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They say that the history books are written by the winners. Maybe that’s one of the reasons most people aren’t that familiar with the name Nikola Tesla. He was a Serbian-American born during a lightning storm in the 19th century, and was a true genius in every sense of the word.
Ask someone who invented the light bulb and they’ll probably come up with the name of Tesla’s great rival, Thomas Edison. The irony is that Edison didn’t actually invent the light bulb – in fact he perfected the work of others to develop a more reliable and commercial design. Tesla and Edison, great rivals, fought directly for supremacy in the way electricity was distributed. Okay, maybe this doesn’t sound as significant as the invention of the light bulb, but it’s just as fundamental to our modern world.
Towards the end of the 19th century, a fierce battle was raged for the future of electrical distribution by the two scientific giants, Edison in the corner supporting direct current (DC), and Tesla in the other championing alternating current (AC). Despite Edison’s significant campaigning for the adoption of the DC system (which included electrocuting animals to prove how dangerous AC was), there’s a major problem with DC – over any significant distance it’s hugely inefficient. If the world had adopted Edison’s approach we would have needed countless hundreds of thousands more power stations than we have today. Thankfully, Tesla’s much more efficient AC system won through and it’s that which forms the backbone of modern electricity distribution grids.
It might be understandable if the world had overlooked Tesla for this single contribution to humanity, but his talents didn’t stop there. There are numerous areas that Tesla pioneered, including: radio, radar, x-rays, hydeo-electric generation, the modern electric motor, recording of radio waves from space, even early experiments in cryogenic engineering. The list goes on and on. In other words Tesla was a true genius in every sense of the word.
Tesla had an astonishing mind and was a true visionary, not bound by current thinking and trends. An example of this maverick approach is one of his final inventions where he experimented with wireless power. Tesla constructed the Wardenclyffe Tower, a device intended to use the Earth and its ionosphere as giant electrical conductors. To realise this extraordinary idea, Tesla intended that receiving stations would be constructed around the world which could draw power from this wireless power grid. This might sound like an absurd concept, but many took it seriously including financier, J.P. Morgan, no less. He helped to fund Tesla’s experiments, but despite early promise, the development work proved prohibitively expensive, and during the stock market crash of 1901, Tesla’s funding dried up. It it hadn’t, maybe our world would be very different today, with power beamed into our homes and vehicles. It sounds crazy, but who knows, maybe in the future someone may go on to prove the feasibility of Tesla’s early pioneering work.
So why do we remember Edison but not Tesla? It’s a good question. Maybe it’s because he laid the ground work that others capitalised on to the point that they are credited with their invention. Also, whilst Tesla’s contemporaries enjoyed huge financial success (and some might say were better businessmen), Tesla died alone and broke in a New York hotel room. Maybe, this underlines that he was more an ideas man, rather than someone concerned with commercially exploiting his inventions.

Whatever one believes about Tesla’s life, without doubt he made a major contribution to scientific progress. Certainly, if he hadn’t have lived, we would have felt the impact on our modern world. But at least now we are starting to recognise the significance of Tesla’s contribution and how his genius touches all our lives to this very day. At the very least, we owe him a debt of gratitude. 

In previous articles I've mentioned parallel realities that various theories point toward, but if they really do exist is there some way you could travel between them? 

As it happens we may be in luck. In 1935 Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen working together on the theory of gravity, came me out with the esoteric concept of a wormhole. To explain the principle of what this is, if you think of our universe as a flat plane and another reality on a plane below it, the wormhole is an effectively a tunnel that can directly link these otherwise separate realities. Now before you get too excited at the idea of an intergalactic tunnel between parallel dimensions, there are some serious technical problems that need to be addressed. 

Also, it isn’t only Einstein and Rosen who have theorised about the existence of wormholes. They crop up in quantum mechanics (the study of the very small) and scientists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that we are actually surrounded by them. Now before you started glancing nervously around worried that you may be about to be sucked into a parallel reality, let me reassure you. These sort of wormholes are infinitesimally small, tinier than even atoms, constantly forming in something called quantum foam, to link different places and even different times, before disappearing again. Now obviously these tunnels are far too small for a human to pass through (you can stop looking nervously over your shoulder now), but some scientists believe it might be possible to expand one so we could.

Another idea is that we could build huge wormhole generators in space. If the entrance was placed near the Earth, the exit could be placed next to far off stars, allowing a spaceship entering to be instantly transported to the far flung point. Alternatively, if the exit was in the same place but at a different time, it would allow instant time travel between the two gates for our space ship.

So how could we build ourselves a viable machine to create a traversable wormhole that remains stable? 

The first issue is that the wormholes are inherently unstable, try to pass through one and you are going to ripped apart when they collapse. So how could we prevent this? The answer is we need to use something that hasn’t been discovered yet and it’s been labelled negative energy. With this magic missing ingredient we could keep the walls open. Simple!

The second serious hurdle to overcome is to that to get anywhere close to a useable wormhole, an incredible amount of energy is required. How much? We are talking the power of harnessed stars. That’s quite a power bill.

So unfortunately for now in practical terms creating useable wormholes seems a way off. In the meantime we’ll just have to rely on science fiction to fire our imaginations about the possibilities of travel between parallel realities and time travel.

This excellent short video with Michio Kaku and narrated by no less than Morgan Freeman, explains wormholes further.