Burkhard Heim

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. Heim's theory also made other predictions as well, such as predicting other particles which have not been observed, and predicting excited states of elementary particles. These predictions do not fully correspond to measured values. (Even Heim's defenders admit "So far Heim has not succeeded in finding a criterion which would limit the number of exited states to those actually observed."[Auerbach and von Ludwiger, 1992]). Finally, the theory does not predict any substructure to the elementary baryons-- i.e., the theory does not include quarks, and this prediction is at odds with measurements in experimental high energy physics, in which the behavior of protons and neutrons at high energy can best be described by quantum chromodynamics. This theory has been extraordinarily successful in predicting the behavior of particles at high energy, a viable alternative theory would, most preferably, need to be at least as successful if it is to replace the standard model of high energy physics. In short, other than the predicting the mass of elementary particles, Heim theory does not do well at fitting the existing data, and some of its conclusions, such as the prediction of excited states of existing particles, seem to be false. However, it was the accuracy of the predictions of particle mass, which had been measured, that was astonishing. This was a prediction that no other theories could make. So this certainly was ready to turn physics on its ear. It made headlines in the popular science press such as New Scientist, and a paper about the possible applications of the theory (which nobody yet actually understood) won a best-paper prize in 2004 from the AIAA Nuclear and Future Flight Technical Committee It certainly looked interesting! Everybody was excited... even if still nobody could actually understand it... 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! Heim's work, published only in German, was very difficult to follow,