when Leonardo da vinci sketched out a parachute or a helicopter-looking self propelling device prototypes that took 500 years to actually build - what did contemporaries think of him?

who are we to judge a great mind? we simply cant. yes he might have gone mad, but there is a very fine line between madness and brilliance and its often blurred. all we can do is take these ideas and test/iterate/test. id rather bet on a horse that is capable of running than on a just born foal.

A lot; he was widely recognized as a genius in his own time. Sadly, his helicopter wouldn't have worked, and he never sketched an ICE.

helicopter prototype was off (just needed different shape propeller, additional stabilizing propeller and proper weight distribution), but it was on a correct development path. parachute design was correct as was demonstrated in 2000. (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bgE0_zA9lEU/U29iF1bk9QI/AAAAAAAAEu...)

what if tesla's highly speculated work is even 50% close?

we had thousands of electric cars manufactured and sold in USA 100 years ago (stop and think about it for a second: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/80/34/c5/8034...). wireless transmission of electricity/energy could put us on a completely different path as a humanity (as well as completely change political and business landscape worldwide).

And an ENGINE!

>At the 1932 occasion, Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays.[205] In 1933, at age 77, Tesla told reporters that, after thirty-five years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was “violently opposed” to Einsteinian physics, and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years. He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.

We know that cosmic rays aren't prevalent enough to produce energy. It should be obvious that you can't record thought through a retina because the majority of thought in the brain occurs in areas obstructed by the retina. He was just an already-eccentric old man whose brain was breaking down, and in trying to cling onto his success from the past he might have developed delusions that to him seem perfectly logical. I don't see why we can't accept that the death ray idea was just as nonexistent/nonsensical as these other ones. Additionally, also from wikipedia:

>In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla's "death ray", Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.

Scary thing? Delusional behavior can just happen to anyone. It's a mental illness and like any illness there may be no way to see it coming. One day, you suddenly think your 'Real Girl' doll is a real person that you love[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_and_the_Real_Girl - Fantastic, true acting by an actor known mostly for his good looks.

FBI clearly stated in that FIA disclosed dossier that there was an outside entity trying to get access to his lab prototypes, papers, information. We do not know if and what was taken,

It's not like these "great minds" are alien superintelligences. How much smarter do you think they were than the average person, in terms of IQ? Maybe 2x maximum? Seems quite possible to judge. Tesla was not a Singularity.

IQ is definitely not the end all-be-all of intelligence because you can train yourself to become better at taking IQ tests by taking IQ tests: that's what all those people with >180 IQ who are "the smartest people in the world" did. And of course intelligence is only part of the equation: people could be much smarter than Tesla but simply never become interested in electricity, and even very smart people can make mistakes and arrive at incorrect conclusions (perhaps due to ego as well - we are all human). There are also different forms of intelligence, as some people are much better than others at verbal/spatial/logical reasoning but perform averagely in other categories.

So in general I'd say IQ is not a good way to look at this. We should look more at the fact that mental illness can affect everyone, and if someone starts suddenly making provably false outlandish claims, that doesn't mean they weren't once a great scientist or very intelligent person.

I disagree, I define a truly great mind as one that thinks very differently from others, and solves problems others can't. Not someone who can just solve problems more quickly.

Why do you think it matters what his IQ is? You can't measure someone's ability to think about new things with a test that asks you to solve relatively simple brainteasers. I am sure his IQ was quite high, but that doesn't mean someone with an equivalently high IQ could do what he did.

Edit: missed a word.

In terms of understanding of electric phenomena, its difficult to point at another with a similar level of understanding (or at least productive understanding).

With that in mind, it would seem he's quite a bit "smarter" than even very intelligent people, with the same life long pursuit.

Maxwell? Faraday? Heaviside? etc. Or are we explicitly talking circuits?

When you try to map some trends 'genius' people have that others dont, it comes to have some form of free/ilimited thinking, like kids often do, persistence and even stuborness based on faith that something others dont get it its actually possible, criativity, a good environment and in the end choose that path that im sure can become a big burden, that will require a lot of spirit, persistence and good will.

So i guess IQ tests alone will never be able to frame or to detect real geniuses in a objective automated manner.

Of course that more brainpower give you more chances to become a genius, but there are some traces of the personality that must also be there.

For instance, the majority of the smart people in the world, will not go through this route, giving they can just use their brains to get rich, famous, powerful and use it in a more egotistical and self-fulfilling manner.

this is not about not being appreciated at the given time. unless you think in 500 years it will be fashionable "to love that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-efimov-state-physicists-fi...

we are all the same, all part of one. if you love yourself and you love "one" you automatically love pigeons and all the other living creatures.

perhaps its our next evolutionary step and he was many years ahead of all of us...

Not just towards the end of his life, he likely had mental issues throughout his entire life. He himself reported experiencing incidents of hallucinations/strange visions of light, and had a number of very strange and exact habits that sound like some kind of OCD (including an extreme aversion to women wearing pearl jewelry of any kind).

if one person is more receptive to certain things than the other .. it does not make him or her crazy...

"The mathematics of string theory suggests that the world we know is not complete. In addition to our four familiar dimensions - three-dimensional space and time - string theory predicts the existence of six extra spatial dimensions, "hidden" dimensions curled in tiny geometric shapes at every single point in our universe. "

"Don't worry if you can't picture a 10-dimensional world. Our minds are accustomed to only three spatial dimensions and lack a frame of reference for the other six, says UW-Madison physicist Gary Shiu, who led the new study. Though scientists use computers to visualize what these six-dimensional geometries could look like (see image), no one really knows for sure what shape they take."

"According to string theory mathematics, the extra dimensions could adopt any of tens of thousands of possible shapes, each shape theoretically corresponding to its own universe with its own set of physical laws. "

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070203103355.h...

The new work was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Research Corp.

Unless you're positing that anyone experiencing these types of symptoms are in fact viewing extra-dimensional objects. In which case, good luck with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

its easy to throw out a baby with the bathwater..

I mean, I don't think Tesla was some kind of super-wizard or anything; extremely intelligent and precient on certain things, lacking in other areas (it's interesting to compare and contrast Tesla and Edison, for instance - but that's OT).

But how often have we heard of, or read about, people able to come up with solutions to, say, complex mathematical problems, seemingly in their head - where they claim to "see" the patterns or formulae or whatever - and it just "comes together" for them correctly?

A kind of "synesthesia" for mathematics, you might call it?

So would it be any less possible that someone could "see" higher-order dimensional visualization and understand them, without need intermediary constructs or simulations?

Also - at least according to his closest biographer (so some bias there, I grant) - Tesla could supposedly "see" how something was supposed to be constructed; it's dimensions, it's workings, it's weight, etc - exactly. It was described as if he could visualize it existing in front of him, before it actually existed, and see everything about it. He could then build it - without needing engineering drawings or such.

Not sure where the truth lies with that, but it was fascinating to read about, if true.