Something to hope for

Through the courtesy of Jerry Pournelle, I read a brief entry about something which, if true, would be as momentous for this century as the Wright Brothers' little escapade at Kitty Hawk was in the last century.

It seems that the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics gives an annual award to scientific or technical papers which in some way advance aeronautics or space flight. In late 2005, the AIAA gave first prize to this paper: Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim's Quantum Theory, by Droscher and Hauser. The two authors of the paper have made a study of the Quantum Theory of Burkhard Heim, and have proposed the following three theses in that paper:

1) Heim Quantum Theory (or HQT for short) predicts two forces or interactions in addition to the four fundamental forces (i.e., gravity, electromagnetism, weak force, and strong force) predicted by the current Standard Model of physics: These additional forces or interactions are described in HQT as gravitophotonic (or a gravity-like field), and quintessence (or a repulsive gravitic field which is the basis for phenomena such as dark energy, dark matter, and black holes);

2) By applying an electromagnetic field of approximately 13 Tesla to a torus of hydrogen, HQT also predicts that sufficient gravitophotons can be generated so as to form a gravitic field somewhat in excess of 1 G. Such a field would permit a spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity, and to accelerate indefinitely at a rate of ten meters per second per second. Translated into practical terms, such a field would permit travel from the Earth to the Moon in four hours, and from the Earth to Mars in thirty-four days;

3) By applying an electromagnetic field of approximately 30 Tesla to a torus of some other material than hydrogen, HQT predicts that a spacecraft traveling at 0.01 C (or one one-hundredth of the speed of light) would temporarily enter a dimension or alternate universe in which C greatly exceeds 300 million meters per second, and which would also accelerate the speed of the craft to the point where it could travel the distance of a lightyear in twenty-four hours. As a constant acceleration of 1 G would result in a speed of 0.01 C in thirty days, again in practical terms, a space flight of ten lightyears could be accomplished in seventy days: thirty days to accelerate to the required speed, ten days in the proposed dimensional drive (at a lightyear per day), and thirty days to decelerate.

I am told that NASA and Sandia Labs are currently testing Thesis #2. If the results of these tests are as predicted and repeatable (can everyone say "Pons and Fleischman"?), there are hopes that Thesis #3 can be tested within the next five years.

I for one hope that those experiments might achieve the results predicted by the theory.