There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious?

Again, as was said in [1], the authors are aware of several shortcomings in this paper. Not all of the physical features of Heim's theory were de-rived properly. Some of the conclusions are based on a somewhat speculative physical model concerning the generation of gravitophoton par­ticles.

It should be mentioned that Heim's legacy is very large, several thousand pages, and his presenta­tion style is not the one of contemporary physics. Heim uses his own terminology that needs to be translated into the language of modern physics. In addition, since his theory is completely geo­metric, there are many concepts that have no counterpart in modern physics. Whether his the­ory is actually true, can only be determined by experiment.

Heim's theory currently is not mainstream phys­ics, but it contains several highly interesting ideas, and its geometric origin of the physical world, is appealing, at least to the authors. As far as the authors understand Heim's theory (many of his calculations remained unchecked so far, simply because of the amount and the difficulty of his work), [...]

Berkant, Heim's work is incoherently presented in the AIAA paper. It
reads like gibberish. One wonders about the mind processes of the
AIAA engineers who selected it for an award. Again I remind you of
Nobel Prize physicist's remark about it:

On Jan 8, 2006, at 11:27 AM, Hooft 't G. wrote:
> Prof. 't Hooft is being exposed to this sort of nonsense several
> times per
> week. Be assured: this nonsense is indeed nonsense.
> G. 't Hooft.

> Albert Einstein was a Nobel Physicist, and yet this is what
> another physicist (t.Hooft) wrote about Einstein's ideas:
>
> "Einstein was one of the first people to protest against this
> impoverishment of the
> concept of logic. It has turned out, however, to be a fact of life."
>
> See http://physicsweb.org/articles/3/18/12/2/1 > So, opinions of a Nobel Prize physicists do not oblige

So what? What is the context. Einstein was wrong about locality in quantum theory. However, if it were not for Einstein raising the issue, most of modern quantum information theory would not exist - most likely. His EPR paper of 1935 was crucial even though he took a
position that proved false. No matter. Even Einstein's mistakes were great ones that were very important for the progress of physics. Great minds make mistakes that are more important than the Victorian Station Master's normal science discoveries. I suppose I am a Nietzschean? ;-)

Well if you think Heim's theory is correct, then explain it to all of us. Hauser's paper is unreadable. Ball is in your court.