The Prestige

So I finally saw The Prestige on Saturday. I had forgotten that it was directed by Christopher Nolan, of Batman Begins and Memento fame, both of which were excellent. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who in my opinion played an excellent Batman, are competing magicians. The Prestige refers to the third and final stage of a good illusion. The kicker, if you will.

David Bowie does an excellent job playing Nikola Tesla, who instead of having a brief cameo like I was expecting, was actually fairly central to the plot. Apparently he has developed teleportation technology, except instead it turns out to be duplication technology. The illusionists are interested, of course, because it makes for impossible feats, and begin to understand the implications of having clones running around.

The Tesla Technology looks excellent. In the trailers for the movie you only ever really see this wooden cabinet that is the receiving end of the tele-duplicator, but the initation pad is under a huge steel ball pulsating with huge streams of electricity. There is a kind of Tesla stage-show indoors with more impressive streamers.

Michael Caine plays kind of a backstage engineer and I like how he made a clear distinction between the two prestidigitators, and Tesla, the actual wizard. Let's refer to Arthur C. Clarke's 3 laws of prediction, care of Wikipedia:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
   possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
   impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
   little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Goodbye Wires

Generally, if MIT's doing it, it must be good. In an earlier post I mentioned Powercast, a new technology where a coin-sized receiver in a laptop or phone could charge itself when within range of a base station. Today I happened upon this article at physorg.com that describes the technology, coupling resonance.

Basically instead of sending the electricity wastefully radiating out in all directions, they make a small magnetic field of frequencies in the MHz range, which allows the electricity to pass through it. The first obvious application is for cellphones, and the inventor Soljacic credits a dying cellphone for his inspiration.

The author of the article does go on to wonder why no one thought of this before, it seeming like such a simple and good idea. I wonder why there is no mention of Tesla or any of his work. While I think he did try the radiation method instead, he was instrumental in developing our understanding of the science of resonance. No offense to the author of course, maybe he's a huge Tesla fan, and the site seems to have some other good stuff about him.

I guess what I'm getting at is that Tesla seems almost forgotten from the ivy-league technical schools and smithsonian type institutes while Edison is like a national hero. Maybe we're only now realizing how many things Tesla really did invent a hundred years ago. I think it will take several hundred years before we really understand all his work completely. It just seems that after Tesla's death, with the whole FBI intervention, and all his files and patents getting pretty much appropriated, there was also an effort to effectively scrub his name from the history books.

With sheer number of inventions, Tesla surpasses pretty much any inventor you can name. But it's the all derivative inventions and discoveries that wouldn't have happened without Tesla's experimental tinkering that really set him apart. Where would modern science be without alternating current, electron microscopes and flourescent lights?