We have to honor his legacy, but people talking about him like he was in the brisk of changing the world (again) are ignoring significant facts.
“I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.”
You could interpret relativity only as curved paths in flat space due to gravity, instead of flat paths in curved space. The math is much uglier, though, so in a metaphysical sense, Tesla was wrong.
Einstein famously said “god does not play dice” regarding quantum mechanics, and “not more open-minded than Einstein” isn’t much of an insult.
Tesla Fact vs. Fiction: Why the Public Perception is Wrong https://youtu.be/6331JXvOUGY
It hit me in school that these are very similar and once you understand one you can apply many of the learnings, but especially the high level logic on the other.