Posted on 07/11/2013 1:56:40 PM PDT by Ravnagora
Ping!
Truly a man who ranks among the greatest inventors of all time. Virtually every life on the planet today is influenced in some way daily by the inventions of Tesla.
A man who mistook the effects of a collapsing magnetic field for a mysterious force that powers the universe.
Find me a scientist who never made a similar mistake... and I’ll find you a poor scientist.
I didn't say Tesla was a bad scientist. I don't think he was Einstein. I think that - as a scientist - he was somewhere between Edison and Steinmetz. As a showman, he was somewhere between Donald Trump and Uri Geller.
The thing is, history doesn't venerate Edison and Steinmetz for their showmanship.
And history won't remember Trump and Geller at all.
“Why do magnets attract ferrous materials yet have no apparent effect on non-ferrous materials? How fast do magnetic fields propagate?
Well, the whole peer review process is mostly about hindsight, isn't it?
Why, just this very day, we had the CDC, a department of the mighty United States Government, admitting that all the talk about how horrible salt for human dietary health is nothing but so much bush-wa.
I guess that's Captain Hindsight too. So ignore it.
The article was to honor Tesla, and you only have some negative bullshit to spout off. WTF have you done so great to improve the world?
i create things constantly. sometimes they work. sometimes they don’t. either way, the process can sometimes lead to new discoveries or ideas.
this is the process of invention.
those that criticize the failures of inventors are rarely, if ever, capable of inventing anything themselves.
History venerates Edison largely because he got away with his theft of Tesla's ideas. Edison was a "Direct Current" man right up to and beyond the point where it was conclusively shown that AC was able to scale up dramatically. DC can run automobile starters and radios pretty well. AC powers industry.
In fact, Tesla's name is used to denote a measure of magnetic flux density. This is an acknowledgement that Mr. Tesla's contributions to the field were substantial. Mr. Edison's name is remembered in the naming of the standard light bulb socket.
Why do magnets attract ferrous materials yet have no apparent effect on non-ferrous materials?
Magnetic fields attract ferrous metals because the magnetic field lines set up by the magnet create "magnetic domains" within a piece of ferrous metal. The interconnected system of magnet and magnetic domains has less total energy than the magnet alone has. The force you feel between a magnet and a chunk of ferrous metal is the result of the tendency of physical systems to assume the lowest available total energy state. Mathematically, it results from the fact that force is the first derivative of energy with respect to position. Thermodynamically, it is a consequence of Newton's second law.
Non-ferrous metals do not exhibit this "magnetic domain" phenomenon, so magnetic fields have no effect on them, at least when they are at rest with respect to the magnet.
Electrically conductive materials (including metals) are affected by magnetic fields when they are moving. Here is a video that shows this phenomenon, which is called "Lenz's Law."
By the way, a "ferrous metal" is simply a metal that contains a substantial amount of iron (Fe, or "ferrum" in Latin). Other elements exhibit magnetic domain behavior as well, specifically cobalt and (surprisingly) oxygen.
How fast do magnetic fields propagate?
Magnetic fields do not "propagate," at least not in the same sense as photons propagate. That's why the strength of magnetic fields dies off very quickly as you get farther from the source of the magnetic field.
That said, changes in magnetic field strength move from one point within the field to another at the speed of light. This is because magnetic fields, like electric fields, are "carried" by photons.
Under the theory of quantum electrodynamics, every type of field has a corresponding particle that "carries" it.
Good point! I guess I have to agree.
I believe Tesla heirs even ended up winning the patent to radio over Marconi. However it really ended up being an acknowledgement more than a money maker.
Ping.
I very much agree. Interesting, is I and probably most others hadn't heard of the man until high school. He should have been mentioned in the same light as Marconi and Edison. Funny how history is written.
ping
Edison was a fabulous manager and thinker, a very good engineer, but not that great of a scientist. In my opinion, Edison’s greatest invention was organized research and development, which has lead to virtually every invention AFTER Edison. Before his time, almost all inventions were developed by lone scientists and “crackpots”.
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