Einstein or Tesla?
I once quoted Einstein on the subject of that other guy. Someone asked Albert what it felt like to be the smartest man in the world. Einstein said, “Ask Tesla.”
A commenter jeered at me because he said Einstein was actually jeering at Tesla. I loved that. So typical. The difference between the do nothings and the do-a-lots.
Einstein’s career. Two important papers as a young man. Then a free ride in academe for half a century of nothing new. All that hagiographic treatment at Princeton. Spending an entire life commenting on the works of other smart men and women, as if he were taking ownership by approving, endorsing, and dismissing others’ ideas, or engaging in his favorite lifetime practice of uttering platitudes quotable in the New York Times. His desk was famously messy. How geniusacious that was.
Tesla. Created the real infrastructure that drives the U.S. to this day. A practical application of alternating current that rendered Edison’s dangerous alternative obsolete. A mysterious future career involving magnetism on a grand scale that made him the central figure of multiple urban legends and the victim of an odd death long before his three score years and forty were done. After which Albert was still droning on about dice and continental slippage.
Einstein was an early prodigy and a long-lived bore. Tesla is the best candidate the world has ever had for being a time traveler.
A commenter jeered at me because he said Einstein was actually jeering at Tesla. I loved that. So typical. The difference between the do nothings and the do-a-lots.
Einstein’s career. Two important papers as a young man. Then a free ride in academe for half a century of nothing new. All that hagiographic treatment at Princeton. Spending an entire life commenting on the works of other smart men and women, as if he were taking ownership by approving, endorsing, and dismissing others’ ideas, or engaging in his favorite lifetime practice of uttering platitudes quotable in the New York Times. His desk was famously messy. How geniusacious that was.
Tesla. Created the real infrastructure that drives the U.S. to this day. A practical application of alternating current that rendered Edison’s dangerous alternative obsolete. A mysterious future career involving magnetism on a grand scale that made him the central figure of multiple urban legends and the victim of an odd death long before his three score years and forty were done. After which Albert was still droning on about dice and continental slippage.
Einstein was an early prodigy and a long-lived bore. Tesla is the best candidate the world has ever had for being a time traveler.
Comments
Post a Comment