Science on Screen®
Film / Lecture / Q&A
Saturday, June 17 at 7pm
NIKOLA TESLA AND HIS PLACE IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE
with Sebastian White, High Energy physicist, CERN
featuring a screening of TESLA
Starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, and Jim Gaffigan
Members $10 / Public $15
Join us for a mind-expanding exploration of the
pioneering scientist Nikola Tesla, featuring a lecture by Sebastian White, and
a rare big-screen showing of Michael Almereyda’s unconventional 2020 biopic.
Brilliant, visionary Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke)
fights an uphill battle to bring his revolutionary electrical system to fruition,
then faces thornier challenges with his new system for worldwide wireless
energy. The film tracks Tesla’s uneasy interactions with his fellow inventor Thomas
Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and his patron George Westinghouse (Jim
Gaffigan). Another thread traces Tesla’s sidewinding courtship of
financial titan J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz), whose daughter Anne
(Eve Hewson) takes a more than casual interest in the inventor.
Anne analyzes and presents the story as it unfolds, offering a distinctly
modern voice to this scientific period drama which, like its subject, defies
convention. (USA, 2020, 102 min., color, DCP)
Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States in 1884
after absorbing the essentials of the new science of Electromagnetic Theory
through study in his native country, as well as Graz, Prague and then practical
experience in Budapest and Paris. His arrival roughly coincided with a period
sometimes referred to as the American Renaissance in Art and Architecture
(~1876-1917). Tesla fit right in and played an important role in The Columbia
World Exposition (1893), which showcased much of what this stood for. Along
with the sense of national identity, a key element was a sense of modernism and
technology for which Tesla was a star.
Dr. White will discuss some of the inventions with
which Tesla is correctly credited and others that relate to developments today,
as well as exploring the broadness of
Tesla’s interests as seen in his friendships with Mark
Twain, Vivekananda and Stanford White, among others.
Sebastian White is a High Energy physicist who, like
many radio amateurs growing up in the New York area, learned early on about the
life and work of Nikola Tesla. Only later, following a (2009) New York Times
article about Tesla’s laboratory “Wardenclyffe” in Shoreham, NY, did he learn
of the friendship and collaboration between his great-grandfather, Stanford
White and Tesla. White now serves as a science advisor to Wardenclyffe,
which had its groundbreaking ceremony this past April. He studied physics at
Harvard and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University for work on the first
hadron collider (the CERN ISR). Since then he has performed experiments at all
5 Hadron Colliders, most recently the CERN LHC.
