[1] At the start of World War II, Heim avoided conscription into the German Air Force by working in a chemical laboratory as an explosives technician.
[3] It was the first time the idea of gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces were treated as distortions of their proper Euclidean metrics in a higher-dimensional space.
In November 1957, Heim delivered a lecture about his propulsion theory to the German Society for Rocket Technology and Space Travel in Frankfurt.
[10] According to von Ludwiger, a German author known for his publication on UFOs, an audiotape of Heim's presentation had been prepared for shipment to America.
[10] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were a number of reports on Heim in magazines and tabloids such as Le Figaro, Bunte Illustrierte, Quick and Stern.
[10] On 25 November 1976, Heim publicly introduced, for the first time, his completed unified field theory in a presentation to MBB engineers.
Pursuant to recommendations by Werner Heisenberg's successor, Hans-Peter Dürr, Heim published his unified field theory summary the following year in an article entitled "Recommendations of a Way to a Unified Description of Elementary Particles" in the Max Planck Institute journal Zeitschrift für Naturforschung (Journal of Natural Research).
In 1982, Heim's mass formula was programmed on a computer at the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg with the assistance of some resident scientists.
In 2004, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) awarded the winning paper in the nuclear and future flight field to a retired Austrian patent officer named Walter Dröscher and Jochem Häuser, a physicist and professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter, Germany.
[10][18] In 2008, the AIAA Nuclear and Future Flight Propulsion Technical Committee published the following statement: Heim had to undergo a series of at least 50 operations after a laboratory explosion that resulted in the loss of both of his hands.
[20] He had found that intense concentration on the study of Einstein's relativity theory had helped him control the pain in his arms mentally and physically.