Sunday, March 26, 2006

What would you do?

If, at the age of 19, you became mostly deaf and blind, and also lost the use of your hands in an explosion?

Would you be lost in self-pity? Would you become utterly dependent on others and lose all hope for your future?

Well that's not what this man did. What he did do was join a university, decide to understand and improve Einstein's theory of General Relativity, come up with his own theory of everything, successfully predict the masses of most known, and some unknown, particles plugging in the values of just four constants (G, h, vacuum permittivity and permeability), and also manage to get married and get a diploma.

Kind of puts things into perspective doesn't it?

Here we are, slogging at and with so many different things, day in and day out, assuming that we are the center of the known universe, assuming that what we do is worth a damn. And this guy who pretty much can't see, can't hear, and can't use his hands, comes up with a new way to look at the universe that looks like the best bet for a theory of everything since General Relativity.

What on Earth, or anywhere else for that matter, can you do to match that? I can't even imagine the kind of dedication and perseverence required to accomplish that. Apparently he developed an eidetic memory after he lost his eyesight and hearing. His wife read papers, journals, and his drafts to him; he would memorise all of them just by listening to her.

Einstein explained gravity in his Theory of General Relavity, by proposing that mass bends space around it and gravity is the effect we see in three dimensions. Heim took it three steps further - he proposed a six-dimensional space, which could explain and predict the masses of various elementary particles with great accuracy. His theory is probably the only major theory which actually predicts the rest masses of various elementary particles to better than expected accuracy.

In the last few years Heim's theory has been getting greater attention, the greatest barriers being language - Heim wrote exclusively in German - and, in a striking resemblance with an acknowledged genius of the early 20th century, Ramanujan, his use of non-standard and unknown terminology.

Among the most exciting outcome of Heim's theory being verified might be super-luminal transport. At the limits of my understanding, the extended theory postulates a gravitophoton, a particle which makes possible the conversion of electromagnetic energy to gravitational energy. There is some way to make normal photons into gravitophotons, thereby pushing the object of interest into a parallel space, where the physical constants are different. The object itself gains velocity when it moves into the parallel space, appearing to move at many times the speed of light in our universe.

I'll stop there, because anything else I say will be even more of a guess and even less of intelligence than I've already displayed :-)...

Go Forth, make your own theories of whatever, achieve something, after all we still have our eyesight, hearing, hands, and presumably some brains. How hard can it be?

2 comments:

Aditi Das Patnaik said...

Wow!! this is so cool!

P.S. Thanks for dropping by my blog.

GeekBeyondRedemption said...

Hmm, blogspot seems to have been screwed up for a while...

Been shadowing your blog for a little while now :-). Was a bit shocked and was glad there was only material damage to the vehicle and perhaps spiritual damage to you and others :-)...