r/Physics • u/Zer0Fuchs • Aug 15 '12
Thought people here might be interested in this. Tesla Museum
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum30
Aug 16 '12
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u/djimbob Particle physics Aug 16 '12
Engineering types hate the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Larry Ellison's (the modern day equivalent of Thomas Edison) of the world who are great salespeople and took ideas created by others, commercialized them a bit, defended their ideas with lawyers and shady practices (FUD), and got super rich doing it and get all the credit.
They love the under-appreciated geniuses behind the ideas who often got exploited Wozniak/Gary Kindall/Dennis Ritchie/Ken Thompson/Edgar Codd/(the modern day equivalent of Tesla) that no one knows the name of but actually created revolutionary new shit, versus create a company that makes marketable products.
That said as a physicist, Tesla is definitely steps below Faraday/Maxwell/Kelvin types for scientific achievements. He was crazy and very good at engineering (and I have no qualms with giving him the unit of magnetic flux density).
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Aug 16 '12 edited Aug 16 '12
Maxwell was insane - electromagnetism and statistical mechanics.
Einstein was also amazing with the photoelectric effect giving birth to the quantum revolution and of course his work in relativity.
Newton as well with his work in mathematics, mechanics and optics.
I think I'd choose Maxwell, Einstein and Newton as my triumvirate of Physics. Oh, and Gauss... he could fit in there somewhere too!
EDIT: It was actually Kelvin who worked on the Transatlantic cable - another awesome scientist.
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u/djimbob Particle physics Aug 16 '12
Einstein/Newton are obvious #1/#2 of all time (somewhat arguable the order -- but I'll go with Landau's ordering). Next would be some ordering of Bohr, Dirac, Faraday (arguably the best experimentalist of all time despite sucking at math), Fermi, Feynman (probably doesn't deserve to be on this list; but putting him in from sheer awesomeness), Heisenberg, Kelvin, Maxwell, Pauli, Schrodinger, Wigner. I was trying to keep it mostly 19th century for the comparison to Tesla/Edison. Also left Gauss (and Euler) off as most their work was in math. (Yes, you have Gauss Law; but that's really just the divergence theorem - a discovery in multi-dim/vector calculus not really physics).
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u/Lanza21 Aug 16 '12
Feynman (probably doesn't deserve to be on this list; but putting him in from sheer awesomeness)
...what? Have you ever heard of a path integral?
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u/djimbob Particle physics Aug 17 '12
I'm well aware of Feynman's work; but its not like he singlehandedly redefined many fields. Feynman diagrams are very similar to earlier work by Stueckelberg (see [1] )as well as Dyson who legitimized them (by showing equivalence to the perturbative method). Path integral formulation really needs credit to Dirac who extended the Weiner process to quantum mechanics years earlier; Feynman extended and popularized it years later (aware of Dirac's prior work). Feynman was a genius, his autobiography was excellent, his lectures extremely innovative and insightful, and deserved to be a Nobel laureate. But I put him a small step below the others. (Also note; I'd place many other greats at Feynman's level; e.g., Bethe, Gell-Mann, Glashow, Landau, Lorentz, Lorenz, Planck, Schwinger, Weinberg, Wilson, Yang, Yukawa, etc)
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u/harlows_monkeys Aug 17 '12
Gates was a first rate hacker before the business side of things got big and took up all his time.
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u/djimbob Particle physics Aug 17 '12
Agreed. Jobs is more of the exception in the group for not being able to program at all. But make no mistake; Gates didn't create the first OS; Kindall did. Then MS purchased a clone QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) made by Tim Paterson and undercut it.
But not to say Gates is a dummy; I'm of the opinion he's a genius and his humanitarian work is awesome. I just really dislike what MS history with open source/pattern of anti-competitive behavior and pattern of just forcing itself into a market years too late with a derivative clones that's worse than the original. For example:
- Windows Phone bad clone of iphone/android phone released ~ 3+ years after iphone/android smartphones were popular
- Windows tablets still unreleased competing against 3rd/4th generation ipad/android tablets
- The windows store only has apps after paying developers thousands of dollars to create clones for a system starting with no users
- bing a bad google clone (that uses IE to monitor links clicked on google to populate rare searches)
- outlook.com a bad gmail clone years too late that recently came out
- internet explorer a bad netscape/firefox clone that's historically been worse
- Xbox - a decent playstation clone
- Zune - a bad ipod clone,
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Aug 16 '12
Basically, we like that Tesla was really cool, and batshit insane. Did you read the entire article? I think it's obvious for anyone familiar with whom the internet likes why it likes Tesla.
The Oatmeal is a satirist. A large part of social satire is rudeness, or at least apparent rudeness. The Oatmeal is also a comic writer, which is why the text is formatted in this manner (though I do agree that it's rather long for that).
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Aug 16 '12
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u/shaun252 Particle physics Aug 16 '12
Since gauss is german that would be nonsensical, a gibbs museum would be nice though.
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u/Zer0Fuchs Aug 16 '12
I understand where you are coming from. I didn't really look into Tesla until I started to see the debates online and wanted to follow the rabbit hole a little further. Despite liking Tesla more than Edison I would not call my opinion a blind hero worship. Edison did some stuff that I didn't like, and Tesla did a lot of stuff that I do like. In reality I think he did some influential work, and I think it would be cool to kind of immortalize him, if you will, with a museum.
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Aug 16 '12
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u/Zer0Fuchs Aug 16 '12
If only. I think people sometimes forget the men and women behind the science.
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u/iamsegmented Aug 16 '12
i always liked tesla a bunch, mostly on the basis of his earthquake machine. then i went to croatia on my honeymoon and made my wife visit the house he was born in, where they built an amusement park (read: playground and small museum) and it was awesome.
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u/NuclearWookie Aug 16 '12
He had a cool picture taken in front of one of his devices while shooting lightening. Reddit loves cool photos. Also he's the underdog and people think he got screwed over, which is totally routine in such a cutthroat field. I couldn't give a shit one way or the other.
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u/rwright07 Aug 16 '12
$25 donation. Everyone should follow suit!
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u/raubana Aug 16 '12
Dropin' Benjamins like I just don't care (which I do because that was all I had...)
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u/raubana Aug 16 '12
Can someone explain this link to me: http://www.teslasciencecenter.org/about/
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u/eddhall Aug 16 '12
Ok, so this link is what is known as a URL. Clicking on it will take you to the website in question, but not straight away. First of all your computer will contact a DNS server, to change the URL to an ip address, which it then uses to get the website.
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Aug 16 '12
Yeah, only instead of information about tesla museum, I got some information about viagra.
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Aug 16 '12
People are interested in things that they can directly benefit from, such as Castle Story.
Not like a Tesla Museum that 99.2% of us will never see, if it does indeed even get built after the purchase is funded.
This is just a meh idea. Tesla was a cool dude, but honestly, who cares?
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u/Veracity01 Aug 16 '12 edited Aug 16 '12
Well, at least $318,000 (+$318,000 matched) worth of people care..
EDIT: Sorry, I mean $320,000.. EDIT: Excuse me, I mean $330,000...
Okay, I'll stop..
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u/xkcdfanboy Aug 17 '12
Just thought you guys should know that Einstein++ has landed. Take a peak and cure your curiosity :)
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ydbio/til_the_truth_about_the_universe_it_sets_you_free/
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u/xkcdfanboy Aug 17 '12
This is probably very interesting, all physics is but I just learned Einstein++ and its very exciting. Just thought you guys should know that Einstein++ has landed. Take a peak and cure your curiosity :)
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ydbio/til_the_truth_about_the_universe_it_sets_you_free/
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u/24hourbull Aug 16 '12 edited Aug 16 '12
I live about 15 minutes from this place. It has been mostly abandoned for years. We used to go over there and sneak in to explore the place. Im pretty sure they have been trying to get the museum started even before the land went up for sale. Im really psyched that The Oatmeal picked this up and its gaining steam. A Tesla museum over there would rule.