Subject: [FG]:

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:14:27 -0500 (EST)

Anybody up on this?

HYPERDRIVE RESEARCH

>From "NEW SCIENTIST". 

     EVERY year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes
for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year's winner in the
nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests
of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor
would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave
Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch:
the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they
possibly be serious?

     The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun
to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher 
at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would 
be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of most
physicists at the theory that supposedly underpins it, Pavlos Mikellides, an aerospace
engineer at the Arizona State University in Tempe who reviewed the winning paper,
stands by the committee's choice. "Even though such features have been explored
before, this particular approach is quite unique," he says.

     Unique it certainly is. If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could
reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would change
the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up in a rocket
on the way to Mars, a round trip on the hyperdrive could take as little as 5 hours.
All our worries about astronauts' muscles wasting away or their DNA being irreparably
damaged by cosmic radiation would disappear overnight. What's more the device would
put travel to the stars within reach for the first time. But can the hyperdrive 
really get off the ground?

     ?A hyperdrive craft would put the stars within reach for the first time?

     The answer to that question hinges on the work of a little-known German physicist.
Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in the 1950s as
a spin-off from his attempts to heal the biggest divide in physics: the rift between
quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity.

     Quantum theory describes the realm of the very small - atoms, electrons and
elementary particles - while general relativity deals with gravity. The two theories
are immensely successful in their separate spheres. The clash arises when it comes
to describing the basic structure of space. In general relativity, space-time is
an active, malleable fabric. It has four dimensions - three of space and one of 
time - that deform when masses are placed in them. In Einstein's formulation, the
force of gravity is a result of the deformation of these dimensions. Quantum theory,
on the other hand, demands that space is a fixed and passive stage, something simply
there for particles to exist on. It also suggests that space itself must somehow
be made up of discrete, quantum elements.

     In the early 1950s, Heim began to rewrite the equations of general relativity
in a quantum framework. He drew on Einstein's idea that the gravitational force 
emerges from the dimensions of space and time, but suggested that all fundamental
forces, including electromagnetism, might emerge from a new, different set of dimensions.
Originally he had four extra dimensions, but he discarded two of them believing 
that they did not produce any forces, and settled for adding a new two-dimensional
"sub-space" onto Einstein's four-dimensional space-time.

     In Heim's six-dimensional world, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism
are coupled together. Even in our familiar four-dimensional world, we can see a 
link between the two forces through the behaviour of fundamental particles such 
as the electron. An electron has both mass and charge. When an electron falls under
the pull of gravity its moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. And if 
you use an electromagnetic field to accelerate an electron you move the gravitational
field associated with its mass. But in the four dimensions we know, you cannot change
the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field.

     In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it
is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again,
and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity
on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

     When he presented his idea in public in 1957, he became an instant celebrity.
Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who at the time was leading the Saturn rocket
programme that later launched astronauts to the moon, approached Heim about his 
work and asked whether the expensive Saturn rockets were worthwhile. And in a letter
in 1964, the German relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, who had worked with the 
distinguished physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and was a member of the 
Nobel committee, told Heim that his plan was so important "that its successful
experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a candidate for the
Nobel prize".

     But all this attention only led Heim to retreat from the public eye. This was
partly because of his severe multiple disabilities, caused by a lab accident when
he was still in his teens. But Heim was also reluctant to disclose his theory without
an experiment to prove it. He never learned English because he did not want his 
work to leave the country. As a result, very few people knew about his work and 
no one came up with the necessary research funding. In 1958 the aerospace company
Bölkow did offer some money, but not enough to do the proposed experiment.

     While Heim waited for more money to come in, the company's director, Ludwig
Bölkow, encouraged him to develop his theory further. Heim took his advice, and 
one of the results was a theorem that led to a series of formulae for calculating
the masses of the fundamental particles - something conventional theories have conspicuously
failed to achieve. He outlined this work in 1977 in the Max Planck Institute's journal
Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, his only peer-reviewed paper. In an abstruse way
that few physicists even claim to understand, the formulae work out a particle's
mass starting from physical characteristics, such as its charge and angular momentum.

     Yet the theorem has proved surprisingly powerful. The standard model of physics,
which is generally accepted as the best available theory of elementary particles,
is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. Even the accepted means of estimating
mass theoretically, known as lattice quantum chromodynamics, only gets to between
1 and 10 per cent of the experimental values.

     Gravity reduction

     But in 1982, when researchers at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in 
Hamburg implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses
of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the accuracy
of experimental error. If they are let down by anything, it is the precision to 
which we know the values of the fundamental constants. Two years after Heim's death
in 2001, his long-term collaborator Illobrand von Ludwiger calculated the mass formula
using a more accurate gravitational constant. "The masses came out even more
precise," he says.

     After publishing the mass formulae, Heim never really looked at hyperspace 
propulsion again. Instead, in response to requests for more information about the
theory behind the mass predictions, he spent all his time detailing his ideas in
three books published in German. It was only in 1980, when the first of his books
came to the attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter Dröscher,
that the hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life. Dröscher looked again at 
Heim's ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions
that Heim originally discarded. The result is "Heim-Dröscher space", a
mathematical description of an eight-dimensional universe.

     >From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics:
the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense,"
Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces."
These are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is 
a repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing the
universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to accelerate a 
spacecraft without any rocket fuel.

     This force is a result of the interaction of Heim's fifth and sixth dimensions
and the extra dimensions that Dröscher introduced. It produces pairs of "gravitophotons",
particles that mediate the interconversion of electromagnetic and gravitational 
energy. Dröscher teamed up with Jochem Häuser, a physicist and professor of computer
science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter, Germany, to turn the
theoretical framework into a proposal for an experimental test. The paper they produced,
"Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory",
is what won the AIAA's award last year.

     Claims of the possibility of "gravity reduction" or "anti-gravity"
induced by magnetic fields have been investigated by NASA before (New Scientist,
12 January 2002, p 24). But this one, Dröscher insists, is different. "Our 
theory is not about anti-gravity. It's about completely new fields with new properties,"
he says. And he and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove it.

     This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil 
to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and
a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce
the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Dröscher and
Häuser say that to completely counter Earth's pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic
field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that's 500,000 times the strength
of Earth's magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80
tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even
stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity
to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force, they suggest.

     ?A spinning ring and a strong magnetic field could produce a repulsive anti-gravity
force?

     Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted
with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace. Here
the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be
several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to
reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, 
Dröscher and Häuser say.

     So is this all fanciful nonsense, or a revolution in the making? The majority
of physicists have never heard of Heim theory, and most of those contacted by New
Scientist said they couldn't make sense of Dröscher and Häuser's description of 
the theory behind their proposed experiment. Following Heim theory is hard work 
even without Dröscher's extension, says Markus Pössel, a theoretical physicist at
the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. Several 
years ago, while an undergraduate at the University of Hamburg, he took a careful
look at Heim theory. He says he finds it "largely incomprehensible", and
difficult to tie in with today's physics. "What is needed is a step-by-step
introduction, beginning at modern physical concepts," he says.

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

     At the moment, the main reason for taking the proposal seriously must be Heim
theory's uncannily successful prediction of particle masses. Maybe, just maybe, 
Heim theory really does have something to contribute to modern physics. "As
far as I understand it, Heim theory is ingenious," says Hans Theodor Auerbach,
a theoretical physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who
worked with Heim. "I think that physics will take this direction in the future."

     It may be a long while before we find out if he's right. In its present design,
Dröscher and Häuser's experiment requires a magnetic coil several metres in diameter
capable of sustaining an enormous current density. Most engineers say that this 
is not feasible with existing materials and technology, but 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".

     For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of
the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if 
we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed
experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind,
is a successful experiment."

     >From issue 2533 of New Scientist magazine, 05 January 2006, page 24

     Who was Burkhard Heim?

     Burkhard Heim had a remarkable life. Born in 1925 in Potsdam, Germany, he decided
at the age of 6 that he wanted to become a rocket scientist. He disguised his designs
in code so that no one could discover his secret. And in the cellar of his parents'
house, he experimented with high explosives. But this was to lead to disaster.

     Towards the end of the second world war, he worked as an explosives developer,
and an accident in 1944 in which a device exploded in his hands left him permanently
disabled. He lost both his forearms, along with 90 per cent of his hearing and eyesight.

     After the war, he attended university in Göttingen to study physics. The idea
of propelling a spacecraft using quantum mechanics rather than rocket fuel led him
to study general relativity and quantum mechanics. It took an enormous effort. From
1948, his father and wife replaced his senses, spending hours reading papers and
transcribing his calculations onto paper. And he developed a photographic memory.

     Supporters of Heim theory claim that it is a panacea for the troubles in modern
physics. They say it unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, can predict
the masses of the building blocks of matter from first principles, and can even 
explain the state of the universe
13.7 billion years ago.