Copasetic Flow

The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe received a pledge of help from Elon Musk of Tesla Motors fame this week!  The effort begun years ago by the Friends of Science East has inexhaustively progressed year by year to their ultimate goal of turning Nikola Tesla's last laboratory into a bustling science museum and maker space.  You might remember the famous ham radio efforts of folks like myself and a few G+ arteiests like  +Diana Eng  and  +Dashiell Hammutt  a few years ago to put the museum effort on the map, so to speak, by transmitting for the first time in over a century from Wardenclyffe and the New Yorker, (Tesla's last home). Soon after that followed the famous crowd-funding efforts of the Oatmeal's  +Matthew Inman  put the Tesla Science Center funding over the top and the Wardenclyffe site was purchased, and repairs began in earnest.  The site looks great now, but they need more funding to complete the cleanup and build the mus...

In all my finals studying I almost forgot! They Did It!  They Did It!  They Did It! It was announced yesterday at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, NY that the Tesla Science Center organization purchased Wardenclyffe and will be turning it into a science museum!!!  The press conference can be viewed below! The crowdsourcing campaign started by  +Matthew Inman  put their fundraising over the top and the lab has been purchased!  Over 33,000 people contributed to the fundraiser.  In addition to a number of other folks that worked on the project, the  +American Physical Society 's Physical Review B editor served on the board of the Tesla Science Center as the Secretary.  As I've mentioned before,  +Dashiell Hammutt  and I were lucky enough to make ham radio QSOs viaspecial event station W3T from the Wardenclyffe property to help raise awareness.   +Diana Eng  and a team of ham radio operators transmitted on the same da...

In keeping with the new tradition of putting something pretty up here at least once a week, here are scenes located near the Shelter Island area on Long Island.  Looking back over these pictures it occurred to me, the Shelter Island Quantum Mechanics Conference movie could be turned into a science of Long Island mini-series.  In addition to the famous conference, Tesla's last lab is on the island, the site of the first transatlantic transmission is there, Marconi's original radio shack is ironically just a few short miles from Tesla's lab and the old RCA transmit and receive antenna farm locations are there as well.  Oh yeah, and Brookhaven is there as well. As I mentioned before, we hung out on Long Island, fairly close to Shelter Island, at Brookhaven National Laboratory doing research for two years.  When we headed out to Long Island from New Mexico, I had no idea just how much historic science had taken place in the area.  OK, first, a map to keep everythi...

I started out to write about parabolic coordinates and the chain rule this morning, but this was too much fun to resist. As I'm sure you've all seen over the last few days, a meteor came down over Russia last week.  Apparently the conspiracy theories have already started to crop up [1].  This got me thinking about the last Russian meteor with conspiracy theories, the Tunguska meteor strike [2]. The Tunguska Conspiracy The story goes like this.  Tesla had realized that he was going to have to tear down Wardenclyffe, his ambitious project on Long Island to broadcast power to the world for free (picture 1). He had time to make one last demonstration using the apparatus that the world would notice.  He told Admiral Byrd at a cocktail party, "When you get to the North Pole, look for my calling card."  Admiral Byrd saw nothing, and the whole event faded into obscurity, sort of.  Decades later, in the 1970's Ru...