Tesla×Einstein

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein, on On what they got wrong as a student that took years to unlearn.
2. 00:10
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Einstein, I want to ask you something I have asked no one else. What did you believe as a young man that you had to destroy in yourself?
3. 00:19
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Destroy is a strong word, but yes, I understand. For me it was the ether. I believed in it absolutely when I was a student. Everyone did. Light had to move through something, like sound through air.
4. 00:30
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   But you abandoned it.
5. 00:32
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   I had to. The Michelson-Morley experiment, the mathematics, they all pointed the same direction. There was no ether wind. Light needed no medium. It took me years to accept that space could be truly empty, and yet light still travels. What about you?
6. 00:47
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   I never believed in the ether in the way they taught it. But I believed in something worse. I believed mathematics was everything.
7. 00:55
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   That surprises me, Tesla. You were known for visualizing, for seeing machines complete in your mind.
8. 01:01
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Yes, but only after I learned to distrust the equations alone. At the Polytechnic in Graz, I worshipped calculation. I thought if I could write the formula, I understood the phenomenon. My professors praised this. They said I was rigorous.
9. 01:18
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   And this was wrong?
10. 01:19
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Completely wrong. Mathematics describes. It does not explain. I spent two years trying to improve the Gramme dynamo using pure theory, elegant equations. All failures. Then one day in Budapest, I saw the rotating magnetic field complete in my mind, turning like a planet. No equations first. Vision first.
11. 01:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, but surely the mathematics confirmed what you saw?
12. 01:46
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Afterwards, yes. But if I had waited for mathematics to give me permission, I would still be waiting. The equations are a map. They are not the territory. You fly over a landscape and then you draw it. You do not draw it and hope the landscape appears.
13. 02:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think we are talking about different things, my friend. The mathematics I use does not describe what is. It predicts what must be.
14. 02:11
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And how often have you been wrong?
15. 02:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Often! The cosmological constant, I called it my biggest blunder. I added it because I could not accept an expanding universe. The mathematics allowed it, so I put it in. Pure stubbornness.
16. 02:25
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You see? You trusted the flexibility of mathematics over your intuition. I made the opposite mistake. I trusted intuition over mathematics, but only after I learned not to trust mathematics first.
17. 02:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Wait, I am confused now. You said you trusted mathematics too much as a student.
18. 02:42
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. And I learned to trust vision instead. But some men never learn the first lesson. They never learn mathematics at all, and they think this makes them free. It makes them nothing. You must know the rules before you can break them properly.
19. 02:58
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Now this I agree with. There is a graduate student, I remember, who came to me in Princeton. He said he did not need to study Maxwell because he could feel the electromagnetic field in his bones. I told him to come back when his bones could predict the photoelectric effect.
20. 03:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Exactly. But you, Einstein, you had the opposite problem as a student, yes? You knew too much mathematics. You could make anything work on paper.
21. 03:23
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Not exactly. I knew the mathematics, but I did not respect authority. This was my problem. I skipped lectures. I thought I could learn everything from books, from thinking alone in my room.
22. 03:34
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And could you not?
23. 03:35
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I could learn the content, yes. But I missed something important. I missed the conversation. Science is not a solo act, even though we tell ourselves it is. I had to learn this later, painfully. When I was working in the patent office, I had no one to talk to about physics. I wrote letters to friends, to Besso especially. He helped me see what I was missing in the relativity paper.
24. 03:59
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I worked alone almost always.
25. 04:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I know. And I think this hurt you, Tesla. I do not say this to be cruel.
26. 04:05
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Hurt me? I produced the alternating current system alone. The radio. The bladeless turbine. All alone.
27. 04:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, and you also claimed you could transmit power wirelessly across the earth using resonance. You built Wardenclyffe. It did not work. Maybe if you had someone to check your mathematics, to say gently that the inverse square law does not care about resonance.
28. 04:28
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You do not understand what I was attempting.
29. 04:30
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps not. But this is my point. I did not understand many things as a student because I refused to sit in the room with people who understood them. I thought authority figures were always wrong. Sometimes they were right.
30. 04:41
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    My professors told me the rotating magnetic field was impossible.
31. 04:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And they were wrong. But were they wrong about everything? I suspect not. I missed good instruction because I was arrogant. I nearly failed my exams because I could not be bothered to memorize what they wanted. This was childish.
32. 04:58
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I memorized everything. Every formula in the textbooks. I could recite entire chapters. This was also childish, you are saying?
33. 05:06
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No, no. But you said yourself you had to unlearn it. You had to learn that the formula is not the thing itself.
34. 05:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. And you had to learn that other people are not always fools.
35. 05:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Exactly. We both suffered from certainty. Yours was in method. Mine was in self.
36. 05:21
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I am still certain about many things.
37. 05:23
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Of course. But are you certain in the same way? When I was twenty, I knew I was right because I felt it. Now when I know I am right, it is because the universe has agreed with me in an experiment. This is a different kind of certainty.
38. 05:36
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    The universe agreed with you about relativity, yes. Has it agreed with you about quantum mechanics? You argue with Bohr for thirty years now.
39. 05:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Touché. No, the universe has not spoken clearly on this yet. Or perhaps it has spoken and I am too stubborn to hear. This is possible.
40. 05:53
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You see? We never stop being students. The unlearning never finishes.
41. 05:58
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    True. But I think we can unlearn badly and unlearn well. When I gave up the ether, I replaced it with something better, with curved spacetime. When you gave up pure mathematics, you replaced it with vision plus mathematics. These are good unlearnings.
42. 06:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And the bad unlearning?
43. 06:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    When we throw out something true because it makes us uncomfortable. I almost threw out the expanding universe because I wanted a static cosmos. This was cowardice dressed as intuition.
44. 06:24
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I threw out collaboration because people stole from me. Edison, Marconi, others. I decided to trust no one.
45. 06:34
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And were you right to do this?
46. 06:35
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I do not know. I kept my ideas safe. But perhaps I kept them too safe. Perhaps some of them died with me because I would not share them early enough. This is something I think about now.
47. 06:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is wisdom, Tesla. To question even the lessons we learned from pain.
48. 06:52
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You questioned everything as a student and learned to question less. I questioned nothing and learned to question everything. Now we are both somewhere in the middle, still confused.
49. 07:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, but confused at a higher level, as they say. I read this somewhere. We return to confusion again and again, but each time we bring more tools.
50. 07:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And still the universe surprises us.
51. 07:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Always. The moment it stops surprising us, we have become bad students again.
52. 07:18
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Then I hope to remain a bad student in that sense. Forever surprised. Forever unlearning.
53. 07:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    To that I think we can both agree. The only good answer to what we got wrong is that we are still finding out.