h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Please check out the 12th paragraph on this site for another very good explaination: (URL removed by moderator)

URL moderated out. D'oh.

For those unfamiliar with this Tesla legend, allow me to briefly summarise from memory (which means I'm probably getting a lot of things wrong).

Nikola Tesla, being both brilliant and more than a little eccentric, liked to tinker with really large-scale electrical experiments. He came up with a lot of crazy ideas, many of which actually worked, probably because they were so crazy (it's a well known fact that any idea which either does or may illicit the comment "That's so crazy, it just might work!" nearly always does work). Most of them involved the transmission of energy over long distances (just like his most widely used invention, AC power transmission... not that he invented the concept tiself, but he did help to perfect the generators behind AC power and to prove that it was more effecient than DC over long stretches of cable), such as his vision of world-wide, wireless, free-to-user power distrobution. He is rumoured to have also built a device with a far more sinister function than saving everybody hundreds of dollars on electricity bills... something which, for all intents and purposes, may as well be called a "Death Ray" (since that's what I've seen it called on most Tesla websites). It is also rumoured that he test-fired the device on that fateful day in 1908, inadvertently causing a massive explosion in Tunguska.

Given that the device was built somewhere in New England and that the earth is, as far as I know, round, it seems a rather unlikely explanation, but there it is.

who was it who said that the more complex technology is, the more it seems like magic? Nikolai himself would be severely regustipated by the groupies he's attracted over the years. Many of whom are not qualified to screw in a light bulb without supervision. By the way, he's mostly responsible for fluorescent lighting. He spent a number of years under the employ of the Westinghouse company, who are not known for their marketing of flighty products. That I know of.

I believe you're referring to Arthur C. Clarke there. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is virtually indistinguishable from magic.", or something similar. Oddly enough, I believe Arthur C. Clarke is one of the main proponents of the Comet Theory for explaining the Tunguska Blast (or so it seems, based on his excellent series of TV shows which used to air on the Discovery Channel).

you can find all the gen on teslaat my h2g2 articleon the great man:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A486182
Enjoy!
Norton II

I think that there is some valid points to the theory that one of Telsa's projects had something to do with the explosion.

The U.S. gov. is working on a project called HAARP, which is based almost in a large part on Telsa's work. If it's opponents are to be believed HAARP could have caused something to the effect of Tunguska

Here is the Offical homepage for Project HAARP:
http://server5550.itd.nrl.navy.mil/projects/haarp/

And here is one of the main (or at least biggest) pages for the opponents of HAARP:
http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/

They didn't work because they were crazy, they worked because he understood DC, which very few people understood (understand./)

If your interested there is a book by Nick Cook (A Janes repoter) called "Zero Point" which mentions the incident amongst other articles. It's a good and surprising read because it's more convincing than some of the similar books around

I have before me a copy of Nick Cook's 'The Hunt for Zero Point'. You could teach a course in clever creative writing with it. It's got everything; aliens, secret government files, Tesla, Einstein, you name it. It's been a while since I read it so I don''t remember off hand if there are any Masons in it. If Mr. Cook mentions the kitchen sink I'm sure it wouldn't need any drains since he could make you believe the scrapings from this afternoons tea go right into a black hole--- invented by Tesla in Area 51.

Over and over he uses the technique of citing a vague reference on one page, which becomes an eyewitness account on the next. A chapter later it's enlarged to something like an official document. I was particularly impressed with his description of the 'vortex generator'-- invented by secret Nazi Scientists of course! If you read it out of context, it's a pretty good description of my Hoover.

For someone who writes for Jane's he doesn't seem to have a very good grasp of how flying things work. Or maybe he does and doesn't want to spoil a good yarn.

But what do I know; for almost a week now I've left off wearing my aluminium lined hat so They are probably focusing beta waves into my poor unprotected ......AHHHH!!!

'Zero Point' is another of those frustrating poisoned words, like aura, cyber, or hyperspace. Zero Points are real and they are part of Relativity, in fact an inevitable consequence of c being a velocity. 'Zero' is Relative to c!
Worse some of the wild claims about Zero Points are almost actually half true. Its just that its like they were stolen by someone who didn't understand them who then passed them along to others by long lines of Chinese whispers.

In another post in this forum I mention an ancient and lost weapon, a supposed "third" generation nuclear bomb - called a Mass Hammer or coherent Mass bomb, that could have caused the Tunguska explosion. A big part of how it might work involves Zero Points. - Essentially though the machine throws a small object called the 'Hammer' into another called the 'Anvil' at nearly the speed of light. The hammer is actually accelerated by interfering with its zero point, bypassing the need to accelerate it directly using energy. The joke of course is that doing anything with a zero point takes unimaginable amounts of energy - probably several times its mass times the speed of light squared. The whole thing has nothing to do with Tesla though who didn't even believe in Einsteins Relativity.

Teslas death ray worked on a totally different principle, possibly something to do with 'compressing light' at radio frequencies. It supposedly killed remotely but invisibly, you point your weird radio at somebody and a few seconds later they fall down dead. Or more prosaically you use it to invade the enemy sides thoughts and drive them mad en mass. And yes the Nazi's were probably working similar things as well. But Teslas radio gun never worked (its physics was wrong) and it was really more an object of subversion and propaganda than anything else.
There are rumors of similar things being used for mass control and programming in Soviet era Russia, the UK, by right wing politicians in the US, and by certain churches to 'acquire' new followers. Some might point to HARRP but it would really be too public, and like I said the basic physics was flawed. - The thing could never work except over a very short range.

As for Tunguska, the bomb above can't be built now let alone in 1908, its literally Star Trek technology. Only a huge nuclear bomb on the scale of 'Tsar Bomba' could make the Tunguska explosion. In 1908 the truth I guess is either that it was Aliens (at say 5,000 to 1) or it was simply something natural that fell from space.