do nothing, or believe everything and build nonsense.
41. 08:28
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You are describing my entire career in that second category.
42. 08:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, but you're still here talking about it. So you built some nonsense, yes, but you also built the modern electrical grid. I'd say you managed the balance better than you think.
43. 08:42
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And you discovered relativity while waiting to be certain. So perhaps we both succeeded despite our habits, not because we overcame them.
44. 08:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Maybe. Or maybe the habit was necessary to get us started, and unlearning it was necessary to finish. I don't know. I'm still uncertain about it.
45. 08:58
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And I can still see, perfectly clearly in my mind, exactly how this conversation will be remembered in a hundred years. Every word. Every pause. I trust the vision completely.
46. 09:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Well. One of us is probably wrong.