Review of Tesla: Wizard at War--The Genius, the Particle Beam Weapon, and the Pursuit of Power by Marc Seifer
By Scott S. Smith and Sandra Wells
Marc Seifer is the author of the bestselling and definitive modern biography of Nikola Tesla, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla
In the view of many scholars of technology, Tesla is the greatest inventor of all time in terms of the impact on our world today (and his most brilliant contemporaries recognized his astonishing genius across many fields without being able to understand the full implications, of course). Even before the recent revival of his reputation, Tesla was widely recognized as the creator of the modern AC hydro electric system (aka the grid, not Edison, as the general public seems to think).
But as Seifer's first book documented, Tesla also invented the AC electrical or induction motor, forgotten once Henry Ford's cheap cars run on cheap gasoline dominated the market. But he foresaw the need for getting power from solar, wind, and geothermal sources. And he created the foundation for unlimited wireless channels, cell phones, neon and fluorescent lighting, x-rays, radar, remote control, drones, robotics, artificial intelligence, and the use of binary code for complex commands.
Guglielmo Marconi stole the credit for the patents enabling radio transmission that actually belonged to Tesla, but the ruling that recognized this from the U.S. Supreme Court came three months after the latter's death at 86 in 1943. Tesla remained largely forgotten until the past two decades, when Tesla Motors (now Tesla Inc.) and references in popular culture (such as on the TV series "Big Bang Theory") reminded everyone that he was not only ahead of his time, we still have not achieved the world he was trying to create. In 2013, Geek Wire crowned him the Greatest Geek of All-Time, ahead of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, among other contenders.?
Seifer's latest book, Tesla: Wizard at War--The Genius, the Particle Beam Weapon, and the Pursuit of Power https://www.amazon.com/Tesla-Wizard-Genius-Particle-Pursuit/dp/0806540966/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20VBLKORQSXVQ&keywords=tesla+wizard+at+war&qid=1668198689&s=books&sprefix=tesla+wizard%2Cstripbooks%2C243&sr=1-1, is a landmark of new research.
Seifer's 715-page doctoral dissertation was completed in 1986 (after seven years of research), when the inventor was still obscure. He remained so even when Seifer's first biography was published a decade later. Another quarter century of study has resulted in Tesla: Wizard at War, which is full of revelations in part due to Freedom of Information Act requests and as other sources have become more available.
Tesla's Particle Beam Weapon
The title refers to the allegations that Tesla had secretly sold a "death ray" weapon to the Soviet Union in 1935, which has been misunderstood in several ways. As Seifer explains, the mechanism of its potential lethality was not actually a ray, but using electromagnetic energy to propel tiny particles of tungsten or mercury. It can best be compared with a laser. The U.S.S.R. paid $25,000 for the instructions on how to build this (equivalent to $500,000 in today's money.
Second, it was designed to be for defense and his hope was that all the major nations would adopt it as a way of deterring war. It could have been an alternative to developing nuclear bombs, had American leaders understood this potential.
Third, as the Communist U.S.S.R. emerged as our primary global opponent in the wake of World II, the sale was sometimes misunderstood as arming the enemy, even though at the time this occurred, the Soviets had a legitimate fear of German invasion as the Nazis took command. But in 1936, Tesla wrote a proposal to the leaders of Great Britain, who ignored it.
Andrija Puharich, M.D., a physicist who brought the psychics Uri Geller and Peter Hurkos to the U.S. to be tested for their remote viewing capabilities, according to Jonathan Margolis' The Secret Life of Uri Geller: CIA Masterspy?, first revealed the details of the particle beam weapon at a meeting of the International Tesla Society in 1984.
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Seifer also provides important background on why in the run-up to the war, Tesla was working closely with the German firm Telefunken and even tended to turn a blind eye to German spying in the U.S. Most Americans, of course, did not favor getting involved in another world war, which is why President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to be very careful with his Lend Lease Program that supplied Britain.?
Once Germany invaded the rest of Europe, Tesla, a Serbian, opposed the Nazis and after Pearl Harbor, wrote an article about his revolutionary weapon in the Baltimore Sun, in which he said his services had been offered to the U.S. government. Seifer notes that in the last six months of his life, at least, he was working secretly with the U.S. military, though some records remain so highly classified that their existence is still denied.
One of the most interesting chapters in the book is "The Day Tesla Died," which reveals incredible details about the federal government's seizure of the inventor's numerous boxes of records. Yet a report on them by Professor John G. Trump (uncle of the now former president) claimed there was nothing in all this of military use, though this might have been disinformation, writes Seifer. In any event, the Manhattan Project continued to develop the atomic bomb.
Tesla: Wizard at War is crammed with fresh details, such as the fact that the eccentric inventor in his final years was not the dirt-poor crazy person that has been the impression created by other books and articles. And much more is revealed about why Tesla violated his agreement with J. Pierpont Morgan about the Wardenclyffe tower he was building on Long Island, which caused the financier to pull its funding, with disastrous consequences for the inventor's work and life.
The God Particle
The last chapter, "God Particle," may be the most interesting and startling for those who understand the basics of the technical arguments. The consensus of scientists has been that Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and the quantum physics that followed disproved the seemingly commonsense notions of physics developed by Isaac Newton, such as that gravity is an attractive force. The notion of the ether, which supposedly filled the universe to try to explain aspects of physics, was abandoned by most scientists a century ago, though Tesla clung to it.
Yet Einstein was never able to create his grand unification theory that would resolve puzzles, such as how, when one particle is affected by something, another in a distant part of the universe reacts instantaneously. New Agers have argued that this confirms the Hindu Advaita Vedanta notion that God is everything and there is no individuality of anything.
Another puzzle is that some atomic particles are known to spin faster than the speed of light, which is supposed to be impossible, according to Einstein.
Seifer makes a powerful argument that these things can be explained if one adopts the idea of a pre-material ether, which he believes could be described as a "primary AC current oscillating at a tachyonic [faster than light] rate...which generates electromagnetic energy...Ether flowing into matter is gravity; matter flowing rapidly through ether is acceleration (experienced as a g-force)."
He quotes the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck, "There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the article of an atom to vibration and holds the most minute solar system of the atom together."
The tachyonic spin of the recently discovered Higgs boson (aka the god particle) bolsters this case. ?"Relativity and quantum theory are incomplete," Seifer writes.
Tesla: Wizard at War is a book that needs to be read carefully several times in order to fully appreciate just how eye-opening it is. The revelations from Seifer about this greatest of all scientific thinkers will no doubt continue.