Burkhard Heim: One Brilliant Man's Quest for Antigravity and Warp Drive

Burkhard Heim, like Charles Steinmetz, is another of the unsung heroes of science near and dear to my heart. Where Steinmetz' innovations were in the applications and physics of electricity, Heim's contributions were instead towards a unified field theory which integrated magnetism and gravity.

From a young age, Heim was fascinated by spaceflight and made it his life's ambition to invent some new means of propulsion that would make crossing the unfathomable gulfs of space more practical. However, life had other plans for him. World War 2 resulted in Heim's conscription into the air force, which could find no better use for him than devising new types of explosives.

This only resulted in an explosion which severely injured Heim, leaving him without hands and mostly deaf and blind at the tender age of 19. This took an understandable emotional and psychological toll on Heim, who retreated from the public, becoming an eccentric recluse.

This was when he began to develop his theories of gravitomagnetism. Though some predictions of his theories have since been falsified by the scientific community, others have succeeded in predicting the mass of certain subatomic particles to a substantially higher degree of accuracy than was previously possible.

Tantalized by these scraps of tentative confirmation, Heim pursued the true ambition of his life which was so terribly interrupted by the war, and by the military's misapplication of his brilliance: Manipulating gravity using magnetism, for the purpose of manned spaceflight.

Experiments based on Heim's theories involving the high speed rotation of a ring of superconducting material over a plate of rare earth magnet at extremely cold temperatures have shown a minute reduction in weight for the apparatus and anything within its field.

This so-called Heim-Lorentz force suggests that electromagnetism can be used to influence gravity, and that the two forces are in some way fundamentally connected to one another. The potential applications for purely electric space propulsion, and even a method for launching from the surface of the Earth to space without chemical rockets have caught the attention of many aeronautics organizations.

Whether or not this effect can, in the end, be leveraged as a method of propulsion, Heim's dream of purely electric space propulsion may come true regardless. Recent vindications of the EmDrive propellantless propulsor indicate that the age of rockets may be over, at least for the propulsion of vessels already in space.

As ever, when we marvel at modern innovations we should not neglect to remember those who came before. The forerunners and pioneers who laid the groundwork for the world we inhabit today, and for the future which still lies ahead of us.

Brilliant men and women before their time, who saw a vision of tomorrow nobody else could see or even begin to understand, which we are only now bringing to fruition.