July 01, 2011

Heim Theory Falsified

Heim theory is a physics theory, initially proposed by a German physicist, the late Burkhard Heim, that attempts to develop a theory of everything. Heim theory's six dimensional model was later extended to eight and twelve dimensions, in collaboration with W. Dröscher. Walter Dröscher and Jochem Häuser have attempted to apply it to nonconventional space propulsion and faster than light concepts, as well as the origin of dark matter.

John Reed has posted to Physforum in 2011 that Heim theory was cooked

Since I posted that I have done a lot of work with Heim Theory. First I tried to come up with the mass of the Tau lepton. Since I had the equations in a state that should give me this mass if I entered the correct quantum numbers for the Tau, I tried that. This experiment failed. The equations blew up. I noticed that the discovery date for the Tau was later than the other particles Heim had masses for. It was discovered in 1975. The latest discovery date for a particle that Heim's equations give a correct mass for is the K meson, discovered in 1947. Of course, there is the well known discrepancy of the neutral electron, and many more new particles not in Heim's results. It's almost as if Heim's theory is like a snapshot of particle data taken before 1975.

So, I decided to go back to Heim's books and translate them. This took a long time but I finally got to the end of Volume I, chapter II. Before starting on chapter III I decided to take a look at Heim's gravitation theory which starts in section 4 of chapter II, Gravitational Space Structure and its Extrema. I was hoping to come up with an answer to the problem of "dark energy" since Heim claimed to be able to show that gravitation becomes repulsive as distance becomes greater than a certain distance due to the mass of the gravitational field. When I looked at the equations given in the book, the starting equation for the gravitational potential is given on page 77. This is supposed to be the Laplacian, expressed in spherical coordinates. But this equation is WRONG. I looked in my copy of "Methods of Theoretical Physics" by Morse and Feshbach where the equation is given correctly to confirm this. In order to get his incorrect equation to work, Heim had to assume that the azimuthal angle is fixed. Why should this be necessary when spherical symmetry is involved? Heim should have seen this error and corrected it. Any undergrad physics student has seen this equation and should be able to write it correctly. Heim made two errors but finally came out with the equation he wanted. I did some more research and found the articles by Anton Mueller and Borje Mansson I mentioned in my earlier posting.

I think I have some idea of what Heim did now. There is much talk in his book about "empirical data". He took the particle mass data and cooked up his equations to make them correct. It certainly was a lot of work for him, but I don't think it has much to do with physics. I'm sorry to say I wasted a lot of time on this but I hope I can save someone else some work.

Geoffrey Landis on Heim Theory He explains why it was interesting.

One of these new theories of physics that looked like it had some promise is the so-called "Heim" theory. According to the story, Burkhard Heim was a reclusive, disabled German scientist who worked entirely outside the usual framework of physics, and between 1952 and 1959 developed a new theory of elementary particles and gravity. Unfortunately, his main publication was a self-published book, available only in German, plus a few articles (also in German) written in a journal about aerodynamics. As a result of the inaccessibility of his papers in English, his use of nonstandard mathematical notation that he invented himself, and the fact that he was very secretive about details of his work, his work was almost unknown in the community of physics.

In short, he was a maverick physicist, working entirely outside the mainstream of physics and publishing entirely outside the peer-reviewed journals. The few physicists who attempted to decipher his densely mathematical papers written in German found it was nearly incomprehensible.

This changed in 2002, shortly after Heim's death, when Walter Dröscher, and Jochem Häuser began to publish papers based on Heim's work, claiming that his alternate theory of gravity allowed for the possibility of antigravity and faster than light propulsion. In addition, they claimed that Heim's theory was experimentally verified! To be specific, they claimed that by using the parameters derived by Heim in a computer program, they could derive the mass of all of the major elementary particles, and these theoretical derivations of masses matched the measured mass; in some cases with accuracy up to nine significant figures. It is hard to emphasize how astounding this is. Modern physics does not have a way to derive the mass of elementary particles from first principles. If Heim's theory could be used to do this, it seems like it must have some validity.

But in 2006, John Reed suggested that the purported success of the Heim theory to predict particle masses had a simple origin: the particle masses were input to the theory to start with.

in 2007, however, Reed changed his opinion. Working with Fortran code that Heim helped develop later that was not published, he says that he can derive particle masses without the use of that A matrix.

In the Physics Forum, Sept. 4 2007, he wrote:
I've completed my programming of Heim's unpublished 1989 equations to derive the extra quantum numbers (n, m, p, sigma) that I thought were coming from the A matrix. I can now say for certain that the A matrix is not involved with this new version. In addition, I can derive particle masses with only the quantum numbers k, Q, P, kappa and charge without the A matrix. This is what I had hoped to be able to do. These results agree with Anton Mueller's results. I'm able to get accurate masses for the 17 test particles I have tried this program on. The worst mass comparisons with experimental data are the neutron, 939.11 vs 939.56 experimental and the eta, 548.64 vs 547.3 experimental. All the others are closer, sometimes agreeing to 6 digits. I thought I might be able to put in any set of quantum numbers for an untested particle and get a mass. This didn't work. I tried the rho+ meson, quantum numbers k=1, P=2, Q=2, kappa=1 or 2 and charge +1. This gave masses of -2000 and + 8. This meson has an experimental mass of 768. However on reading further, the rho is an excited state of the pion, so I used the old 1982 program that calculates excited states, and the first excited state of the pion has mass 775.

He concludes "I'm more convinced now that there is really something to his theory. I don't understand much of the math yet. It's very complicated and different from anything I'm familiar with. I have a Ph.D. in physics so I know something about physics."

Chronological Overview of the Research of Burkhard Heim (5 pages, english translation by John Reed, Feb 2011)

In 2009 - Corrected derivation of Heim’s theory of gravity with a presentation of the foundations of Mesofield theory by Dr. Konrad Green (previously unreleased) (148, 445) K. Grüner. “Notes on Heim's Theory of Gravity” in MUFON-CES Report 12 (451)

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