Here's an idea.
There is not one, but two Nikola Teslas.
Here I am about to introduce the man who
needs no introduction, that ingenious inventor,
that enchanter of electricity, Serbian
national, and American hero, Nikola Tesla.
Tesla has experienced a spell of popularity rival
possibly only by that of bacon.
It's bacon!
As such, he might be reaching a state of saturation rival
possibly only by that of the cronuts.
Scientists and food analogies aside,
we hope that in spite of such burdensome popularity
you'll stick around to hear us talk
about why we are not popularizing
the Tesla, but only a Tesla.
Tesla's accomplishments were of course, numerous.
He contributed to the designs of alternating current, sonar,
x-ray, radar.
He demonstrated wireless power transmission,
and was an all around electrifying presence-- get it?
--in the engineering community.
He is famous for a good many things,
though perhaps most notably for his bitter rivalry
with his former boss and American inventor Thomas A.
Edison.
As detailed by the Oatmeal, link in the description,
the two men are like water and oil.
Tesla is the geeky genius nerd trying to power
the future and Edison is the boorish, profiteering bloat bag
jerk sack.
So clearly people will root for Tesla, the dashing genius,
the clear under dog.
Except was he?
Now I'm not about to tell you to stop liking Nikola Tesla.
Being enamored of him makes perfect sense.
He stands as a pillar of the DIY and hacker ethoses.
He was a charismatic and weird dude.
And was even played by David Bowie in that one movie.
So that's cool.
I'm not about to say that he's not that guy.
But I am about to say he's a lot more than that guy.
And then we're going to talk about how
history is kind of weird.
You ready?
Tesla was a lot more than that guy.
For starters, in his heyday Tesla
was famous, like cover of Time magazine famous,
which makes his eventual destitution all
the more upsetting.
Also upsetting, he believed in eugenics.
He thought subatomic particles were a bunch of hooey
and that Einstein's theory of relativity was not on track.
At one point, he was sure that he received a transmission
from Mars.
And there was the whole thing with the pigeon.
Poor guy.
Now maybe Tesla had a great reason
to stay off the E equals MC squared train.
And maybe he did hear from Mars, though he was definitely
off on the eugenics point.
Those tidbits rarely make their way into the popular portrait
o' Tesla.
There are in essence two Teslas.
The one made of meat and gray matter
who lived a life full of ideas and complexity,
the historical Tesla, and the one made of images, photos,
and stories that will live forever
and throughout time beyond the first one, the simulated Tesla,
the simulacrum of the historical Tesla.
One is not better than the other person, per se.
I mean both are true.
Though at this point, simulated Tesla
might be more true simply because he's more familiar.
He's the one that most people think
of when they think of Tesla.
He is the celebrated Tesla.
He is the "true" Tesla, though maybe not be
wholly accurate Tesla.
"Truth," French philosopher Michel Foucault writes,
"is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted
because it has been hardened into an unalterable form
in the long baking process of history."
Simulated Tesla, all of his characteristics baked
into a handy set of images for and by his admirers
is, whether he is or not, true.
Now at this point it would be very fair to wonder aloud
to yourself, hold on a minute.
Since we're all subject to history,
doesn't this happen to everybody?
Are Marilyn Monroe, Genghis Khan, Johnny Cash,
and for that matter, Rome, the invention of the light bulb,
and the Battle of Waterloo all inventions of history too?
Well yeah, sort of actually.
And this is a big "problem" with history.
Aside from being written by the winners,
it's also written by humans.
And this conundrumizes things.
Foucault again writes that "In our time
history is that which transforms documents into monuments.
In that area where in the past history deciphered
the traces left by man, it now deploys a mass
of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant,
placed in relation to one another to form totalities."
We really want people and events like Tesla and Tiananmen Square
and the founding of Apple computers
to really and deeply mean something,
to fit into a larger picture.
We like to see motivation and connection, narrative,
and progression.
But sometimes it's just not there.
But it's nicer and frequently easier
to understand if it's portrayed as though everything
does fit together.
Is our understanding of history wrong then, at least
as far as it's portrayed in books and movies
and on the internet?
No.
Well sort of.
Tesla definitely exists now beyond empirical evidence,
so we need to use the images, texts, photographs,
whatever else to conjure him.
Some of those images are incredibly clear and useful
and behave as great documents, expressing
as much truth about their subject as one could possibly
hope exists.
But sometimes, even in their perfect completeness,
they are not complete enough.
We like to imagine Tesla or Babe Ruth or Waterloo
in just such a way.
So we make a simulated Tesla or Babe Ruth
or Waterloo that is a little less messy and a little more
shiny.
Or in the case of Thomas Edison, a lot more shiny.
This happens many times because in a past figure or event
we see something that we imagine or want to discourage
in ourselves or our time.
Historical Tesla, with his physics skepticism
and culturally ingrained racism doesn't really
make a great hero of the internet.
Simulated Tesla, opposed to corporate interests,
effectively open source, and up all night
inventing the world's coolest electrical gizmos,
that sounds more like it.
We'll take one of those, please.
Or maybe this dichotomy is just a bunch of hokum
and that we shouldn't view simulated Tesla as history
at all, more like historical reproduction.
As anthropologists Edward Bruner says,
"maybe we should see all culture as continuously
invented and re-invented and argue
for transcending such dichotomies
as original and copy or authentic and inauthentic."
Maybe like the inverse of Batman and Gotham,
Tesla isn't the historical figure we deserve,
but the one that we need or want to embody or communicate
something about us and our time and that
makes him no less real or authentic.
What is important is not that simulated Tesla resembles
historical Tesla, but that simulated Tesla stands for what
we want and expect of him.
Because I mean, who doesn't want to look up
to a charming, debonair figure who can power
light bulbs with dirt and coax 135 foot lightning bolts out
of thin air?
That is basically the textbook definition of bad ass.
What do you guys think?
Is our simulated Tesla really Tesla?
And does it matter?
Let us know in the comments.
And instead of asking you to subscribe
I just want to take this moment to apologize to all the history
teachers out there.
Sorry.
It's so great to be back from vacation,
back in my corner again.
Let's see what you guys had to say about Google and knowledge.
Nathan Hawks makes what I would say
is a very fair complaint about the episode.
Which is that John Locke would have only been writing
about biological consciousness.
And so that is totally fair.
However, the History Channel dig really hurt, Nathan.
That really hurts.
AwSam media makes the point that while Google
might be knowledge, it certainly is not wisdom,
and sort of draws a little connection between data,
knowledge, and wisdom.
It was a great comment, so we'll pause here for a second
so you can check it out.
Dzejens makes the point that it is not necessarily
the amount of information that is on Google,
but seems to suggest that it is the quality
of the connections between those pieces of information.
And of course, you could argue all day long about
whether or not those connections are good or bad.
And here we are back again at the idea of networked facts.
So yeah, it's a point.
The always sharp Olly Leonard from Philosophy Tube
made a video response critiquing my reading of Locke.
And then I wrote him a wildly long Tumblr post in response.
So we'll put links to those things in the description
if you want to check them out.
Myrofox brings up a study where people
seem to remember differently when they use a computer.
And Shaeress says exactly what I would say,
which is I wonder how this would compare
to a study done with both computers and a piece of paper.
Hard to say what exactly is changing.
1467edward says that Google can't be knowledge
because Google can't experience things.
But then SmurfOfWar13 actually brings up
the point that I would make, which
is that Google actually does seem
to have a kind of experience.
Again, it's not a biological consciousness experience,
but certainly an experience.
So yeah, that's a rabbit hole that you can fall into.
ashkuigp points out that knowledge can only
exist in social and cultural context of utility, which
Google certainly doesn't have.
There are no Googles that are getting together
at the coffee house and talking to one another yet.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these knowledgeable individuals
in a social and cultural context of utility.
And the tweets of the week, there are two of them,
come from Peter Hogenson, who point us
towards an article by Joshua Foer.
It is really interesting.
And also to the Gettier Problems,
which kind of changed a lot of stuff about epistemology.
Check him out.
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