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Snippets from The Energy Show: Part III

Snippets from The Energy Show (Friday, June 5 in the Claudia Cassidy Theater--Click here for reservations) submitted by H. Peter Steeves

Tesla with King Peter II of Yugoslavia in the Hotel New Yorker, July 15, 1942

Nikola Tesla was obsessed with power. More kilowatts. More and larger coils. More Earth to himself. Toward the end of his life, he announced that he had completed a Grand Unification Theory, a dynamic theory of gravity that would disprove Einstein and his faulty theory of relativity. Tesla’s theory would explain all of the mysteries of the universe. The scientific establishment never saw this theory before his death, but it was rumored by many to “exceed the boundaries of reason.”

In the aftermath of World War I, Tesla became focused on working on building a super-weapon that would put an end to all war. He called it his “Death Ray,” and it was to fire a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury accelerated via high voltage, completely vaporizing anything in its path. Such a powerful weapon, he believed would raise the stakes of war so greatly that no nation would ever turn against another. Potential violence, he argued, would balance out to become kinetic peace.

His mental problems grew worse. He would live the rest of his life in hotel rooms, the numbers of which had to be evenly divisible by three. He was compelled to walk around each building three times before entering, and he began working on his experiments with light, his obsessive-compulsive mind fixated on the dual nature of light as both a particle and wave. Potential violence was kinetic peace. Here was There.

Teleportation and time-travel were real.

On June 5th at the Chicago Cultural Center, Nikola Tesla’s mad dreams will become a reality.