Neil deGrasse Tyson On "The Nikola Tesla Fan Club"

Car you drive. So I now have a Tesla, yeah. So I pony it up. They're expensive, by the way. I heard. Yeah, so I have the X, so that's my sort of utility vehicle. The X is the SUV. A very high acceleration, as you know. But yeah, there's no maintenance on it, right? There's no oil chains, there's no, you know. The only moving part is the, what you turn in the wheels with, right? No pistons, nothing. So, you know, cars really should have been this a hundred years ago, and then we would have had a hundred years of clever engineering to perfect that. You ever see the documentary who killed the electric car? No, I haven't, but I know about it, and I know some of the background story behind it. And the electric car was one of the first, because electricity was all the rage a hundred years ago. Let's electrify the cities. There's Edison, there's Tesla. Everybody wants to do everything electric. And the car had just come out, let's do it electric. So this was not a new concept. And it's unfortunate that more sort of innovative thinkers hadn't been brought to task on how to perfect the electric car. Speaking of Tesla and electricity, what did you think about Tesla's initial idea that Westinghouse shot down to sort of broadcast electricity so that people could just pull it out of the air? Yeah, so the people in the Nikola Tesla fan club somehow feel that he got wronged in his life, okay? And surely some of that is true with regard to his business acumen and patents and who owns the patent and does he have good business sense? Is he as savvy or as sneaky, whatever other words you might apply to Edison, all right? So I get that. But his contributions to electromagnetism are real and recognized in the world of physics. Like I said, there's a unit of electromagnetism named after him. So don't come crying to me say he was not recognized by my people, okay? He's recognized. He had some ideas that were a little out there and out there on a level where it almost certainly would have not worked. And here's why, okay? Electromagnetic energy is communicating between us. I see you, that's because visible light is reflecting off of your scalp, okay, to me. It's reflecting off of my nose back to you. You can ask how much energy is in that? Well, not much. It's not much energy in visible light photons. If you stayed there long enough, you might feel a little warmth from it. But no, you're not gonna drive a car with that energy. You're not gonna run a motor with it, okay? Well, of what good is it? Oh, you know what we found? We can use electromagnetic radio waves, which are the lowest form of electromagnetic energy, lowest energy level of all of your life. We can use radio waves not to transmit energy. That's not the point of it. The point is to transmit information. And information became what characterized the modern era. And that's why in the 1950s and 60s, when everyone is imagining flying cars and motorized sidewalks, everything is running on energy because they're thinking energy's gonna be free in the future. But what they didn't figure was that information would be free or easy to transmit and to generate and to store and to delete. And whereas the energy that would take to move things and to drive things, that would be a problem. No one saw that coming. Nobody saw that coming. So as your photons get higher and higher energy, yes, you can start doing things with them. You get X-rays and gamma rays. But that's not what Tesla was referring to. He was talking about moving radio waves through the space that would charge things up. You can't pack sufficient energy in your radio wave to do anything we need to do mechanically. Currently. Currently, well- Back then, would it be sufficient? There might've been something you could've done with your radio waves, because the needs were, no, but that, no, no, I take that back. That was the height of the industrial revolution. That was the age of the machine. The age of the giant turbines. Radio energy is not touching that. Right, but wasn't it possible that he was considering it for things like radios or light bulbs or household items? Would it be possible to use that power for that? So now what, so what happened? So the radio waves, if you had enough power in radio waves to generate a light bulb, to power a light bulb, well, through the air, are you standing in the way of this? This energy has pathways. We now send energy through wires, because you're not standing in the way of the wire. The wire is buried. The wire has insulation. It would have some sort of residual effect. The wire on a high suspension thing. You wanna move it through the air and you wanna walk around like, no, that's not how that works. But I've heard people discuss- If you're moving enough energy through the air to power something that itself could kill you, the energy powering through the, moving through the air could kill you, unless you bring a little bit amount and then you store it and then use it later. You could do it that way. Sure. Some sort of battery system. Yeah, you need a storage system. But you would still probably have some sort of residual effect of having this stuff broadcast through the air. And who knows what it would do to human health? If you needed that much energy, right now the energy to transmit information is so low that it, no, it has no effect on your health. That's why I can pull out my cell phone. I'm in a brick, this is fake brick, that's fake brick. I'm in a bill- No, it's real bricks. Yes it is, go touch it. I don't believe you. Go ahead, those are real bricks. Go touch the bricks, man. Jesus Christ, he thinks we got fake bricks. Who do you think we are? Okay. Oh. You got it. Thought I was a liar, how weird. Ha ha ha ha ha. Now, let me be honest. It's a veneer. A brick veneer, okay, it's not holding anything up. Real buildings. So it's not structural bricks. It's sliced the end of bricks and then they mortar it in and everything. Real bricks make it look great. Okay, so we're both right. It's real bricks. No, it's real brick. It's real brick, but it's not structural. It's not structural brick. So here I am, I'm real fake. So we're inside, I can pull out my cell phone and have a phone call. Yes. These are microwaves of a frequency that can penetrate walls, send information to my cell phone and I can communicate using information and not have that energy kill me. But it's not enough to power the actual device itself. It is not enough to power the device, correct. So in Tesla's days- So Tesla, everyone is thinking he's got the solution to the future transmission of energy. No, he doesn't. Well, I don't think anyone's saying that, but what they are saying- He did and his fans do. But back then there were no computers. Back then there were no televisions. But we did have machines. It was the era of the big machine. Right, but I don't think he was insinuating that you could use that to power factories. I don't know what he wanted to power with it. I don't know what he would have powered with it, if not light bulbs and other things.