Clark Lindsey (who is a physicist, at least by training) has more thoughts related to the earlier post.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Alan Boyle has a roundup of (mostly skeptical) comments from the scientific community.

Thanks Rand, your earlier post and the link to Clark Lindsay's provided me the answers to some questions I had about this being way to go good to be true when I posted on that Scotsman article last night after reading it on Instapundit. Here's my post:

http://downdeepintexas.*blog*spot.com/2006/01/hyperspace-for-real-updated-1-6-06.html

And, yes I know it's a blogger address, but I'm getting ready to shift soon, once I make sure I'm not going to lose everything.

... And I'm about the last person on this hyperdimensional brane to write something about this, but you can find an overly long item (that mentions Rand and Clark) right here:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10694827/

Two words:"Prove it."

I have some sympathy with reporters trying to cover that New Scientist article. I received a preview of it which I recognised as difficult reading but interesting and wanted to report, as a now freelance space journalist, for The Sun, a UK tabloid.
The immediate problem is that it is a very complex idea to tell in simple words and just a few paragraphs. I posted a copy of my own attempt on my own blog. (I think, in retrospect that the bit about the US military, which New Scientist also only mentioned in passing, is somewhat superfuous.)
I too wondered where The Scotsman got that bit about "the speed of light".

Some interesting stuff at Protosimplex. I don't even come close to being able to understand the math, but I found the author's interpretation of cosmology particularly fascinating.

If this is nuts, it's at least an extremely well worked out craziness!

Regards,
Ric

It doesn't read like crackpot stuff (the AIAA paper), but even in the AIAA paper, it doesn't explain how they get from the original assumptions to the conclusions that a strong enough magnetic field could cause 1) a cancellation of gravity and 2) a propulsive force (anti-gravity). That must be in other papers somewhere. It's sort of like reading about relativity with no discussion of the concept of perspective.

But given what they say in the paper, the bigger concern for any kind of space transport--the 'hey wait a minute' comes when they're talking about how you convert photons to gravitons--what happens to unconverted photons. Given that the machine they talk about at Sandia to test the theory with produces huge amounts of x-rays, and they're talking about an order of magnitude beyond that, what happens to any unconverted xrays? Answer--fries anything that's unsheilded.
Just like, the theory that nuclear fission power was possible was clear in the 1920s--but not actually done on a useful scale until 1958...and you're talking about much tougher physics and much higher energies and magnetic gradients here.

The science may work out (doubt it in this form) but even then the engineering has a long way to go...

For me, the space drive would be ' nice to have', but the really fascinating part of this is that Heim theory could be the unified field theory - i.e. achieve what String theory is trying to do, but in a simpler and more elegant fashion. However, even at that, it is fiendishly difficult for non-professors - check out some pages I started on Heim and Heim Theory at Wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkhard_Heim & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_Theory