Theory of Everything

The ideas themselves, when they finally got around to them, were fascinating - especially the idea of six (or was it seven) extra dimensions hidden in the convolutions of the 'strings'. I suppose I should read the book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkhard_Heim
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim-Theory
http://www.heim-theory.com/Contents/Introduction_to_Heim_s_Mass-Fo/introduction_to_heim_s_mass-fo.html

Brian Green's Theory of Everything is very much exaggerated in terms of likelihood, which becomes really obvious if you've read "The Elegant Universe." You should also read Green's "The Fabric of the Cosmos : Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" just to get a better idea of how this guy thinks.

But, this is how people come to believe things because they're put in front of them in an official way on PBS with fancy graphics.

that's edgy writing! me likey

But, this is how people come to believe things because they're put in front of them in an official way on PBS with fancy graphics.

go on, then, poor tormented angry fellow. grace us with your special message. but if it's Qaballah related forget it.

It has, has it? I thought such 'parallels' usually turned out to consist of a lot of vague handwaving and wordplay on the part of said occultists (or their followers). But then, I'm not an expert.

The Wikipedia article you link to is astoundingly bad!

The discussion page attached to the bio is actually quite interesting, with plenty of people pointing out the possible signs-of-crankdom in Heim Theory.

The constant refrain of his supporters seems to be "because he was a hermit who used unusual maths, noone has read his books! If they did, his theories would revolutionise physics!" None of them seem to have spotted the obvious corollary: "If they did, then more flaws would be spotted!"

Yes, it has.

From a completely superficial standpoint, you can point to incidents in the occult past (a very sweeping, all-encompassing thing) and point and laugh like Nelson and say "Ha, ha!" at popular ideas like Ether and Magnetism, but this is just some people using then-current scientific terminology which science has since moved away from. Does that mean occultists are stuck holding the bag of shit that science handed to them in the first place? Not likely. Not all people used the terms the same way and, despite popularization and falling off of these terms back in the day, the terms are still used and completely valid to convey many concepts. Occult relationships are hard to put into words. The occult meaning of fire, water, earth, air and spirit is nowhere near as easy to grasp as it sounds, nor were popular terms like magnetism and ether. In fact, the occult concept of ether was always different from the scientific idea, as was the occult concept of magnetism. On top of that, people tend to lump occultists into one big group as if they all had the same understanding of ideas. In fact, most people are seriously ignorant of occult concepts for the simple fact that only seriously interested parties could wade through the amount of material required to actually understand them, since the occult reality is not only a complicated subject but somewhat "hidden" among thousands of books which contain blinds, misunderstandings and lies. Even books which attempt to explain flat out these concepts are huge and complicated and generally require the reading of dozens of other huge and complicated books in order to comprehend the material. For this reason, often material will present one concept as if it is the truth, but the truth is that this one concept is a basic understanding of many other concepts, so that what seems to necessarily exclude all else in fact often is just another way of expressing the same relationships. People who have any understanding of this stuff are generally pretty well-rounded and well-read or progress simply will not come. The casual skeptic will not make any progress at all. The extremely interested skeptic will understand only so much which may then turn him into a believer. A believer will understand only so much until he becomes a practitioner and a practitioner will only understand as much as his practice (hard work) earns him.

get one paragraph (or more).

No one is claiming as such. But part of the problem, if you look at the third link I provided in particular, is that the dude wrote all his equations in selector calculus, even ones which would've maybe been more easily digested in tensor form.

In any case, the whole point of the site now seems to be to make it all as public and transparent as possible so as to work out any kinks and (finally!) make it available in English for a much more vast peer review.

Whatever mystical bs a scientist may believe, it doesn't necessarily reflect in their work. Newton, Kepler, etc. all had some strange ideas. We simply don't celebrate those parts of their intellect. It appears, from these PDFs, that the information is being disseminated in a scientifically valid and accepted manner, with papers full of formulae and all the usual stuff. I'd be more skeptical if this was all couched in obscure non-technical ideas, but the fact is that looking at the papers, you'd have no clue what this guy actually thought about the world. (Which, as we've discussed, may not have anything to do with the implications of his theory.)

As is pointed out somewhere in the Wikipedia articles linked above: Newton was an alchemist and mystic, and Kepler an astrologer: but both those men lived in an era when such things were part of the science mainstream (admittedly, Newton came at the end of that period). Heim didn't.

One of the main problems I have - but didn't mention above - with this whole "science is now proving The Occult right!" thing is that the term "occult" can cover such a large range of beliefs. In fact, I'd say that over time it's been extended to cover just about *every* different philosophy or worldview invented. That makes it very easy to say "science is proving The Occult right", because you can pick and choose the bits of The Occult which seem to match closest to current scientific theory, ignoring the vast multitude of others.

Occult relationships are hard to put into words.

And, furthermore, many practitioners of The Occult have deliberately put their beliefs into hard words, because they wanted The Occult to stay literally occult - presumably on the grounds that Secret Knowledge is Better Knowledge. Because occult texts tend to be so obscure, that makes it even easier to interpret them to fit your own beliefs.

People who have any understanding of this stuff are generally pretty well-rounded and well-read or progress simply will not come. The casual skeptic will not make any progress at all.

Hey, I like to think I *am* a pretty well-rounded person. I'm a sceptic, not a skeptic.

I did not suggest you weren't well-rounded.

The occult DOES cover all aspects of supernatural and paranormal, but that doesn't mean all occultists agree on what is actually the occult and what is actually charlatanism, which is why the term "occult" can be used just as much to discredit all aspects of itself, as you just have.

That does not mean, however, that you are correct about the occult. There are major lines of occult thought of which everything else is just an offshoot. For instance, Helena Blavatsky has been put down throughout the years by people who do not understand her ideas and see her as a racist nutter. What she tried to do was join the major lines of occult thought into one thing. Aleister Crowley tried to do something similar. Same thing with BOTA, Franz Bardon and thousands of authors since. These are all examples of what I was saying before about explaining as "truth" that which is only a basic representation of something else. When you get right down to it, the ideas become so simple yet so abstract, there is no "truth", which is where the phrase "nothing is true, everything is permitted" comes from. An analytical studying of the Bible with accurate translations will reveal the same secrets of Yoga out of these bizarre little stories that make close to no sense in English, utterly changing the meaning of Christ, the crucifiction, Satan, Heaven and God, the "truth" as some Christians like to say.

The common thing in the occult now is to boil away all religious connotations and come at the occult from a new age psychological perspective. Any well-rounded skeptic such as yourself is bound to roll her eyes and walk away from someone who tries to explain to you how to "circulate the light in your imagination", but in reality, that's all these 5,000 year old mystics of India were doing is basically mind-control and visualization. It may sound like a waste of time, but you'd actually have to DO it to know that. Most people will try some simple enough technique with no real understanding or background, fail and say, "Ha, I knew this was bullshit."

There also hasn't really been any worthwhile occult books published in the last 25 years or so and most of those are out of print and were printed by small publishers on small runs, anyway. So, while most people these days will start out with Wicca, Satanism or New Age, they most likely will have to dig a lot deeper to understand much of anything beyond superstition and faith, although Raymond Buckland put out a pretty good starter book for Wiccans (based on Golden Dawn material), that unfortunately becomes too dogmatic once you progress, once again illustrating my point about "truth."

Science, stop harshing my (religious/new age) buzz/mellow!!