Talk:Burkhard Heim/Archive 1Modified

message: Illobrand Von Ludwiger said we could use the image on p. 51 of the 1st Telepolis print edition, as he took it himself at Spitzingsee in 1985 and already gave permission for it to be reproduced. -- hughey 08:14, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Concerns about image in article

message: Heim at one time worked with Pascual Jordan  However, after this phase of involvement with the scientific community he withdrew from public life for such a long time that Jordan and the others who knew him simply died away. He is no longer known to the top physicists of today.
Is this not opposite of what was said by Max Planck? "A controversial theory will only be accepted when the old guard has died away."
As for peer-reviewed work - there are 2 problems here
# Heim was not fighting for tenure, so he was under no pressure to publish.
# If he really was a "super-Einstein" he was simply peerless:
For a peer to review a paper by Heim, thousands of pages of theory would have to be worked through. Is there a journal prepared to do such a thing? The encouraging thing is, those physicists who have worked their way through the theory have not found it wanting, apart from discovering some errors that they are now correcting, and in any case didn't affect the mass calculations.
We have to remember that Heim was not a normal able bodied, ambitious academic. He did put his theory to some physicists, but only those he knew personally. This group had shrunk to a small circle through death as time progressed. The Heim-theory web site has enough background to be of interest to some physicists - those behind it have also gone to the effort of converting as much as possible from selector calculus to a more "normal" form. There is also the additional step of translating the work to English. The Heim-theory group thought appropriate to publish on the web, as the theory is no longer original.
On the question of why more physicists haven't investigated Heim yet, or why his merit had not been evaluated a long time ago, recall that that String Theory was out in the wilderness for many years - 30, 40 or 50 depending on what you consider the origins. The string people then were convinced of its merit, but couldn't get more than a tiny group to look at it. This sounds a little bit like Heim? --hughey 18:27, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm still skeptical, but I should mention that Einstein's work deserves respect because it has undergone the kind of unrelenting attack that Heim's work has yet to undergo. WpZurp 19:05, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on Heim 

message: I would guess that the number of people out there who firmly believe that Heim was on the right track numbers in the dozens or perhaps the hundreds, and it sounds like the number of  professional scientists who feel that way is roughly six. A fully NPOV article should probably give some sense of those proportions, and be balanced accordingly.--Steuard 17:41, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)
:In the Heim-theory site, 8 physicists belong to the group; 5 are professors. At least one other professor and maybe two state elsewhere that they are deeply intersted in Heim theory but are not associated with the Heim-theory group. Add people like me, with a degree in physics and post-grad in astrophysics and we are maybe talking of up to 100 interested?
:My attitude is that Heim was not a trickster since he worked with for example, Jordan and Heisenberg. If his theory appeared to predict masses with the stated accuracy then it is certainly woth looking into.
:As an aside, Droescher's 8-d version of the theory has what looks like "quintessence" in it, which might be another predictive aspect. The current (Jan 2005) print issue of the popular on-line German magazine Telepolos  has an article on Heim, his theory and space propulsion - this has aroused some interest in Germany, so maybe amongst those now increasingly accessing [www.Heim-theory.com] after being directed there by the magazine article are some interested physicists too. hughey 09:56, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to achieve NPOV in the current article? 

message: Some biographical tidbits from heim-theory.com:
* In school he booby-trapped some doors with a chemical explosive of his own devising. He wasn't punished for this as the teachers couldn't believe that a 12 year old could have managed that.
* When he was 17, he presented a plan to Heisenberg , for the ignition of tritium by a shaped-charge of explosives.  Heisenberg was impressed by the knowledge of the young man, but couldn't believe that the chemical ignition of the nuclear fusion was viable  (10 years later this procedure was shown to work and became known as the  ' clean ignition of the H-bomb' ). That was the first example of him being ahead of his time - just as well for the allies! 
* In the war as an 18 yr old conscript, a German ministry heard of his plans for a super-bomb and a lab was put at his disposal - that was where a colleague  caused the explosion that blew off his hands and badly injured eyes and ears.
* In his blindness, he developed an auditory edetic memory that allowed him to learn Italian and Spanish both in 8 days,  but took all of 14 days to learn Turkish.  In 1957 Von Ludwiger became his friend after being falsely arrested for purloining a recording of a Heim lecture. Over the years, he was impressed by how Heim could recall authors that he himself had forgotten, or repeat verbatim formulae read to him 20 years before by his wife.
* After reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson I note more parallels between Heim and Newton - the latter actualy waited 20 years before going into print with the results of his year of wonders, and due to staring at the sun was nearly blind for a long time - like Heim!
* In the magazines 'Stern', 'Bunte', 'Quick' and in many other newspapers, as well as on the main German TV station ARD, interviews and reports were published about Heim's new physics.
* American and Russian scientists of that time trusted in the fact that a physicist, formerly at the Max-Planck Institute for astrophysics in Goettingen under Carl Friedrich Von Weizsaecker, was not stupid (you seem to be superior to them - wow!). Werner Von Braun inquired of Heim  as to whether he would soon perfect a method of propulsion for a moon shot - but Heim had to admit that for this it was a bit premature: However, in the last 2 years papers presented at propulsion workshops on both sides of the Atlantic imply that the time might be ripe to try out some of those ideas.
Everything seemed to be going well in his scientific career up to then. I think Von Weisacker, Heisenberg, Jordan etc. were convinced that the young Heim was a prodigy, so there was reason to hope that his work on a unified field theory and field drives for space travel would soon come to fruition. However, this is when he shut himself away to work obsessively on the TOE, trusting no-one but a small circle of friends and colleagues who over a period of 40 years simply died off,  so that when he finally had the mass formula there was a new generation of scientists who never heard of him and couldn't believe that this guy, coming seemingly out of nowhere, could have come up with the unified field theory. Now does that sound like the sort of person who would slip in wobbly into his mass formula? The time of his schoolboy pranks was long since past. Thus I would say there were more than adequate grounds for giving the theory the benefit of the doubt until it's checked out properly. --hughey 09:20, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tidbits from Heim's life