If someone were to ask me to ignore all of physics, and pick what I want most in the world, very near the top of the list would be a faster-than-light drive. To be able to fly a starship anywhere in the Galaxy, see things up close I’ve only dreamed about…
But, for the moment, it’s science fiction. I have not seen any credible, testable theories about any kind of FTL engine.
But something came up today, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s a paper that appears to give a description of how to build just such a device. It’s written by two German men, and uses a little-known idea by a man who postulated a way of traveling faster than light.
I looked over the paper, and alarm bells went off all kinds of ways in my head. They talk about types of dark energy as if they are real, when we’re not sure of that at all. It talks about slipping into "parallel space" without really defining it. It has a lot of math, nearly all of of which is well over my head, so I cannot judge it at all (any takers?). It also posits new particles, new interactions, and all you need to do it is a superstrong magnetic field, one not much more powerful than what you might find in a medical MRI (though the energy density, the amount of energy you can squeeze into a volume, would be far higher).
It claims that a trip to the Moon would take 4 hours, and Mars in about a month. You could even go superluminal, faster than light. More alarm bells.
What’s weird is that this paper was chosen as one of the best papers of 2005 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I have no knowledge about this organization, but some of the other papers look quite legit to me.
Is this paper for real? Beats me. This type of stuff isn’t really my field, and the math is beyond my understanding, as is the physics. It looks fishy, and my instincts tell me it’s bunk. But I’ll leave it up to wiser heads. I’ll just say that I won’t be surprised if it turns out to be nonsense, and I will be surprised — very surprised, but pretty happy — if it pans out. But I seriously doubt it will.
Incidentally, the authors claim in a newspaper article that a working prototype might be built in five years. That’s a falsifiable claim, so I guess I’ll just have to wait.
Note: I will be traveling to the Washington DC meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Friday, so this will probably be my only post today. I am very much hoping to be able to do some mo’blogging during the meeting, and report on as much astronomy news as I can– and there will be a lot of news. No guarantees, as I expect to be very busy! But I’ll try.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:11 am
It will “only” take 4 hours to get to the Moon? Heck, Pluto Express is supposed to make that trip in just 9 hours as it departs its planet of origin. It sounds to me like the paper you found it a bit too theoretical - at best. Any signs of perpetual motoin machines? Well, maybe they really have figured things out and we’ll name our version of Warp drive after them instead of Zephram Cochran. Like you say, their predictions are falsifiable.
I’ve been reading a conference proceedings from 1966 titled “Space Age in FY 2001″. It’s hard to read in a lot of ways because it extrapolates things far too optomistically for what really happened and in ways that really could have happened that would have altered my life in ways I had seriously dreamed of 25+ years ago. Particularly in space propulsion, using Nuclear drives even for lfitoff from Earth, not to mention for space power and so on. The conference was just before the Apollo 1 accident and some of the first signs of budget cuts in the next few years and the budget is extrapolated at worst as a constant into the future. The introductory paper did, however, predict global communications and, though not by name, something resembling the internet. The worst is that the predictions could have come true had the political will been there and the inovations being made at that time in the Apollo program had continued unimpeded.
I should write up some of the details on my blog sometime….
Jim.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:39 am
I have to run off in a minute, so I can’t read the paper in full detail, but after a quick once-over it’s pinging my bogosity meter. Overall, the authors seem very willing to take a theory as solid when the experiments just aren’t there to back it up. For example, I don’t believe the notion of a quantum of area has been rigorously established in quantum gravity (since we hardly understand what quantum gravity is about anyways). The most recent thing I read about it was somewhere in John Baez’s “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics”, which only noted that quantum gravity **suggests** that we might have an area quantum… The whole Heim Quantum Theory also seems a bit out of the mainstream; I haven’t heard of people in more recent years trying to use HQT for unification (if it had worked in the ’60s, we wouldn’t have string theory now, would we?).
I also get worried by the “virtual electron” they introduce on p. 5. Electrons aren’t typically virtual particles… And I have the definite impression what they’re trying to do violates momentum conservation, somewhere.
I wonder if the “American Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics” was qualified to judge this paper. They might have liked it for its speculative content and what it would imply for space travel, but I doubt their judges were familiar with quantum field theory and general relativity to the level required. Praise by the American Physical Society would mean more, in this particular case.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:46 am
Putting aside the problems of going FTL for the moment, if one were capable of moving very close to, (but still under) the speed of light, a trip to a remote star system would in theory be very short within one’s own frame of reference. However, explorers would never see those they left behind again, so future space travelers would have to be very independent, self-reliant folk.
January 6th, 2006 at 3:16 am
They appear to think they’re onto something. It almost certainly won’t work, but I would still be interested to see someone try.
January 6th, 2006 at 3:37 am
There is a serious proposal for a warp drive using negative energy densities by Miguel Alcubierre (Class. Quantum Grav. Vol. 11 L73-L77, 1994). It achieves FTL speed by altering the fabric of spacetime, so you don’t run into the limits set by special relativity. Space is shrunk at the front of the space ship, while it is stretched behind the ship.
I guess the bumper sticker would read “Eat my space.”
January 6th, 2006 at 4:22 am
Before getting into any heavy physics, let’s look at the top of the second page:
“Furthermore, the spontaneous order that has been observed in the universe is opposite to the laws of thermodynamics, predicting the increase of disorder or greater entropy (Strogatz 2003). Everywhere highly evolvled structures can be seen, which is an enigma for the science of today.”
OK. As anybody who has debated a creationist knows, this just isn’t true. Increased order in one place comes at the expense of increased disorder elsewhere. That’s it: no new theories of 8-dimensional discrete space necessary. In recent years, nonlinear dynamics people like Strogatz have found cases where coupled systems can synchronize, the snazziest example being the fireflies of the Far East who phase-lock their flashing cycles until an entire forest is blinking on and off at once. This is a spectacular phenomenon, but we can describe it with present-day statistical physics.
They cite Strogatz’s book SYNC, which goes into detail on these sorts of things. I heard Strogatz speak on the subject a couple years back, not long after the book came out, and he certainly didn’t dispute the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He made a fairly grandiose claim, I recall, that synchronization may be as fundamental a principle as entropy, which may turn out to be true but certainly needs more investigation. Still, nothing the synchrony people have said overturns basic physical law: on the contrary, their work has shown just how well the laws we know today explain strange aspects of the natural world.
The next topic they bring up is how well General Relativity (GR) works. If “the gravitational force is nothing but an effect of the geometric curvature of spacetime” (reasonable enough so far), they believe “this concept can be extended to all physical forces”, meaning that electromagnetism and the nuclear forces should also have a geometrical interpretation. People have been trying this for a long time: back in the 1930s, Kaluza and Klein discovered that if you take a spacetime of five dimensions, four of space and one of time, and you “curl up” one space dimension into a circle, GR in this odd universe reduces to the GR in our familiar spacetime plus a new field which looks an awful lot like Maxwell’s electromagnetism. This “Kaluza-Klein theory” introduced the notion of compactification into modern physics, i.e., the idea that dimensions of spacetime might be closed into loops. (This is dear to string theorists, who have six extra dimensions they need to get rid of.) However, the plan to derive all forces from geometry didn’t pan out. Everything got horribly more complicated by the ’50s, when all sorts of particles started showing up in the nucleus, and we got put on the trail towards W bosons, quarks and gluons.
The present-day tendency is to modify the theory of gravity (GR), rather than to invent esoteric spacetimes in which GR leads to other forces.
The authors make a slick dodge when they call Heim space a “quantized space”. This could mean that it is a discrete space — a set of points with nothing in between — or it could mean that the laws of quantum mechanics are said to apply. These are drastically different things. Supposing that they mean the first option, then I suppose it’s possible that working out GR in this bizarre spacetime gives you a set of equations which include the known four forces, plus the “quintessence” and “gravitophoton” interactions and whatnot. (If Heim theory hasn’t changed since 1977, it’s got other stuff it has to include: quark and lepton generations, neutrino masses, etc., etc. I need to check the original sources, but I’m highly skeptical that HQT incorporates all the interactions we know about today.)
Even if this is the case, you face the big problem that GR is a classical theory. It doesn’t incorporate quantum mechanics. All the forces one could derive from GR in a weird spacetime would also be classical. This means that you would have to “quantize” them, and quantizing gravity is such a pain that no one’s got it right yet.
I wonder if the other interactions GR gives you in Heim space are renormalizeable. . .
It looks almost like they’re trying to invent a classical theory which “fakes” quantum mechanics, using the extra dimensions x7 and x8, which they call “information” coordinates. No, I don’t know what that means either, but my gut feeling is that trying to fake quantum theory in this way would get you into trouble with Bell’s Inequality.
What else. . . “Virtual electrons” exist, but they come in electron-positron pairs. (If you create a negative charge out of the vacuum, you need a positive charge to balance it out.) According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the time that such a virtual electron-positron pair will stick around multiplied by the energy of the pair is roughly Planck’s constant. This sets a cutoff on how significant virtual pair-production can be. . . But now I’m just talking to myself.
Further research and more thinking are required.
January 6th, 2006 at 4:34 am
I forgot to mention my own pet science-fictional theory: the quintessons which carry the quintessence force (responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion) are actually particles which zip in and out of hyperspace. This allows them to travel faster than light, which is why the dark energy distribution is so uniform throughout space — the quintessence field has had plenty of time to come to equilibrium. Of course, if you could couple to the quintessence field in the laboratory and make a coherent quintesson beam, you could send signals faster than light, and maybe even tap the expansion of the universe for your energy source.
Which is just what you need to defeat the Zok beings from planet MQ-Prime.
January 6th, 2006 at 5:27 am
BA, judging from Blake’s post, your gut instinct was right. Thanks, Blake, for a very readable explanation (my brain just shuts down when I start getting into quantum field theories).
PK, if I recall correctly, a subsequent analysis of the Alcubierre warp drive found that it would require very very large amounts of energy to warp spacetime before and behind the vehicle. In other words, although the idea might work in principle, it is not a practical option.
January 6th, 2006 at 5:48 am
Quick followup:
OK, so I couldn’t remember the exact stuff about the hypothetical quantum of area, but in the Google Age, it wasn’t hard to find where I read it:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/area.html
“One of the key predictions of loop quantum gravity,” says Baez, “is that the area of a surface can only take on a discrete spectrum of values. In particular, there is a smallest nonzero area that a surface can have. We could call this the ‘quantum of area’.” In 2002, Olaf Dreyer and Lubos Motl each calculated this quantum using independent methods, and they arrived at the same answer. However, in 2004, further work showed that one of the sources upon which Dreyer relied had made a mistake, thereby casting Dreyer’s work into doubt.
Overall, this just confirms that the notion of quantized area is a speculative one, still in flux and subject to interpretation.
January 6th, 2006 at 6:15 am
Nigel, I believe you’re right. Only a theoretical physicist would be happy to sit on an engine that has the energy content of medium-sized supernova…
January 6th, 2006 at 6:15 am
I note they won the best paper award in the “Nuclear Propulsion and Future Flight” category. I’d be curious to see the other entries, and how many others there were. Like most folks on this list, I’d love it if it was true, but I’m not packing my bags until some basic questions are answered.
January 6th, 2006 at 7:46 am
Geez a lot of smart people read this blog! Good stuff Phil and thanks for the additional input Blake Stacey. Plenty of food for thought here.
January 6th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Phil, research into the Heim Quantum Theory (which is what the two German gentleman based thier work on) led me to an orginazation called American Antigravity. By circumstance, in the BAUT forums on another subject, NCMoore pointed out that Richard Hoagland is on that orginazation’s Board of Directors. Gives you pause, hey?
January 6th, 2006 at 8:46 am
The AIAA is a real organization. I’m not a member, but it’s mentioned frequently around here. It may be as Blake Stacey says, that they just aren’t qualified to evaluate this paper. They are an organization of aeronautics and astronautics engineers, not necessarily quantum physicists.
The paper mentions “NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program (BPPP)”. It also says, “The requirements of BPPP for revolutionary space
propulsion are that no or a very limited amount of fuel is used, a low energy budget is maintained, and (possibly) superluminal speed is reached.”
I’m not familiar with this BPPP, but if it’s real it is probably run out of a different center than Johnson. There have been some rather esoteric and highly questionable papers funded regarding “antigravity”, so I can’t rule out that this is a real program to push frontier science that is stuck weeding the promising from the fictitious.
I was struck by some of the things mentioned by Blake Stacey. They make assumptions to extend GR to the other fields. They use terms that are theoretically in their glossary, but their glossary is for some reason missing. They state that order in the universe is counter to entropy and needs explanation.
It looks to me the paper is way to far into the speculative to be useful at this point. It appears the authors are saying, “If we assume this to be true and pretend that will be found to be true, then it has some startling and potentially useful ramifications for the possibility of space travel.” And if horses had wings, that’d be pretty cool, too.
January 6th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Really.
Theories get verified by making testable predictions. There’s nothing quite as testable as finding that a theory, if true, implies that a certain device should be able to be built and should work a certain way. If the device works as advertized, that’s quite a confirmation. If it dosn’t work out, then it dosn;t work out. The theory might be wrong or the calculation that led someone to believe the device would work could be wrong.
January 6th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Nicely put, ruidh. Philosophically speaking, this paper is “scientific”, in that it advances a testable proposition. The authors are certainly a vast number of notches above the Bogdanov brothers, for example.
Speaking only for myself, my beef with the article is not that the authors make predictions using an untested theory, since that is of course how theories get tested in the first place. Instead, I find the theory physically implausible from the get-go, for reasons I sketched above. One way to conclusively nail the HQT in its coffin would be to provide experimental evidence that its predictions do not match reality; in order to do this, one has to go out and perform the experiment. In an ideal world with infinite resources, this would pose no problem. Another way to knock the theory down is to show that its premises are faulty. For example, if upon closer examination the HQT violates energy conservation, we could justifiably throw it in the junk bin.
Clearly, I have done neither of these. In our limited world with restricted resources, I believe it’s a good idea to try the latter option first. It’s cheaper, and it has the benefit that testing the theory can lead one into interesting areas of physics.
I want an FTL drive as much as anybody. But we all know that in order to do that, you need a hyper generator that can get you across the alpha wall. Of course, in order to travel in hyperspace and not destroy yourself on a grav wave, you’ll need a Warshawski sail too.
Required reading: On Basilisk Station by David Weber
January 6th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
NASA employs Marc Millis full-time to dream up far-out propulsion ideas. I view that as buying a lottery ticket without knowing what the odds are or exactly what the jackpot would be.
In my humble opinion, the most plausible scenario for human interstellar travel is sending vitrified (”frozen”) embryos on journeys that last thousands of years. Artificial wombs would grow the embryos…
January 6th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
At first I thought, hey wow…maybe one of these guys is another Einstein?
But I also wondered if it sounded like just more of the same baloney that you read on sci.astro newsgroup from the nutters?
And if Hoagland has anything to do with it, well then I guess it’s baloney!
But I still would like to see some physicist tackle this and prove this as baloney…better to get it done quick, before the nutters start some more Bad Astronomy!
January 6th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
On second thought, if Jim Scotti says it ain’t so then I would tend to believe him too!:)
January 6th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
If anyone wants, I can ask Vic Stenger’s mailing list … they deal with a lot of bogus physics …
January 6th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
I am no one to comment on this, but one term caught my eye - “hermetry”.
Brings to mind some beautiful figures…34-26-34…HERmetrics
January 6th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Just to back up what Irishman posited about the AIAA - it is a very legitimate organization. I am a former member and many of my peers are current and long time members. The AIAA is a professional organization for engineers and scientists working in the areas of aeronautics and astronautics (as the name implies). A lot of engineers that work for the big defense contractors are members. AIAA gives symposiums, holds conferences, organizes courses for it’s members, etc. However, as someone pointed out, I have yet to meet any AIAA members whose area of expertise is quantum gravity theory. From my experience, the members of AIAA mostly work in the world of Newtonian physics. But they are still smart guys…
January 6th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Thanks, Tim G, for the link to Marc Millis. That site basically supports what I said about the status of the BPPP. One of his pages discusses the “ruler for advancement”, a scale as follows:
conjecture => speculation => science => technology => application
–Conjecture: The very beginning of the quest for knowledge. This is when you know what you’d like to accomplish, but you have no idea if it is even possible.
–Speculation: When you have learned enough to know what you do know, and know what you don’t toward solving the problem.
–Science: The level when you have learned how nature works. You now know if something can be done and what it will involve.
–Technology: The level when you can begin to engineer and build working devices to apply those laws of nature to answer your goal.
–Application: The final state when the technology is good enough to be put to common use. Cars, airplanes, microwave ovens are all in this category.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/inspinv.html
It places the research such as this paper along that scale as somewhere in the midst of speculation. They are following the methods and applicability of science, but aren’t far enough along to be science yet.
Blake Stacey Said:
>I want an FTL drive as much as anybody. But we all know that in order to do that, you need a hyper generator that can get you across the alpha wall. Of course, in order to travel in hyperspace and not destroy yourself on a grav wave, you’ll need a Warshawski sail too.
And don’t forget the inertial compensators to keep from turning yourself to goo. Of course, those are also useful just with your impeller drive to poke around the star system so you can get to the hyper limit in a decent amount of time.
(Weber is Great!)
January 6th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Just so nobody gets too excited — this paper is complete nonsense, not worth spending a minute’s time on. If I find the energy I might post on it, but this is no better than the other hundred crackpot preprints I get in the mail every year.
January 6th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
I totally agree with Sean. This is total nonsense. I scanned the paper very quickly to see just what this supposed propulsion system does with respect to Newton’s Laws… and it violates them. Dead End as far as I’m concerned.
I also agree with the comments regarding Weber’s science fiction stories. I love space opera… good stuff…
January 6th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
I would rather see a Ford Motor Company like assembly line manufacturing thousands of conventional launch vehicles than a one-of-a-kind dragster trying to break the speed record.
One math formula I do understand is this: the more you make of one model, the less it costs.
January 6th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
As Sean said, “Heim theory” seems like pretty clear crackpot material, both on first reading and (somewhat) closer inspection. (See http://www.heim-theory.com/ if you want to inspect some of it yourself.) A few key points:
* Heim theory claims to predict particle masses from first principles, including electons, protons, neutrons, pions, and other known particles. But it also predicts a long-lived neutral version of the electron with roughly the same mass. (No, nobody’s seen such a thing.) Looks like it has five neutrios, too.
* Those mass predictions are listed in a PDF at the heim-theory.com website (”Selected Results”, p. 3), where they are often given to astounding accuracy (the Omega- mass is given to 12 significant digits; experiment only knows five). But not a single predicted mass comes with error bars! (The closest they come is a confusing graph on page 12 showing how much their results change for different values of G.) Every serious scientist knows that the error bars are as important as the value itself.
* Heim theory depends on extra dimensions, but they aren’t “curled up” to make them invisible as in string theory. Instead, according to the “Goals of the Research Group” page on that website, they “are not measurable by physical instruments and have an informational character, since they describe qualitative aspects (meanings) of material organisations.” That sounds more mystical than physical to me, and it’s the only Heim theory explanation for why they aren’t seen that I’ve found.
* The extra dimensions in Heim theory actually have negative metric signature: they are timelike. Even the Heim theory folks know that a theory with more than one time dimension is necessarily unphysical. So how do they explain this difficulty? They say that although the extra dimensions look like time, they “have to be something different”. The reference I saw gave no explanation of what in the theory would make them different, or of what that difference might be. In relativity, a negative metric signature is the _definition_ of a timelike coordinate.
* Some of the equations of Heim theory include a dimensionful constant called E, whose value is 1 meter^2. This is treated as a simple definition of a reference area, but if you change that value (say, to 1 foot^2), physical predictions of the theory change (e.g. the “initial size of the universe”, whatever that means in context). It would be, well, surprising to see SI units appear in a significant role in a fundamental theory of nature.
Sorry for going on at such length; I had a lengthy and frustrating discussion with a Heim fan a year ago. (It really wasn’t worth the time, but I naively held out hope that I would be able to help him see the serious flaws in the theory.)
January 6th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
I’m not a scientist, but a question for those who are:
If Heim’s theory & the underlying science is crap, how is it able to predict & calculate mass of fundamental particles? From what I’ve been told, the current prevailing theories CAN NOT do that…
January 7th, 2006 at 12:44 am
I’ve been hearing about this story on other email lists as well.
Maybe the folks behind this paper are the next Einsteins… and maybe they’re just some wackjobs pushing BA (Bad Astronomy).
As I just told some other folks, don’t let the media hype get to you. Give the scientists in the relevant fields some time to do their jobs. Of course, it could take decades or centuries to test something like this, it at all. And until there is some respectable scientific authority and scrutiny behind it all, I shall remain skeptical and reserve judgement.
For me, the whole thing is a curiosity at this point. Slightly higher on the scale than a good sci-fi book, but not much. Certainly nothing even remotely close to testable or even respectable science. Unfortunately, the media and some nuts will grab hold of this and blow it out of proportion — there may even be a cult that pops up around it. Wouldn’t that be something? The “Warp Drive Cult”…
But maybe when I’m 85 I’ll look back on these comments and smile at the fact that I was wrong in my skepticism. Isn’t that one of the ultimate beauties of science — to be proven wrong through the scientific method?
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see…
Cheers — Mattus
January 7th, 2006 at 1:03 am
Prime says:
“If Heim’s theory & the underlying science is crap, how is it able to predict & calculate mass of fundamental particles? From what I’ve been told, the current prevailing theories CAN NOT do that…”
Well, one has to be careful here… did the Heim’s theory folks predict & calculate the mass of particles that were previously known to exist (actually a post-diction), or did they actually predict the existence (and mass) of previously unknown particles?
If they did a post-diction, the concept has much less weight. It is easy to formulate a theory that gives an accurate answer to a question to which you already have the answer. Kind of like how psychics and astrologers do their thing, ya know? What the theory needs to do is make testable predictions about unknowns, and its proponents must then compare those predictions to the experimental results.
And if they did predict the existence of previously unknown particles, were these particles detected. Also, were there any other theories that made similar predictions? Does the Heim’s theory make any testable predictions beyond the mass of fundamental particles? Is the only thing it predicts accurately the mass of particles, while it screws up everything else? Is it consistent with currently accepted theories that do provide adequate explanations for observed phenomena? Etc. etc. etc.
These are all just a few of the questions that I’m sure the scientists who deal with this stuff will be asking. The ball’s in their court…
… we just have to wait and be patient.
Cheers - Mattus
January 7th, 2006 at 4:13 am
From what I could make of it, their theories required two additional interactions. Have they furnished an adequate explanation as to why these interactions have not been observed?
January 7th, 2006 at 5:08 am
Thanks Sean, Steuard, Mattus et al. for digging into the Heim bog more deeply.
January 7th, 2006 at 7:14 am
hi,
if faster than the speed of light travel actually is accomplished at sometime, do you suppose it would be called “warp speed” after the startrek terminology? i hope not……
January 7th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Irishman: BPP was NASA’s skunkworks. The idea is, if we get an Einstein or a Newton every ten generations, can we put a hundred people in a room and get an effective Einstein once a generation? (With nine women, you can get a baby in a month!)
And, it is run out of Marshall. http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/
January 7th, 2006 at 10:09 am
I’m not really qualified (enough) to really debate the merits of this theory, or any of the underlying theories or maths involved in the paper.
This theory definitly flies in the face of other more or less accepted theories. But, many, many theories (that have supporting evidence) fly in the face of many other theories (that also have supporting evidence). For instance, certain quirks of quantum mechanics depend on one of two things (possibly both) things not working correctly: conservation of momentum or special relativity (most likely the later, since it has much less supporting evidence).
I don’t really want to be flame bait, but I think its important to put this out there:
If this theory, or one of the underlying theories its based off of (or any other theory, for that matter) are shown to violate so-called “laws” (I believe so-far in this comment list were conservation of energy and momentum), they should not be automatically be put down as completely inaccurate — I believe the theories should still be tested in some way. If it comes down to it, and the theories garner some sort of supporting evidence, those laws should be reconsidered in the light of new non-supporting evidence. Remember: in science, nothing is outside the reach of further evidence.
January 7th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Steuard says:
“* The extra dimensions in Heim theory actually have negative metric signature: they are timelike. Even the Heim theory folks know that a theory with more than one time dimension is necessarily unphysical. So how do they explain this difficulty? They say that although the extra dimensions look like time, they “have to be something differentâ€. The reference I saw gave no explanation of what in the theory would make them different, or of what that difference might be. In relativity, a negative metric signature is the _definition_ of a timelike coordinate.”
Can you expound on the unphysicality of extra time-like dimensions. I’m not a relativist but I have heard some theories on alternate space-times. One assumed time has 3-coordinates, or 3-D time, just as space. Something the authors were calling “Quantum-Temporal Cosmology” or QTC. It was coming from one of my undergrad astronomy profs and it seemed a bit bogus but I didn’t have the background to know why. So I guess my question is this, in QFT parlance is an extra time dimension equivalent to an extra coordinate? And if so, what makes them unphysical?
Thanks
January 7th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Four hours to the moon? Sheesh! I hope there’s a good movie.
Michio Kaku always said the problems with theories such as these that even if they are possible they are actually not possible. If physics could allow us to accomplish this, I highly doubt we’d be able to find the energy or money to do so.
::sigh::
January 7th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
I think that the paper can be real or some guy whos faking it all.
Maybe it could be possible to contact a mathematician who could verify the equations. The particles and dark matter that they say exists are based on the theory of how atoms still exist even if there are no photons going through them. (like how if you turn off the light in a room at night. The air still exists around you but you can’t see it so it can be classified as “dark matter” Some people think that the dark matter in t universe may be some types of atoms that either absorb light, can’t be illuminated, has a strong gravity so that photons cannot escape, or is something else.)
The reason “tachyons” have not been discovered yet because in order to travel faster than light, they would have to have no mass. Anything that has no mass is virtually undetectable. And because it has no mass, there can’t be an antitachyon. However, if we find a way to contain them when they are created, (say when you collide some particles together) you might be able to “ride” the tachyon. However that technology isn’t availible today because we don’t know the physics of how the tachyon works.
And even if that theory (the one on the document) did work, we aren’t capable of generating such a vast energy source unless we create it in space. (maybe harvesting photons since photons can move a spaceship?? Some guy from nasa said that photons could move a spaceship if it had a sail to catch them….)
And even if we do manage to create that vast energy source, like people said, it would be the size of a medium supernova. Wouldn’t that screw up our solar system? (like the orbits of planets, comets, asteroids, etc…We don’t want jupiter flying at us)
January 7th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Being a complusive SF fan of a certain type, I couldn’t help but obsess on the phrase “[…] and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days […]”. Why 11 instead of 10? What’s at 11 ly?
Eliminating everything closer than 10.5 ly and farther away than 11.5 ly, I get:
Lacaille 9352: 10.7317 light-years, class M2e V
Ross 128: 10.8873 light-years, class M4n V
EZ Aquarii: 11.0817 light-years
Procyon: 11.406 light-years, class F5 IV-V
61 Cygni: 11.4269 light-years, class K5 V
It’s a measure of how compulsive I am on this stuff that I bothered to check out the red dwarfs:
Lacaille 9352 is metal poor but seems boring otherwise, Ross 128 is a flare star, like a lot of red dwarfs, and EZ Aquarii looks like an unsurprising binary, of which at least one is a flare star.
This leaves us with Procyon and 61 Cygni.
Procyon is, sad for all us Niven and Dickson fans, totally unsuitable for an Earthlike planet. Procyon B is a white dwarf, which means any Earthlike worlds were cooked clean, and it orbits close enough to A to disrupt the orbit of any Earthlike world there. Worse, because B used to be more massive, it used to orbit closer to A, making the situation even more hostile. If you want to look at a white dwarf, Sirius B is closer.
[ObNerdism: actually, a planet that formed after B went WD could orbit B close enough to be as warm as Earth without being perturbed away. It would be seriously tide-locked and I doubt the planets that form from the debris left from the exciting events leading up to a WD would have the same % of elements as Earth: I see a tendency for a bias towards elements and chemical compounds that are stable at very high temperatures. Discovery of a Magnetic White Dwarf / Probable Brown Dwarf Short Period Binary (arxiv #0508043) by Schmidt, Sikody, Silvestri, Cushing, Liebert & Smith, discusses a close-orbiting brown dwarf companion of the white dwarf SDSS J12109.31 +013627.7 so this isn’t totally insane]
That leaves 61 Cygni, which actually isn’t an obviously horrid place to look. It’s binary but the two stars are 52 to 120 AU apart (still close enough to have a significant risk of long term climate effects, thanks to perturbation, according to a paper whose title I cannot recall). Neither is so dim as to have a tide-locking problem or so bright as to be short-lived and as far as I know there’s no evidence for exciting events in the past for 61 Cygni.
I suspect that they must have been thinking of 61 Cygni.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:26 am
All this high-falutin’ science is all very well, but what i really want to know is, what on earth or nearby planets is “mo’blogging”?
Cheers from a dumbOz
January 8th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
MSNBC’s Cosmic Log has picked up this story..
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3217961/
January 8th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Phil Plait is an idiot. How else do you describe some moron who wastes a whole book on lunar conspiracy bashing? Then to top that mind staggering imbecility he think faster than light travel might be possible. Even comments on some snake oil article about it. You are a born fool Phil. All that expensive education was completed wasted on a loser like you. Even those people you call pseudoscientists have more sense. Do the world a favour and stop pretending you have a brain. Clearly you have nothing but sawdust between your ears.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Shut up God. You don’t exist. Lol.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Go and kill yourself BA. You are a disgrace to science.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Don’t listen to them BA. I’ll fly in your spaceship with you.
QUACK! QUACK! QUACK!
Dumbass! Sorry, I take that back. Calling Phil Plait a dumbass is an insult to dumbasses. Do you even have a brain Phil? Go and play with your FTL drive and stop pretending to be a serious scientist.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
I agree with all the Phil bashers. Talking about scifi engines is stupid. Clearly Phil is a fraud. Even little kids know more than this freak wannabe astronomer. He must have bribed the astronomy teacher or sucked his dick to pass his exams. Go away BA. You suck!
January 8th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Now this kind of posts clearly illustrates one popular saying:
“The missing link between monkeys and humans is… us”
January 8th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
I’m with you BA, I’ll let greater minds than mine figure this one out but it would be nice wouldn’t it?
You know somewhere I remember being taught that way back a lot of smart folk thought Columbus was going to sail off the edge….who knew…and who knows?
Clear skies
January 8th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Holy cow, listen to all the nastiness on the blog…
Where the hell are we? In Congress?
Cheers - Mattus
January 8th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Hi All
Reading the papers and the bad German-English translations at the Heim website there are things that aren’t encouraging. At the same time you’ve got to at least listen to the ideas of a guy who worked with two missing arms, no sight and 10% hearing - he believed in his quest for the Unified Field and his spacedrive. And did it without rubbishing Einstein like all the other cranks do.
That being said the detail available in the AIAA paper about how to fly in hyperspace isn’t much. The basic idea is that two new forces arise out of the extra dimensions in the theory - one is repulsive gravity, and the other allows EM radiation to be converted into gravity. I think they’re saying you use the first to accelerate to say ~ 0.01c then use the other to change your inertia which effectively increases lightspeed. What remains invariant is the ratio v/c, so if you increase c to 33,000 times its current level (they handwave over just how) then the ship speed becomes 330 c.
All a bit “Hey Presto!”
Adam
January 9th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Jon Niehof Says:
“Irishman: BPP was NASA’s skunkworks. The idea is, if we get an Einstein or a Newton every ten generations, can we put a hundred people in a room and get an effective Einstein once a generation?”
I read a short article on information theory some time back that basically implies that we get Einsteins and Newtons all the time. The problem is that our science needs to advance sufficiently before these genius level people can make the connections that make the giant leaps. Note that Newton invented his Calculus at the same time Leibniz did. If Einstein had not made the mental leap to Relativity, someone within a generation or two would have, the tools and knowledge were ready for the discovery.
Sticking a room full of scientists (100 would be a pretty full room) together would probably not help if the tools and general knowledge didn’t yet exist to facilitate the discovery.
Of course Einstein was remarkable, able to figure out so much with just thought experiments based on existing knowledge. It is doubtful that without Einstein all of his discoveries would have occurred within one brain and so quickly.
It’s kind of like the saying about Good Luck being merely the meeting of opportunity and the prepared individual.
jbs
January 9th, 2006 at 1:17 am
I should probably add that I’m not sure that study was called information theory - I read this bit quite a while back. The nutshell is that science technique, knowledge, and technology reach a kind of critical mass such that one of the genius level individuals of the time will figure out the thing that the technique, knowledge, and technology lead to. In the early 1900’s it was Einstein.
If the library in Alexandria had not been burned in the early Christian Era it’s possible that the genius level accomplishments of Newton and Einstein would have happened centuries earlier.
jbs
January 9th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Traci Leigh Said:
>if faster than the speed of light travel actually is accomplished at sometime, do you suppose it would be called “warp speed†after the startrek terminology? i hope not……
I suppose it all depends upon the manner in which said FTL is accomplished, and perhaps the fancy of the person making the discovery. Said person may choose to call it Warp Drive out of homage to ST, or he might prefer Hyperspace as an allusion to Star Wars. Or he might think Weber’s got the better terminology with Warshawski sails and hyper walls.
And if you go back to the original ST pilot, you’ll find the actual term was Time Warp Drive, but that got truncated to obfuscate the time element.
Jon Niehof, I followed that link to the BPPP. Poking around, I came up with this on submitting ideas/papers for screening:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/faq.htm
Scroll down to Credibility Screening Criteria. Lots of nice sounding stuff, but especially this:
(e) Investigation of an Unconfirmed Anomalous Effect:
In cases where an anomalous effect is being discussed that has NOT YET BEEN CONFIRMED in the literature, it is mandatory that the author concentrates on the experimental methods for isolating the effect rather than speculating on a new theory to describe the unconfirmed effect. (No jumping to conclusions!) To demonstrate that the author is fully aware of why the effect is anomalous, they must cite references for the relevant current theories. The author must acknowledge possible conventional explanations of the anomaly, and the steps needed (or already taken) for a discriminating test. A discriminating test must be suggested that could distinguish between possible conventional explanations or whether this is a genuine new effect. In cases where the author is challenging negative test results that have already been published, the author must cite these references and explain why the prior tests were incomplete or why a reinvestigation is warranted. Also, the author must explain why the effect (if genuine) might be advantageous to the propulsion challenges.
All of the posted evaluation criteria seem reasonable for playing scientifically on the frontier. Somehow this latest paper doesn’t seem to quite fit. Note that the BPPP is no longer funded, and this paper’s reference to it was more along the lines of “we would meet the BPPP goals” than “we’ve been approved by BPPP”. So basically they self-evaluated on whether they meet the BPPP challenge statement for type of space drive, but there’s no equivalent evaluation of if they meet the criteria for approval that BPPP holds.
Alex Lyman Said:
>If this theory, or one of the underlying theories its based off of (or any other theory, for that matter) are shown to violate so-called “laws†(I believe so-far in this comment list were conservation of energy and momentum), they should not be automatically be put down as completely inaccurate — I believe the theories should still be tested in some way. If it comes down to it, and the theories garner some sort of supporting evidence, those laws should be reconsidered in the light of new non-supporting evidence. Remember: in science, nothing is outside the reach of further evidence.
This is a touchy matter. On the one hand, you are fully correct, nothing in science is beyond reconsideration in light of new evidence. Even the dreaded Conservation Laws are not above reproach. However, there is something to be said for the skeptic dictum, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Or to rephrase, any claim requires the amount and strength of evidence that is equivalent to the amount of evidence that it controverts. If I say I walked to the bank this afternoon, you have no reason to doubt me, and my claim doesn’t violate any known rules or expectations (except maybe why an American would walk anywhere). But if I said I levitated to the bank, it would take more than a bank statement to convince you that I am telling the truth. The bank statement would confirm my trip to the bank, but it wouldn’t confirm the method of my claim - levitation.
The Conservation Laws are firmly established and well-supported, so any proposal to violate them must be considered very critically. Any evidence of supposed violation must be scrutinized for any possible means of error. If some violation truly does emerge, it must be considered if there is some greater entertwining that has not yet been uncovered, such that some larger Conservation Law remains unviolated, e.g. Conservation of Matter being tied to Conservation of Energy.
geoff Said:
>If physics could allow us to accomplish this, I highly doubt we’d be able to find the energy or money to do so.
Yes, in order to make some of the bigger ideas of SF viable (if the physics ever allows them), we will need a revolution in economics and power generation. However, a revolution in power generation would likely lead to the necessary revolution in economics. If power production were suddenly increased by a factor of 100 without any gross increase in costs, the per kiloWatt cost would be dropped by the same factor. That’s practically unlimited, cheap energy from our current perspective. (Of course that’s a fantasy projection, but the result is valid.)
Lwindjwla Thaliazalor Said:
>All this high-falutin’ science is all very well, but what i really want to know is, what on earth or nearby planets is “mo’blogging�
I think that’s what we would call a “typo”. I suspect the intent was “more ‘blogging”.
Carnifex, I think the quote was, “The missing link between monkeys and intelligent beings is … us.”
JusANuttaBackYahdah Said:
>You know somewhere I remember being taught that way back a lot of smart folk thought Columbus was going to sail off the edge….who knew…and who knows?
This is another one of those misconceptions that many people seem to have been taught. None of the educated people of his time thought Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the world. They all knew the Earth was round by then. The real question was whether Columbus could actually reach anywhere by sailing west. You see, everyone knew about where the Indies had to be, but nobody knew there was anything between Europe and there in that direction. The trouble was, Columbus was relying on faulty calculations and believed the Earth was about half the diameter it is. So he thought he could get the Indies with enough supplies (water, food) to make it, whereas the balky backers didn’t think he could carry enough supplies to make it there, because they had different calculations. So Columbus made his voyage because he convinced the Queen of Spain that he was right, and then accidentally and fortuitously found inhabited islands at about where he thought he would find the Indies. Thus he lived to return and make history work out correctly.
January 9th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
If I were a betting man, I would place a rather large wager that this theory will not work out.
January 10th, 2006 at 7:02 am
New Scientist magazine has a useful commentary on this paper - see http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg18925331.200. There is an interesting parallel with Einstein in that one of the authors is an ex-patent examiner !
JB
January 10th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
>I think that’s what we would call a “typoâ€. I suspect the intent was “more ‘bloggingâ€.
Or possibly moblogging, as in blogging from a mobile device such as a PDA or cell phone.
January 10th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
It sounds as if the Heim theory is currently fringe science, but isn’t quite crackpot science yet. Once it gets scientifically disproved it will immediately become _the_ crackpot science theory, displacing Tesla (who is getting a bit long in the tooth by now). I mean, it’s perfect — you can come up with parallels to all the existing flying-saucer jargon, the Philadelphia Experiment, everything!
Until then, it does at least provide us fiction writers with a new name for our rubber-science spacedrives.
JLC
January 13th, 2006 at 10:23 am
“Predicting” the particle masses from “first principles” is easy if you are allowed to make up anything whatever, unconstrained by what is known about the universe. Just assume that the masses are describable as the roots of an arbitrary polynominal, and then run a computer program to do nonlinear regression to find it.
This shows the falsity of some forms of empiricism, incidentally, since the polynominal would meet the goal of “acting as a data summary”. One also wants what is sometimes called “consilience” and other, transempirical, virtues.
January 20th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Yes, when
Just noting all the comments above, a few points to clarify:
On predictions – Heim theory has an outstanding prediction on the Neutrino masses. Either we measure neutrino masses more accurately to see if Heim’s mass values are correct or we check the formidable maths background to the mass formula which has already reproduced the known masses to great accuracy using only G, h and c as input.
Also, if Heim-Droscher theory is right, there should be particles called gravito-photons transforming electromagnetic energy into gravitational in certain conditions. If an effect is seen at 25 Teslas in the coils as described in their experimental setup, this would be one prediction of the theory - without the need for that extra hyperspace effect. And note that Heim was emphatic about not wanted to violate energy conservation – he was relieved that the theory gave no ‘free energy’ since, as he correctly noted, the environment is in enough of a mess from waste energy.
As for the number of dimensions - the full exposition does require 12 dimensions it seems. In the 8-D version, the energy density tensor has only 36 non-zero elements and so Heim justifies restriction to a 6 x 6 space. 6 x 6 is enough for the mass formula derivation. Quoting Hauser & Droscher “The dimensional law derived by Heim requires a 12-dimensional space, but the additional four coordinates are needed only in the explanation of the steering of probability amplitudes (information).”
The surface element, the ‘metron’, is similar to that in LQG. Heim derives the need for it in his own calculations. Hopefully they can soon be published in the standard journals to see if they are plausible.
In Heim theory, particles are stable distortions in the 6-D metron lattice - the ‘condensation’ that results in a particle involves projection from 6 dimensional structures on 4-D. I confess that the details of this are hard to understand and I haven’t got that far yet. Charge is associated with a partial-metric: the full metric is a ‘poly-metric’, with the normal g(i,j) of gravity and others for the other forces. That part is rather elegant and not at all ‘ugly’. Heim acknowledged Kaluza-Klein theory as having the right idea. Only for Heim the extra dimensions are not compacted - there are 3 normal space dimensions, 3 time-like dimensions (including normal time) and the rest of an ‘organisational’ nature, having to do with quantum probabilities etc.
Von Ludwiger is working on transcribing tapes of Heim speaking on all this (in German admittedly) and wants to then have it translated into English and published as an introduction. Apparently when he talks about it, it’s much easier to understand where he’s coming from.
On the issues mentioned by Stuard above – these are repeating the discussion we already had in Wikipedia talk pages on Heim – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Heim_theory and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Burkhard_Heim
January 25th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
I, for one, will be perfectly content to sit here and watch until someone can come up with a provable excursion to ANYPLACE not on the face of this earth. Until then I’m gonna keep reading sci-fi and hoping against hope that something provable finally happens.
January 27th, 2006 at 4:56 am
Preface:
My view of “such things”–and all things, really–(since long before and til long after this discussion or any personal study on the matter, specifically–which occurred well in advance of AIAA’s conference) is one of logical skepticism, yet a firm realization that all ideas, theories, and even physical laws were at one time completely out of the question in accordance with the universe “as we know it”, and that yesterday’s science fiction has today become quite passe’ in having dropped the “fiction”. As soon as a scientist has lost his curiosity AND his dreams AND the realization that he knows NOTHING in the broad scheme of things, he has ceased to be a scientist and has joined the ranks of ordinary scholars and historians and journalists whose job it is merely to stand back and document what is known thus far, rather than stand out on the edge and overturn for tomorrow what is “known” today. The fact that so many are so quick to downplay, sneer at, and even outright specifically attack an idea (that could be the possibility of a realization of the dreams of ANYONE who devotes their life to such studies to such a degree as puts them at a level of knowledge and comprehensive ability to even speak on such things) such as this both comes as no surprise to me, and furthermore is ample indication as to why none of you (not all of you, but you know which ones “you” are) will ever be anything but armchair skeptics or maybe marginally influential contributors at best, regarding the overall flow and progression of what we “know” from year to year.
For what its worth, Heim was a friggin genius who had the utmost respect of all who ever knew and worked with him, few as that may have been, considering his seclusionary lifestyle because of his multiple disfigurements and disabilities (that were a direct result, from his late teen years, of a very early-beginning and never-waning unbridled passion for discovery and intuitive, prodigious questioning of the universe, our place in it, and the validity of what we “know” compared to what we could possibly know and where it could take us. Don’t get me wrong: neither his natural genius nor his disabilities/disfigurement qualify his theories as valid, but his unending, conscious realization that humanity, and he in it, knows nothing compared to what we will know at some future time qualifies him as being far more of a logically realistic scientist and theorist than any who assume their station as not just skeptic, but some sort of holy, supreme, (unpublished…tsktsktsk), referee whose place it is to hip check the work of others, keeping them down at their alotted station. Which one of you can actually explain the mathematics involved in Heim-Droscher Space? Even enough to even explain the fundamental link between gravity and electromagnetism and their dimensional origin? That would certainly at least put you in the running to win the “I have an inkling of a right to discredit ANYONE” award.
Truth is, very few physicists have even heard of Heim or Droscher, much less read their work. It’s a vastly smaller-yet still proportion of the scientific community who have even been able to walk away from such a reading with anything other than a furrowed brow and perhaps a few nightmares of certain equations coming to get them and haunting the part of them that wants to know everything. But the few who have been able to be intellectually limber enough, yet have a firm enough grasp of theoretical physics (within the frame of the universe AS WE KNOW IT—with actually very few theoretical liberties taken) have walked away having looked into the face of a god the creationists only wish they had…the face of theories and equations and principles so far ahead of their time, with one of the fundamental inabilities of physicists made short work of for a friggin appetizer, and the vast majority of his biggest theories and principles put forth were written well before the 60’s and the beginnings of the NASA’s actually useful progress.
Einstein called the man a genius, a prodigy, and it was in the early 20th century, through working on first the special, then the general relativity priciples, then later an attempt to reconcile them with quantum mechanics, that Heim stumbled upon the base of his ideas. He had to wait quite a few years before anyone had designed the equipment to test and prove his theories for calculating mass of certain tricky little particles. (”Easy to do,” you say? Just give you the relaxing of certain universal “knowledge”? Happy to. And you can have a few years to come up with your own relaxations in our body of knowledge. But be sure and make them all plausible, none yet truly unproveable, and THEN within your genius framework, please use your calculations , et al to calculate such figures with such accuracy accross the friggin board. I’ll wait right here while you go do that–Dr. Heisenberg, I presume?)
Who am I to say he’s right or wrong, and I’ll bet everything on nothing at this point. But who the hell are most of you to deride him? (…or Phil, or anyone else who supplements their strict scientific regimental structure with a bit of hope for what we have yet to find and its possible correspondence with their own dreams for what we can accomplish? The same sort of dreams that have fueled–directly or otherwise–every scientific discovery we’ve ever “known”. Which is precisely why the majority of you are, and will forever be, journalists and historians, and not an iota more.) Einstein would have walked out of this forum long ago. And I probably should have followed him without wasting my breath…
January 27th, 2006 at 5:19 am
Oh, and here’s a link to an article to help give you some background on both the story and Heim, personally:
New Scientist: “Leap into Hyperspace”
Far less radical than string theory–but not nearly as understandable and debatable, which has got to just burn some of ya’s up, doesn’t it?
February 24th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Actually there may be a test that can be done to test a part of the Hiem theory and the equipment to do so is at Sandia national labs.
An article in New Scientist claims “Roger Lenard, a space propulsion researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico thinks it might just be possible. Sandia runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine which “could probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients”.â€
Article link http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925331.200.html
March 4th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
A collabrative effort is uderway to implement the Heim particle mass formula in Java. Plus there is a lively discussion of Heim particle structure theory at
http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=4385&st=285&#entry70571
The site has Phd’s and amateurs.
Take Care!
March 27th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
It is not anti-gravity, but pro gravity. Consider a mechanical rock that is attracted to larger mass-density. “An apple falling to the earth”
April 9th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Heim was a german physicist who died in 2001. He proposed the theory that you alluded to when talking about Hyperdrives. The interesting thing about his theory, is that it predicts the masses of all the subatomic particles that have been discovered by particle accelerator experiments. The accuracy of the predictions is far greater than what can be calculated by any presently accepted quantum field theory. It makes predictions of the existance of other particles (the gravitophoton for example). One of the predictions is the presence of antigravity. Before you write off a theory, you should consider what makes a good theory. One: it must explain all possible observations. Two: it must make predictions. Heim’s theory does both of these things, and explains many observations made in experiment better than even theories like string theory. This theory should not be dismissed with out testing the predictions made.
The theory was discussed in great detail by NASA scientists. You may want to try and read them. http://www.hpcc-space.com/publications/index.html
You can also get more information at the web site http://www.heim-theory.com
Please remember to keep an open mind. It is essential to all science. If experiments are done to show that the predictions made by his theory are incorrect, I will be more than willing to dismiss his work. I think though, the mass calculations made from his theory, and how well they match experiment, and that his theory unifies Gravity and electromagnetism, which no other theory can do, merits a good look at what he has done.
Bob Zubot
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:04 pm
New Scientist, the EmDrive and the Wobosphere…
shnood: (roughly) an imposter; a person oblivious to just how trivial or wrong his ideas are.
“Were there any interesting speakers at the conference?â€
“No, just a bunch of shnoods.â€
“The magazine New Scientist loves to feature shnoods on the …
May 31st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I think, there’s more to this new idea of anti-gravity propulsion than most of us might assume. Here’s why …
This is about the work of the late obscure physicist Burkhard Heim, who lived, studied and worked on his Field Theory in my hometown of Goettingen, Germany. In short this guy most probably was a genius in the realm of Einstein (some tentative proof for this claim later) but was shunned by most of his contemporaries mainly because his stuff was way over their heads. Even today there’s said to be only a handful of physicists worldwide who are able to grasp his work (and having to admit this is something every expert in any field really loathes).
In short (and by no means accurate because I’m a clinical psychologist by trade with just too much curiosity for other disciplines) this is what he tried and (if those who understand his work are right) even achieved: he wanted nothing less than to bridge the theoretical gap between the General Theory of Relativity and the Quantum Theory (in short he was after a Grand Unified Theory: No GUT, no Glory!). Note: he was NOT trying to devise any kind of propulsion for interstellar space travel, this is more like a by-product developed later on by the physicists Dröscher & Häuser.
Heim’s “Field Theory” states that the principle of Quantitizing is also valid in the fabric of space-time, and that subatomic particles are the source of gravitational forces. This guy was physically handicapped after he lost 90% of his eyesight and both arms in a freak explosion in a lab in 1944 and yet he kept on working in reclusion with help from his wife for many years.
Here’s an *ultra short* synopsis of what he did come up with: his postulate was that there is a “middle field” between electromagnetism and gravitation in the 6-dimensional space. This “middle field” he stated in 1957 can be used to derive gravitational from electromagnetic waves. He was soon contacted by Wernher von Braun but refused to give out more of his work
because he felt he still had a long way to go before putting any piece of it to real world use.
After being coaxed by Prof. Pasqual Jordan (an expert on GRT) in 1964 Heim set out to find a way to accurately calculate the masses of subatomic particles (something nobody else has done so far). In 1977 he published his solution in the “Zeitschrift für Naturforschung” of the german Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, and in 1980 he published his first book “Elementary Structure of Matter”.
Now, what’s really mind-boggling is that researchers of the german Electron-Synchrotron (DESY) in 1982 programmed and tested Heim’s equations and found that by using them they could calculate the masses and energy states of particles with an accuracy that fell within 0.01% of the empirical values as determined by use of DESY and other accelerators/colliders. Compare this to an accuracy of only between 1% and 10% of empirical values when using calculations based on lattice quantum chromodynamics (as done in 2003).
But the problem remains that Heim’s work is so complicated that even todays best physicists need to study it for at least one year before beginning to grasp its true potential (according to the DESY guys). Lately, a group of physicists devoted to Heim’s theory have repeated the mass and state
calculations using a more precise value for the gravitational constant as it is known only now and they found even better accuracy compared to the empirically derived values than in the older work done by DESY. So, in short it looks like Heim was really onto something and clearly knew what he was talking about.
Now onto the practical application of his work: one of the few colleagues who actually did work with Heim during his lifetime is an austrian physicist named Walter Dröscher. He found some conceptual errors in Heim’s theory and helped him to work around those missteps. They both came up with the two additional dimensions which interact with our 4-dimensional world: where Heim’s theory claimed that the dimensions #5 and #6 are the ones that effect gravitation, in the 8-dimensional Heim/Dröscher-World dimensions #7 and #8 are the sources of a new quasi-gravitational force that is repulsive rather than attractive, called “Quintessence” (note the similarities to the new concept of Dark Energy in cosmology). Whereas photons as the bearers of the electromagnetic force result as a geometric structure by combination of the dimensions #4-#8 Heim & Dröscher then describe a new particle that results from a combination of the dimensions #5-#8.
And here it gets really good: Dröscher and his colleague Häuser developed the theoretical (and practical) framework for an advanced propulsion system, the so-called Dröscher/Häuser gravitophoton-field drive (now named Hyper-Drive). Based on Heim’s theory this is what they basically say (in my
complete lay terminology): a spacecraft is able to project its own gravitational field by producing gravitophotons. To do this, the craft is fitted with a massive ring (appr. 2 tons) that is rotating inside a magnetic field (20 Tesla is said to be sufficient to constantly accelerate a spacecraft of 150 tons with the equivalent of Earth’s gravity). The rotating mass inside of the
strong magnetic field will produce virtual pairs of gravitophotons through vacuum polarization. This, according to quantum electrodynamics, is a process in which a background electromagnetic field produces virtual electron-positron pairs. In the framework of Dröscher/Häuser and Heim it also produces virtual pairs of gravitophotons. Because the effect on mass
is much stronger in the case of attracting gravitophotons this kind of propulsion will result in a force (called Heim-Lorentz force) that can be used to counter the gravitational force excerted on the spacecraft by e.g. earth.
This kind of spacecraft could cover the distance Earth-Moon in appr. 4 hours. Because it always follows the resulting accelerating force the craft could perform almost all kinds of flight manouvres as well as drastic accelerations
without negatively affecting the passengers (note that this could explain the erratic flight patterns that are described in so many UFO observations).
But it gets even better: according to Dröscher/Häuser it is mandatory, that after reaching a certain critical limit the spacecraft must leave 4-dimensional space and transit into a parallel or higher order space! Here’s why: because repulsive gravitophotons would reduce the gravitational potential of the whole spacecraft, or its inert mass, and because energy needs to be preserved (E=mc^2) it then follows that the craft must go faster than the speed of light. Of course, in 4-dimensional space-time this cannot happen thus forcing the craft to transit into a parallel space called R4(n) in which it is actually possible to travel at n-times the speed of light.
Dröscher/Häuser have calculated that it should be possible to travel to Mars in 2.5 hours and to reach the star Procyon (distance: 11.4 ligtyears) in just 80 days – not too shabby, indeed! Imagine the following dialog at a breakfast table in NYC, say some 25 years from now. He: “I’ve got an appointment today in New Berlin (capital of Mars) at 1pm.” She: “Okay! Don’t forget that the Wilsons come in for dinner at 7.” He: “No problem! I’ll be back at 6.30 the latest … gotta buzz now, have a nice day, honey!”
All that is needed to bring this theoretical stuff into real world usage are the will and the money to finance experiments accordingly. For more and far far better information cf. e.g. http://heim-theory.com/Contents/contents.html
Note that Dröscher/Häuser have presented their framework three times since 2002 at the Annual Conference of Interstellar Spacetravel of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, so I guess some people do actually listen to them …
Also, since all this stuff has been out there for more than 20 years now it may very well be that someone has already put it into practical use without bothering to tell the public about it. You know who the usual suspects are.
I’ll apologize for my german tainted english and lay man’s translation of this stuff (that is also waaayyy over my poor psychologist head). I just thought it might be of interest to you.
Cheers -mike
September 26th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
What can I say warp factor 1 engage Ithink we have another video game fan after all video game addicts have been traveling in hyperspace in arcades and home systems since atari realeased asteroids
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Remember that when you go into a black hole and reach the singularity, you’ll see two dimensions of time in order for GR to remain true? Remember that the gravitational force in a black hole is so strong light cannot escape? So if you can’t travel faster than light, why is light not fast enough to escape from the gravitational force of a black hole? Let’s step over to the event horizon over here and I will show you that Heim is right… Oh wait that won’t work very well. So let’s use a smaller example. Let’s take a big ring and spin it really fast. Then let’s apply a huge EM field inside it. Oh no, we created a black hole and we’re traveling faster than light!
March 27th, 2008 at 8:02 am
I’m primarily a planetary geologist, but I’ve taken a great interest in quantum physics, GR/Sr and such for a long time. I believe, with all your protestations of Heim and others….even if it’s protestations for or against…you’ve all missed the point. That points being this: at one stage they thought Einstein was a crackpot and no one could understand his theories. Until they studied what he wrote, did the experiments and found he was pretty much on the ball. However, Einstein, no matter how much his physics paradigms are taken as gospel, is not the last word in physics. Regardless of the experiments and such, that have been done since his theory’s publication, it doesn’t mean that he is correct in all of his assumptions about what constitutes reality. Hell, he couldn’t get his head around quantum physics, so what does that say about his supposed “genius”.
Given that none of you are completely familiar with what Heim wrote, as are most physicists as well, don’t decry his theory/theories until you’ve done the experimental work yourself. Or have seen and can vouch for experiments done by others. Even then, it won’t necessarily discount his work because we may not have the requisite technology to fully perform any experiments to confirm/deny the theory. This was the case with Einstein for quite a number of years.
Discounting anything, without proof positive that you’re correct in your assumptions, is a very dangerous situation to get yourself into. You may never see the results come to light (as it maybe 100 years before they come in, for instance), but you may have to, metaphorically, eat your own words. You never know what’s around the corner.
July 9th, 2008 at 3:41 am
No one mentioned the possibility of time travel. I know that approaching the speed of light slows time, but can one travel backwards in time by exceeding the speed of light? Can one control which past one travels to? Perfect accuracy is unnecessary. Might it also be possible to travel to parallel worlds, which split off from ours in the past?
As for travelling to the stars, they’re awfully hot, and the planets orbiting the stars are only slightly more hospitable, but maybe we will find that they were colonized by humans billions of years ago. Maybe we will even go on dinosaur safaris. Don’t laugh, there are hundreds of out of place artifacts (ooparts). Some date back to the paleozoic, and a beautiful pewter vase with silver inlaid flowers was blasted out of the precambrian Roxbury conglomerate in Massachussets in 1852. Nowadays, such anomalies are usually ignored but not always.
December 29th, 2008 at 3:18 am
Why is everyone so ’scared’ of extra dimensions? They are here, they MUST be here…
Look at your computer screen. It’s flat - it’s 2d (if we skip time for simplicity), isn’t it?
Or maybe it’s not. Each pixel of the screen may take a value that represents colour. This means, that you screen is a 3d construct on a 2d plane. Just by adding colours. That is why you may play 3d games on it - the third colour dimension is used to show the depth.
Now think about our 4d spacetime. Common misconception is that human can’t imagine more than 3 dimensions, cause we can’t see them. A huge error I think. WE ARE the 4th dimension - just for every point in space assign a value that represents the energy that resides in that point (ie an atom of your body) and we have a 5th dimension already. Add magnetic fields, gravity fields and whatnot and you may as well end up with 12 dimensions…
This is what Heim’s done (or what I understand from his work). On top of our regular 4d he added dimensions representing quantum states. Simple.
The real chellenge is quantisation of space. If you divide space into little cubes then you have either prefferred directions (it’s easier - ’shorter’ to move along axis than across the cubes, as diagonal of cube is longer than its side) or (if the cost of moving from one cube to another is the same no matter the direction) a circle should actually be a square (in a square the distance between midpoint and walls measured in ’tiles’ is equal for each point on perimeter)