Who is Smarter? Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein

Hate to be pedantic, but Einstein's brain was cut up and preserved. I think pieces are still around somewhere

Hate to be pedantic, but Einstein's brain was cut up and preserved. I think pieces are still around somewhere

Edit: though Einstein is still without brain technically.

I'd say Tesla. That's not to say Einstein wasn't extremely good at what he did: a lot of his work in relativity was logical deduction from a set of postulates.
But the clincher for me is that Einstein worked in an area which would (probably) have been discovered eventually as science would have headed in a direction where some observation would have destroyed Newtonian mechanics (there were even known discrepancies in planetary orbits at the time though most people didn't take too much notice) while some of the stuff that Tesla did was so far beyond the imagination of anyone at the time, and even scientists now can't replicate his demonstration of long distance wireless energy transfer with minimal energy loss


http://home.earthlink.net/~drestinblack/wireless.htm
"Tesla spent his remaining funds on his other inventions and culminated his efforts in a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs by transmitting 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and ran one electric motor! With this souped up version of his Tesla coil, Tesla claimed that only 5% of the transmitted energy was lost in the process. "

Nobody seems to have replicated it, although with 100 million volts I'm surprised the resulting current didn't blow up the 200 light bulbs.

I don't think they're really comparable. Einstein pretty much single-handedly came up with an entirely new way to think about the universe - one whose fundamental aspects had never even occurred to anyone before. Tesla was a brilliant inventor, but most of what he came up with was based upon principles already widely known, so his inventions would have appeared eventually anyway. I'd say Tesla is more comparable to Edison, against whom Tesla would win by far.

In all fairness, with the thing being said about scientists not being able to replicate his minimal loss long distance energy transfer, I'd argue a lot of his inventions wouldn't have appeared eventually.

I don't know if you realise it, but that bold part is considered an insult in the scientific community...

Not really, but please, explain why our civilisation isn't powered wirelessly by tesla coils.

"Tesla spent his remaining funds on his other inventions and culminated his efforts in a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs by transmitting 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and ran one electric motor! With this souped up version of his Tesla coil, Tesla claimed that only 5% of the transmitted energy was lost in the process. "

Nobody seems to have replicated it, although with 100 million volts I'm surprised the resulting current didn't blow up the 200 light bulbs.

I've said it before in this discussion, but scientists not being able to replicate something is a bad thing in science. Replicability is "everything". If nobody can replicate your results, then nobody will believe them. Especially if this goes on for so much time. It's much more likely that Tesla was deluded by some mistake gone unnoticed than that today's much more advanced technology cannot do something he did in his time.

I've no clue how you think that comment is in any way related to coils. I'll refresh your memory.

This was the part of your post I was criticising (as I said, I was referring to the bold bit):



And just to get everything in the same post, here goes why any experimentalist will feel despondent if you tell them that "nobody seems to have replicated" their work (also from a post here):



He was a genius, but that "feat" is not the reason why.

My point was that Tesla achieved a feat which is not currently achievable, if it was then I doubt we'd have power cables, the loss and cost of production must surely exceed the ~5% Telsa claimed to have achieved. If Tesla had a flaw as a scientist I would say that it was that he did not write a lot of his ideas down. This of course makes it difficult to reproduce his (apparently verified) example of extremely efficient wireless energy transfer.

You claim that perhaps Telsa missed something, I'm not so sure I can explain away this phenomena by saying that he simply miscalculated the efficiency of the device.

Verified by whom? It's one claim. Isolated claims are not meant to be taken seriously by the scientific community. That's about it. Science just wouldn't be taken seriously if we just started recognising feats without means of verifying them.

To my knowledge it was a public demonstration and the reliability of the claim has not been questioned.

I am more than familiar with the scientific process. But we're not dealing with crazy joe who's only means of verification is his dog who can talk (but not to strangers mind, he's shy).

Instead we're talking about the kind of person who can be told that the Earth has a liquid metal core and then work out that it's possible to send radio signals all over the Earth by reflection off of the ionosphere, or something as crazy like that. I'm very much inclined to trust his claims, as it does not appear to be have been in his nature to be deceptive. Obviously it would be nice if we had a proper schematic drawing of the device he used so it could be rebuilt and tested, but the fact that he could design these things from imagination alone is testament to his genius, which is the nub of this thread after all.

Well, as we're on TSR, I'm going to come right out and say that neither of them had any A levels and so cannot be considered smart at all.