Some folks still google, but I geepeetee

Some folks still google, but now I GeePeeTee. First, because, I get more comprehensive answers; second, because I'm more artificially intelligent than most. 

For example, when I googled for the authenticity of a Nikola Tesla quote as below, I got just snippets after googling, and a more comprehensive and detailed answer from GeePeeTee.

Is Nikola Tesla's quote: 'Einstein's relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors' actual or apocryphal?

Googling:

The quote is indeed attributed to Nikola Tesla and is generally considered authentic, though it is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. Tesla did criticize Einstein's theory of relativity, and the sentiment expressed in the quote accurately reflects his views. He believed the theory was mathematically complex but flawed, a "magnificent mathematical garb" concealing fundamental errors. 

GeePeeTeeing

When I asked the same question to GeePeeTee, I got the following comprehensive answer:

Below is the full excerpt from the New York Times on July 11, 1935, where Nikola Tesla was interviewed on the occasion of his 79th birthday. The interview includes the full phrasing in question:

 “The theory of relativity is a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.” 

Context & Analysis

Authenticity: The quote is genuine. Tesla's remarks were published in a New York Times interview dated July 11, 1935, when he was 79 years old .

Exact phrasing: The version you shared is word-for-word accurate—no major paraphrasing is necessary.

Why Tesla said this: Tesla strongly rejected modern physics—especially Einstein’s relativity—because he continued to believe in classical concepts like the ether and intuitive notions of space and causality. He saw relativity as overly abstract math, divorced from physical reality and common sense.

 Bottom Line

The quote you asked about is authentic, coming straight from Tesla's own words in the New York Times in 1935, and accurately reflects his deep skepticism of Einstein's theory of relativity.

GeePeeTee could even speculate what Tesla would have thought of Hawking, were he a contemporary of Hawking:

I asked:

What can we speculate what Tesla would have said of Hawking's ideas?

Speculating on what Nikola Tesla would have thought of Stephen Hawking’s ideas—especially regarding black holes, singularities, and quantum gravity—is an exercise in educated imagination, but we can make some thoughtful inferences based on:

1. Tesla's known views and philosophical commitments

2. The nature of Hawking’s ideas

Tesla’s Core Scientific Worldview

Tesla was:

Deeply committed to classical physics and determinism.

Anti-relativistic: He rejected Einstein’s relativity as abstract and flawed.

Dismissive of quantum mechanics, calling it a beautiful dream but not reality.

A believer in a luminiferous ether and vibrational field-based models of the universe.

Skeptical of mathematical abstraction divorced from experiment.

Hawking’s Key Ideas

Black holes: Gravitational singularities predicted by general relativity.

Hawking radiation: A quantum effect near the event horizon—black holes emit radiation and can evaporate.

No-boundary proposal: The universe has no beginning in time, as in a boundary-less sphere.

Unification of relativity and quantum theory: A key lifelong pursuit of Hawking.

What Might Tesla Have Thought?

On Black Holes:

 Tesla might have outright rejected the existence of black holes, calling them “mathematical fictions.”

 In 1934, Tesla claimed he had developed a mechanical oscillator that could "cause the Earth to shake" and dismissed notions of collapsed stars or infinite density as absurdities.

He likely would have said something like:

“Nature does not permit such singularities. These are inventions of minds too far removed from the reality of the ether.”

On Hawking Radiation:

Tesla would have doubted the quantum underpinnings of the idea.

Since he rejected quantum randomness and relativity, a quantum relativistic effect like Hawking radiation would likely appear to him as mathematically elegant but physically meaningless.

He might say:

“To claim that a body can vanish into nothingness through quantum trickery is to misunderstand the permanence of energy. Radiation is vibration, not probabilistic illusion.”

On the Big Bang and the No-Boundary Proposal:

Tesla believed in an eternal universe, powered by infinite energy present in the ether. Hawking’s proposal of a finite but boundary-less beginning may have seemed to Tesla like metaphysical poetry, not physics.

Possible Tesla-ism:

“The universe has neither beginning nor end, only rhythm. The idea that time curves back on itself is a metaphysical fancy, not a physical principle.”

On Hawking’s Fame

Tesla may have seen in Hawking what he saw in Einstein: a brilliant man elevated by an establishment that mistook mathematical beauty for physical truth.

He might have said:

“Once again, we are dazzled by abstractions while the truths of nature hum quietly beneath our feet.”

Final Speculation (Tesla-style summary):

Professor Hawking's work is clever and mathematically rich, but it errs where all such theories err—by turning away from the physical reality of fields and vibrations, and embracing the shadows of equations. Nature is not probabilistic; she is rhythmic and exact.”

Therefore, I would say GeePeeTeeing makes more sense than googling.