Source : Albert Heisenberg Masters in Physics from Brown Univ. Specializing in photonics. Science Historian
Updated Jun 21
Genius and Geniuses: Who was smarter, Albert Einstein or Nikola Tesla?
There is so much wrong information on here. The question is, with all due respect, quite inane. How do you define "smarter"? Tesla was a brilliant inventor cum electrical engineer not a physicist, apples and oranges. One is better off asking who was smarter, Michelangelo or Darwin? The only reason people have jumped on the Tesla bandwagon is because his work is much easier to understand than Einstein's. Einstein's theory of General Relativity alone (and Einstein did a LOT of revolutionary work outside relativity), exceeds anything Tesla ever did. It is a work of rarest genius: it is much harder to understand 10 coupled, nonlinear, hyperbolic-elliptic partial differential equations than it is to understand A/C electricity (which owes more to the work of Faraday and Maxwell than it does to Tesla, but I digress).
I find it ironic that Tesla ridiculed Relativity because he couldn't understand it. At any rate, your GPS wouldn't work without it.
I love Tesla and he was an absolute genius inventor in his own right, but he was a very different kind of thinker. Einstein's intellectual achievements answer far deeper questions about nature (e.g. Matter, Energy, Time, Space, Motion, Gravity, Photons, etc) than anything Tesla was able to achieve during his otherwordly brilliant career.
Einstein’s career was worthy of 7 Nobel Prizes (maybe even 8): Fantasy Physics: Should Einstein Have Won 7 Nobel Prizes?
Tesla was a brilliant inventor, but modern technology (and science in general) owes more to Einstein than it does to Tesla (many of the inventions for which he is credited would eventually have been created).
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