Talk:Burkhard Heim/Archive 1

message: The Heim image was removed "due to a lack of a free license". I contacted Illobrand Von Ludwiger, who said we could use 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 in Telepolis. I will thus try to embed this image - that's a first for me in Wikipedia, so I hope it's not too messy.--hughey 08:14, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Concerns about image in article

message: Hdeasy recently made some changes to the main article with the edit summary "More toning down of sceptical POV in the light of new theoretical work."  I'd just like to make it clear that in my opinion, the current article would require extensive work to be considered NPOV.  I hope that I'll be able to do some of that rewriting myself eventually, but it will be a while before I have the large block of time that would be necessary to do it right.  (I'm not willing to put my name on incremental updates of the article as it currently stands.)
Finally, a note on the "skeptical POV" that is currently somewhat represented in the article (and on this talk page): I believe that the vast majority of physicists would not subscribe to the skeptical POV that I have taken here, but to a sort of "dismiss out of hand" POV.  Some would be polite about it (as Hawking apparently was, based on your comments above) and some would be downright rude or mocking.  The fraction of physicists who would take even as much time as I have to look into the theory is probably quite small.  Based on what I've seen thus far, 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 (feel free to correct me on that if you've got a better estimate), 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)
:I am trying to get a better estimate of total nr. of professional scientists who believe that there is something to Heim - in the Heim-theory site it is stated that 8 physicists belong to the group, of which 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, worked with Jordan, Heisenberg et al. and so if his theory appeared to predict masses with the stated accuracy then it is certainly woth looking into. 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 http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/buch/default_1.html has an article on Heim, his theory and space propulsion - this has aroused a lot of 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.--hughey 09:56, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  (N)POV in the current article