Ftl - Heim QT based propulsion models

[Atomos]

http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=16902006

what?

 

[selfAdjoint]

This story has been all over the net today. Slashdot had it. What I want to know is who was Burton Heim and what was his theory? One scientist was quoted as saying he'd like to see some math, which makes it sound like Heim's wonderful theory never would have made it on our IR forum here.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This seems to be the place to find out... I haven't even looked yet...I'm afraid...
http://www.heim-theory.com/

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A few other related links:

MAGNET EXPERIMENT TO MEASURING
SPACE PROPULSION HEIM-LORENTZ FORCE
http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/AIAA2005-4321-a4.pdf

The Physics of Burkhard Heim and its Applications to Space Propulsion by Illobrand von Ludwiger, M.Sc.,
prepared for the presentation at the First European Workshop on Field Propulsion,
January 20-22, 2001 at the University of Sussex, Brighton, GB
http://www.mufon-ces.org/docs/heimphysics.abstract.pdf
note that Mufon is the Mutual UFO Network

Elementary Structures of Matter
by Dipl. Phys. Burkhard Heim
http://www.twesten.net/Gespraechskreis/heim/auerbach.pdf

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This looks like what we want...

Heim Quantum Theory for Space Propulsion Physics
http://www.uibk.ac.at/c/cb/cb26/heim/theorie_raumfahrt/hqtforspacepropphysicsaip2005.pdf

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Well, my first impression is, wow! I hope they're right...

 

[Atomos]

This saddens me immensely. Here there may be some very interesting developments that could change the nature of human existence, and I am too young and ignorant to be understand it, and certainly too young and ignorant to be involved.

 

[dlgoff]

Well, my first impression is, wow! I hope they're right...

Me too. I'd like to hear from the experts here.

 

[scott1]

The US air force has expressed an interest in the idea and scientists working for the American Department of Energy

Why does the Air force have interest this?Shouldn't NASA or some other govement deptrament be reashing this?

 

[Spin_Network]

This story has been all over the net today. Slashdot had it. What I want to know is who was Burton Heim and what was his theory? One scientist was quoted as saying he'd like to see some math, which makes it sound like Heim's wonderful theory never would have made it on our IR forum here.

Maybe..but it made it here:https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=83624

quite some time ago !

see posting #9 ?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The sad part is that should this work, it will probably be classified before you can say gravitophoton.

 

[scott1]

The sad part is that should this work, it will probably be classified before you can say gravitophoton.

Only if they find Aliens.If it is going to be classified I will join the Air Force

 

[Serpo]

Only if they find Aliens.If it is going to be classified I will join the Air Force

That's true scott... there really would be no other reason to classify this material. You don't see new models of refrigerators being classified :P.

 

[Hdeasy]

I was the one who started the English wikipedia pages on BURKHARD Heim - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkhard_Heim and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_Theory .
The latest rush was started since New Scientist ran a feature on him on Jan 7th 2006 - http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925331.200.html - I know the journalist and checked his English and some of the science. Yes, I was initially sceptical, but the more I read about Heim the more I realized that he was serious in his extension of Einstein to higher dimensions. I even have a copy of the fortran program (courtesy of Heim Theory group not for dissemination) that churns out the masses of elementary particles - only input is G, c, h and a set of a few quantum numbers from part I of Heim's mass theorem. This stuff is dynamite and will probably blow string theory shy high!

 

[Hdeasy]

This story has been all over the net today. Slashdot had it. What I want to know is who was Burton Heim and what was his theory? One scientist was quoted as saying he'd like to see some math, which makes it sound like Heim's wonderful theory never would have made it on our IR forum here.

You can see from the papers quoted by IvanSeeking that there is plenty of Math in Heim theory - too much, in fact, for normal mortals. That's the whole point. It takes a professor in Theoretical Physics on average a year of intensive study to tackle the math to the extent that he can appreciate the mass formula and maybe some of the Heim-Droscher stuff. I have Heim's books but haven't had the time to study them intently - dipping into them here and there, though, they are consistent - he plays around with the Ricci tensor and does a double transform involving curvilinear coordinates...

 

[selfAdjoint]

What do you think of that mass formula Hdeasy? I am suspicious of it. Every constant seems to be defined in terms of three or four other constants. With that much leeway it only takes a teeny adjustment here, or a plausible assumption there to nudge the results in the right directions. I'd be surprised if he couldn't "predict" the proton, neutron, and electron masses to some nice accuracy under those conditions.

 

[LeonhardEuler]

I find this a little suspicious:

The probability of this being due to chance is on the order of 1 in 10⁶⁴ [(10,000)¹⁶ = (10⁴)¹⁶]

(he's talking about the theory predicting 16 masses with an error of 1 in 10,000)
First of all, it seems that he is assuming that the probability of guessing one mass with an error of one in 10,000 is 1/10,000. That isn't true. If I told you to guess random number, and then I compared it to some arbitrary number, the probability that you are within 10% of the given number is not 10%-it's more like 0. This is because, if we confine ourselves to integers, then there are only finitely many numbers within 10% of the given number, while infinitely many are outside of that range. Now, in the case of the theory we are not talking about integers, but real numbers. However, in practice, the experimental values are only given to so many decimal places, so we might as well truncate the theoretical values at the same number of decimal places. Then the same analysis applies since there will only be finitely many numbers within a given error bar of the experimental values having the given number of decimal places.

He speaks of the "mass spectrum" which indicates that there are many allowed masses. He also says that the theory predicts undiscovered particles. I think the question is what is the density of the allowed masses. This would allow one to find the probability of all of the elementry particle masses falling so close to the theoretical ones.

Another part I found strange:

The 8 dimensions of Heim theory is the result of two mathematical objects

1. a non-linear operator whose matrix representation C consists of 4 submatrices

As far as I know an operaor is linear if and only if it can be represented as a matrix. Perhaps the elements of the matrix are themselves functions, or there is something else going on here, but, as described, that doesn't make much sense.

 

[Hdeasy]

Mass formula

What do you think of that mass formula Hdeasy? I am suspicious of it. Every constant seems to be defined in terms of three or four other constants. With that much leeway it only takes a teeny adjustment here, or a plausible assumption there to nudge the results in the right directions. I'd be surprised if he couldn't "predict" the proton, neutron, and electron masses to some nice accuracy under those conditions.

my attitude is that the accuracy obtained cannot be by tweaking approximations, since the only input real numbers are G, h and c. All the other combinations of Pi and integers are coefficents of the various equations. So either the formula is for real or it's a complete fudge - i.e. the 16 particle masses were back-engineered to pop out of all the Pi's and integer combinations. That would mean massive fraud - but the fact that Von Braun, Heisenburg, Jourdan and others of the Math crowd at Goettingen knew Heim and were convinced he was a genius seems to rule out a Korea-stem-cell type scam.
Oh and mea culpa - 'twas I who introduced that probability argument into the Wikipedia page on Heim - what I meant was that given estimates already near the correct masses, what's the chance of 'zero-ing in' on the experimental value? E.g. for the electron, if your estimate is initially of the order of 1 MeV/c**2, then the probability of getting the additonal decimal places to get 0.5110 MeV/c**2 is about 1 in 10,000. Crude argument, it's true, but it was introduced to counter another Wikipedia-ist's contention that the masses were 'random' - as pointed out above, of course, the prob. of a completely random guess getting so near is much smaller.
If you follow the condensed derivation of the mass formula in http://www.heim-theory.com/downloads_pw/D_Zur_Herleitung_Der_Heimschen_Massenformel.pdf in www.heim-theory.com then you get an idea of the maths involved. Apparently Droescher and co. want to derive the equation rigourously, but ran into a problem - if more physicists were to join in that research a proper derivation might be achieved and the validity of the mass formula could be settled once and for all.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

There must be a few more heavyweights in this forum who could expound there ideas about this? It's very exciting to think it might be true, but I'm not counting my chickens. Saying Nasa is interested says it all for me, they're hardly going to take much notice unless it has at least an outside chance of being a plausable mechanics?I'd love it if it was right though

 

[EnumaElish]

This is a little off the main subject here, but -- when I first read about the Heim drive (or the Z machine) on the New Scientist web page yesterday, the first thing that popped into my mind was the humongous magnetic drive in the movie Contact that was used to send Jodie Foster's character onto a faster-than-light interstellar journey.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Funny that when my boss said I wonder who'll try it out first, Jodie Foster popped into my head

 

[EnumaElish]

Funny that when my boss said I wonder who'll try it out first, Jodie Foster popped into my head

And, guys, she really doesn't need a chair, or a seatbelt!

 

[selfAdjoint]

There must be a few more heavyweights in this forum who could expound there ideas about this? It's very exciting to think it might be true, but I'm not counting my chickens. Saying Nasa is interested says it all for me, they're hardly going to take much notice unless it has at least an outside chance of being a plausable mechanics?I'd love it if it was right though

Check out what Hdeasy said in post #15 on this thread:

You can see from the papers quoted by IvanSeeking that there is plenty of Math in Heim theory - too much, in fact, for normal mortals. That's the whole point. It takes a professor in Theoretical Physics on average a year of intensive study to tackle the math to the extent that he can appreciate the mass formula and maybe some of the Heim-Droscher stuff. I have Heim's books but haven't had the time to study them intently - dipping into them here and there, though, they are consistent - he plays around with the Ricci tensor and does a double transform involving curvilinear coordinates...

Here's the guy who wrote the Wiki material on Heim, he's the go-to guy in Germany for the Heim theory. And he says he's not qualified to critique the theory technically. Nobody's going to be able to do it off the tops of their heads, but with all this publicity look for the first papers discussing the theory to come out in a few months. And after all the theory seems to have had a 25 year evolution, so it's not all just what Heim wrote in his two huge books. There's a bunch of later material to absorb. And not much of it seems to be online.

But we shouldn't believe him just because a lot of heavweights of old time quantum theory admired him. More than one good sound scientist has gone over the edge before this. Eddington, for one, wrote a huge book - solid math from beginning to end - to derive the fine structure constant from "fundamental theory". It was later judged to be all tosh.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Fortunately unlike String Theory at the moment, you can at least test this theory experimentally. It's all just mathematical hypothesis currently it seems from what I've read, if it pans out it'd be interesting but I'm not exactly preparing for space flight to extra-terrestrial worlds in the next twenty years. Experimentation as ever is the key to proving or disproving it once and for all.

 

[Kakarot]

well that settles it, jodie foster is going first whether she likes it or not

but this is really cool, hopefully it works so i get to see another solar system in my lifetime lol

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Are you sure she's the right person for the job? I mean is she as eminently qualified as perhaps some astronauts? The only thing that worries me is something like this is the perfect target for terrorists, New age loonies and crackpot conspiracy theorists? I only hope that they take the right precautions, Nasa's safety record isn't that perfect at the moment anyway.

 

[mouseonmoon]

quotes: New Scientist
"For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to
justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in
getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious
introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment,"
he says. "

and/but

"...theory is incomplete at best, and certainly extremely difficult
to follow. And it has not passed any normal form of peer review,
a fact that surprised the AIAA prize reviewers when they made
their decision. "It seemed to be quite developed and ready for
such publication," Mikellides told New Scientist."

This doesn't sound like it'll be in production by next Christmas.

I've been wondering about the 'standards' of NS?
opinions please

 

[Hdeasy]

quotes: New Scientist
"For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to
justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in
getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious
introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment,"
he says. "
and/but
"...theory is incomplete at best, and certainly extremely difficult
to follow. And it has not passed any normal form of peer review,
a fact that surprised the AIAA prize reviewers when they made
their decision. "It seemed to be quite developed and ready for
such publication," Mikellides told New Scientist."
This doesn't sound like it'll be in production by next Christmas.
I've been wondering about the 'standards' of NS?
opinions please

You've got to remember that Heim was an exception in many ways. Working on his own and answerable to no-one, he was following an older code of behaviour where the 'publish or be damned' system of modern academia did not hold. This explains why Mikellides found the theory quite developed and ready for publishing - surprisingly so for something essentially unpublished hitherto. So papers are long overdue and hopefully will soon be submitted to the standard journals.

 

[LURCH]

I know that NASA was also looking at faster-than-light technology that would rely on a negative energy field to produce wormholes. However, negative energy can only exist in a system that possesses a greater amount of positive energy, and the amount of positive energy needed to create a field large enough for a human being to pass through would amount to more than the proposed mass of the entire universe.

Has anyone seen an indication as to how strong the magnetic field would have to be for this "Z-drive", and how much power would be required to create that field?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Page 9 of 11 here gets into this...

In the rotating torus, the positive and negative gravitophoton fields are generated together, and, because of energy conservation, their strengths are equal and can be directly calculated from Eq. (15). assuming a magnetic induction of 30 T, a current density of 230 A/mm², and 4×10⁵ turns for the magnetic coil, the positive gravitophoton field should result in an acceleration of 3×10² m/s², in direct vicinity of the torus. Some 10 m away from the torus the acceleration is down to some 0.1 g or 1 m/s². This value for g⁺_gp is being used in calculating the value of n for interplanetary missions...

http://www.uibk.ac.at/c/cb/cb26/heim/theorie_raumfahrt/hqtforspacepropphysicsaip2005.pdf

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

I've read this; simple question does anyone think this could work?

 

[Hdeasy]

I've read this; simple question does anyone think this could work?

Well, I think the evidence is overwhelming that there is some substance to Heim's Unified Field Theory. The propulsion angle would be nice to have. But for me more important is to get additional confidence in the mass formula - if that can be derived rigourlously, then it could supplant other candidate TOEs like String Theory. However, the maths is so tricky that it's uncertain which is easier - prove the mass formula or test the Heim-Lorentz force.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

A colleague of mine after looking at the equations merely sugested that they were reverse engineered, I.e made to fit the model like changing the variable in ax^2+bx+c can be engineered to fit any quadratic curve. Not so much predictive more just taking the answer as 100 and working out what the equation should be. That's his view, I wouldn't even begin to know how he came to this conclusion but maybe someone could hazard a guess?

What implication does that have if true?

 

[Hdeasy]

Why the Fraud allegation stinks

A colleague of mine after looking at the equations merely sugested that they were reverse engineered, I.e made to fit the model like changing the variable in ax^2+bx+c can be engineered to fit any quadratic curve. Not so much predictive more just taking the answer as 100 and working out what the equation should be. That's his view, I wouldn't even begin to know how he came to this conclusion but maybe someone could hazard a guess?
What implication does that have if true?

This is the usual answer of someone who takes a glance at the theory and decides it's too complex for him/her. Thus to justify ignoring it from now on, she rationalises that this highly respected scientist was guilty of fraud of some sort. But there are several points against this allegation - first, Heisenberg, Jourdan et al. vouched for the genius of Heim: so it's extremely unlikely that he would try a cheap trick like that. Note - an intersting case similar to your colleague was Hans Peter Dürr ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Peter_Dürr ), who met Heim and a colleague in 1977 when he was director of a Max Planck physics Institute (the chair previously occupied by Heisenberg ! ). Initially Dürr was dismissive until he got to talk with Heim - their conversation became intense and went on for many hours, after which Dürr was convinced of Heim's credentials. It was at this meeting that Dürr was so impressed by Heim that he convinced the latter to break his rule of not publishing before his theory was utterly complete and the result was the only peer-reviewed paper by Heim summarising his theory. So, been there, done that!

Second, looking through the derivations on www.heim-theory.com, there is a great consistency about it. Take any sub-section and examine the logic. It is always impeccable. Thus there is a plausible scientific explanation for how the equations evolve. Finally, to get 6 x 16 decimal places (more, as arbitrary powers of 10 are needed), one needs in principal more than 96 terms in various equations. This is because the coefficients are all small integers or integer multiples of Pi, so that one cannot simply say that here are 16 equations in 16 unknowns, as the answer is to be a real number. It is not clear that so many independent terms / equations are present in the final 'readout' phase.
This is why there needs to be a more accessible introduction to the theory. Luckily, one of the Heim-Theory people has tapes of Heim talking about the theory which he has almost finished transcribing. Apparently it is far easier as an introdcution to the theory than the books written during Heim's lifetime. By hte way - since this proposed book would be essentially Heim speaking to the reader, one hopes it would have the same effect as it had on Dürr in 1977.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

His reply to this is that the theory is no more testable than string theory. Extra dimensions give him all sorts of chills. He's not disputing that there could theoretically be a a basis for EM and Gravity being unified, just the interpritation. String theory is fascinating to me but I with my limited understanding can't help but think it is merely scientific philosophy or even sophistry as it stands now. Like a logic argument I guess.