© 1997 Ken Glasziou
© 1997 The Brotherhood of Man Library
¶ Editorial
A word of explanation, perhaps apology to those with no interest in the prophetic science of The Urantia Book, appears to be in order in view of the radical departure from our usual format by the inclusion of one exceptionally long article in this issue. For those so affected, assured that it will be a one-off experience except in rare cicumstances.
The Urantia Book imposes a quandary upon readers with a strong science background who become aware of science material in the book which cannot be explained other than that its origin is from non-human sources. Such material provides incontrovertible evidence that this book is what it claims to be, an authorized revelation provided by celestial beings for the spiritual uplift of the human races. By drawing attention to the prophetic science, at least some formerly agnostic or disinterested people may feel compelled to give serious consideration to what significance such a revelation might have upon their lives. But the book itself states:
Overpowering arguments and mental superiority are not to be employed to coerce men and women into the kingdom. Man’s mind is not to be crushed by the mere weight of logic or overawed by shrewd eloquence. (UB 159:3.2)
Two relatively recent events were instrumental in bringing about the inclusion of the following article (which is the text of a talk given by Ken Glasziou at the recent annual meeting of Australian readers of the book). One event was the exceedingly strong support provided by newly published materials on the prophetic validity of the included materials, the other the publication of Martin Gardner’s attacking the authenticity of the revelation. So bear with us as we demonstrate that our revelation is nothing other than what it claims to be and that Gardner did not do his homework adequately.
¶ Article
While at a recent Urantia Book conference, I had occasion to sit in on a discussion between various groups who were in the process of translating the text of The Urantia Book into their own languages. Virtually everyone of them had what, to me, seemed a strange, but understandable, attitude toward the text. They acted as if it were divinely hallowed truth in the same sense as the fundamentalists treat their Bible, a book dictated by God himself, and therefore infallible. These people gave the impression that they were in fear of making a mistake in their translation, lest lightning from the heavens should terminate their efforts.
Yet it is a fact that, among the many authors of The Urantia Book, not a single one has that “Creator” status that would grant them infallibility (UB 159:4.6)—not even those Divine Counselors who authored papers in Part 1. In reality, some of the authors, the midwayers and the seraphim, are only a little above the level of us mortals. Besides that, the revelators inform us that about 3000 contributions have come from human sources, and that the conditions of the mandate were that human sources should be used wherever possible. The revelators tell us that the cosmology of the book is not “inspired,” and that they expected that much of the science and cosmology would come to be outdated and in need of correction. Hence when thinking about this book, we need to get our expectations right, and maybe take the recommendation of Bill Sadler who advised Urantia Book readers to never equate their hopes and their expectations.
The book, of course, calls itself the Fifth Epochal Revelation, and regardless of how it got here and who wrote it, for many, including myself, that is precisely what it is, a book that reveals truth of a quality, spirituality, and consequence that far exceeds anything previously available to mankind. But the book itself makes it clear that “revelation” and “absolute truth” are not synonymous.
There is so much material out there on the book shelves of the world claiming to be revelation that we would have to be either naive or desperate to accept the claims of The Urantia Book without at least making some effort to validate its claims. But if we attempt to validate the book’s status on the basis of its science, we must distinguish between its prophetic content, its topical content, and its outdated materials. An alternative approach is to concentrate on the prophetic component and also to consider who, other than celestial beings, might have written it—and this is the approach we will take today.
Most of the Urantia Papers bear the date of having been given to us in the 1934/5 period, but history tells us that much of the source material that gave rise to those papers was received and discussed long before that time, even as much as twenty or more years earlier. According to the book, the mandate given to the revelators carried the proviso of “the proscription [prohibition] of the impartation of unearned or premature knowledge,” but with a few minor exemptions that permitted correction of errors and divulgence of key facts. This latter provision is what allowed the revelators to include prophetic materials unknown to science at that time. For some of us, the prophetic science content was the justification for singling out The Urantia Book from among all the others for continued in-depth study. Later, many would have found, as I did, that the book’s lofty spirituality carries its own justification and validation.
However, The Urantia Book is no ordinary book for not only does it provide us with a multitude of reasons for believing in its revelatory status, but it also provides much ammunition that keeps our options open to reject that status—if that is our desire. In this article, we’ll touch upon more than ten physical phenomena that were, at best, the wishful thinking of theoretical physicists at the time the Papers were received, plus a couple of others that they had not even thought of. But if a reason to reject the book’s revelatory status and even to make fun of its content is needed, there are always the giant birds that talk while carrying their passengers on 500-mile non-stop trips, or the couple who conceived red, orange, blue, green, yellow, and indigo children, or the other couple that had 16 invisible progeny who, as pairs, produced 248 more invisibles per couple at the rate of one every 70 days. Surely anyone first opening the book where that kind of material occurs would be justified in concluding it was simply rubbish for the gullible. And as well as that, there are the errors now accumulating from its outdated science.
¶ So who wrote the book?
But let’s get back to the question that if celestial beings did not write the Papers who did? Because of the magnitude, diversity, and depth of the book’s content, I believe that the book could only have been put together by a committee that included highly knowledgeable academics, or people of similar bent and interests.
¶ A committee wrote the book!!
I think that such a committee would have needed a top rate physicist who had close contact with the frontiers of research in sub-atomic physics and astronomy. As well, people with a good knowledge of archaeology, anthropology, geology, the Bible, philosophy, history, and theology would have been required. Some members could have had interests covering more than one area. For the sake of brevity we’ll refer to this hypothetical group as the Triple “A” committee, indicating a committee of anonymous academician authors.
¶ Who commissioned the committee?
Who could have commissioned the Triple “A” committee? Among those at the helm of the early Urantia gatherings were the husband and wife team of Dr William and Dr Lena Sadler, Wilfred Kellogg, and at a later stage, Emma Christiensen, the son of the Sadler’s, known to everyone as Bill, and perhaps a few others. It is possible that if a committee was commissioned, only Dr William and Dr Lena Sadler were ever aware of its existence. One reason for saying this is that it is difficult to equate the devotion to the cause displayed by most of those associated with the origins of the book if these people were aware that the book was a fraud. One or two people for their own personal reasons might conduct themselves in such a way, but it seems unlikely that a larger group with no reward offering, would dedicate the whole of their lives to the task of propagating a fraud. This same line of reasoning would have to apply to our hypothetical Triple “A” committee members. They would have needed to have had a driving motive to do what we are postulating they may have done.
¶ Some problems of the committee hypothesis
Such a hypothesis poses many problems, not the least of them being the preservation of secrecy. The amount of work involved in researching the materials for The Urantia Book, the amount of time required to write it up for presentation to the Sadlers and friends, then the rewriting, and the presentation of the final drafts must have been quite enormous. Hence it is virtually inevitable that other family members or friends of the hypothetical committee members would have become curious about what was transpiring. Close collaboration by the Triple “A” committee members would have been absolutely essential in order to maintain the extraordinary consistency to be found throughout the book, a problem that would have been many-fold more difficult in pre-computer times. Taken together, these circumstances present a scenario in which secrecy is virtually certain to break down. But, to my knowledge, not the slightest hint of the existence of such a committee has ever hit the skyways and byways of rumor propagation. We will be looking at this problem again as we come to some of the materials we need to cover.
[Free copies were available at Flagstaff of a booklet entitled “The Science, Anthropology, and Archaeology of The Urantia Book.” It is referred to in this article. If you would like a copy, contact David Biggs or Ken Glasziou.]
The title of this address is listed as “Convergence,” a term used by some Urantia Book readers on the Internet which implies keeping track of new scientific findings that might have a bearing on the prophetic content of the book, and judging whether this new science is either converging with or diverging from the prophecies in the book. Please refer to page 7 of the science booklet (Urantia Book UB 42:8.3) and I’ll endeavor to clarify two fairly difficult pieces of prophetic material in the book that have now converged with modern scientific knowledge. Later we’ll go to some work by a scientist-reader from Finland who uncovered some quite astounding convergences buried deeply in the content of what appear to be maths exercises for high school students.
[The following quotations from UB 42:8.3 of The Urantia Book are provided for convenience]
The charged protons and the uncharged neutrons of the nucleus of the atom are held together by the reciprocating function of the mesotron, a particle of matter 180 times as heavy as the electron. Without this arrangement the electric charge carried by the protons would be disruptive of the atomic nucleus.
As atoms are constituted, neither electric nor gravitational forces could hold the nucleus together. The integrity of the nucleus is maintained by the reciprocal cohering function of the mesotron, which is able to hold charged and uncharged particles together because of superior force-mass power and by the further function of causing protons and neutrons constantly to change places. The mesotron causes the electric charge of the nuclear particles to be incessantly tossed back and forth between protons and neutrons. At one infinitesimal part of a second a given nuclear particle is a charged proton and the next an uncharged neutron. And these alternations of energy status-are so unbelievably rapid that the electric charge is deprived of all opportunity to function as a disruptive influence. Thus does the mesotron function as an “energy-carrier” particle which mightily contributes to the nuclear stability of the atom.
The presence and function of the mesotron also explains another atomic riddle. When atoms perform radioactively, they emit far more energy than would be expected. This excess of radiation is derived from the breaking up of the mesotron “energy carrier,” which thereby becomes a mere electron. The mesotronic disintegration is also accompanied by the emission of certain small uncharged particles.
The mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia.
These mesotrons are found abundantly in the space rays which so incessantly impinge upon your planet. (UB 42:8.3-7)
Firstly we’ll be looking at the beginning paragraphs UB 42:8.3 of The Urantia Book that can be found at the top of p. 7 of the science booklet.
¶ A mental picture of the atom
In order to be able to communicate with one another in terms of normal, everyday experience, we can visualize an atomic nucleus as being a kind of spherical container in which other little spherical containers are found (Fig 1.). One kind is called a proton and it carries a positive electric charge. The other kind could be described as a mirror image of the proton minus its electric charge, and is given the name “neutron.” The simplest of all atoms is the hydrogen atom and it consists of a single proton with its single positive charge. It is a fact of creation that for every positive charge in the universe there exists an equal and opposite charge that we call negative. The proton is accompanied by its negatively charged electron that is thought of as being smeared out in a cloud skirting the spherical proton. The size of an atomic nucleus is in the order of 10-15cm and the electron cloud is of the order of 10-8cm. Putting that into more familiar terms, if the electron cloud was a mist clinging to the surface of the earth, and the nucleus of the atom was at the very center of the earth, that nucleus would be about the size of a football field and situated 4000 miles away from its electron cloud. Which all goes to show how powerful is the electric field that holds the electrons to the nucleus and permits matter to exist.
As atoms get larger, Nature endows them with more and more protons with their positive charges and these are highly repellent to one another. To help alleviate the problem, Nature adds neutrons to the protons, on a roughly one to one basis to start with, but as the bundles gets bigger, Nature has to supply more neutrons than protons in order to stop things falling apart. The number of protons in the mix decides whether a particular mix, called an element, will be hydrogen, oxygen, silver, gold, iron, aluminum, or what have you. The number of neutrons accompanying the protons does not influence which element a mix will be, but it does determine its stability. Carbon, for example, has only six protons, but can have from 5 to 8 neutrons. The last one is called carbon 14; it is unstable, and breaks down radioactively, which is very convenient for those archaeologists who use it to carbon date the remnants of their ancestors.
¶ On making nuclear peace
Par.1 of UB 42:8.3 is about how the atomic nucleus holds itself together despite the antipathy of the protons for one another. Fig. 2 shows diagrammatically, a theory published by a Japanese physicist, Hideki Yukawa, that is almost the exact equivalent of what is stated in Par.1. Eventually Yukawa was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, which, of course, was not just a simple drawing like Fig. 2, but a highly developed mathematical treatment of his proposal. Effectively, it assumes that this particle, termed the mesotron or meson, picks up a positive electric charge from the charged protons of the nucleus and switches it to the neutron which thereupon becomes a proton while the proton that lost its charge is now a neutron.
Why does it have two names? Well the Greeks used the word “mesos” to mean middle and Yukawa’s particle had a calculated mass somewhere between the electron, the proton, and the neutron. So there were three choices, meson, mesoton, or mesotron simply meaning middle sized particle. Eventually “meson” won the day.
¶ A breach of the mandate?
Yukawa’s theory was published in 1935, one year after receipt of the Urantia Paper. Does that controvert the mandate about the proscription of unearned knowledge? Not necessarily, because Yukawa’s memoirs state that he had been thinking about the problem ever since the discovery of the neutron in 1932. It is customary in most research laboratories to have internal seminars, often on a weekly basis, in which research workers present progress reports on their projects. Although the mandate for the revelators proscribed the disclosure of unearned knowledge, there was no stipulation that it had to be published before it could be used in their revelation. Presumably the revelators could have used Yukawa’s seminar notes, or even his spoken addresses as source material for the book.
We do need to note that Yukawa’s idea was only one among other possible theories attempting to account for nuclear stability. We also need to note that in UB 42:8.6, the revelators point out that Yukawa’s explanation of nuclear binding is only partial. The book actually says, “The mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia.”
That particular comment appears to be highly prophetic, and would have remained so even if our Triple “A” authors had written it in during the 1950’s. For example, Nobel Prize winner, Leon Lederman, wrote: “The hot particle of 1950 was the pion or pi meson. The pion had been predicted in 1936 by a Japanese theoretical physicist, Hideki Yukawa. It was thought to be the key to the strong force, which in those days was the big mystery. Today, we think of the strong force in terms of gluons. But back then, mesons which fly back and forth between the protons to hold them together tightly in the nucleus were the key, and we needed to make and study them.” Here Lederman appears to indicate that, in the 1950’s, most physicists thought the Yukawa theory was still adequate—and perhaps they should have for they had only just awarded him the Nobel Prize because of it. The Urantia Book, of course, says it was inadequate—a comment that turned out to be true.
A development causing mini-excitement occurred in 1936 when Anderson and his co-workers announced the discovery of a particle in cosmic ray experiments that appeared to correspond to Yukawa’s meson as it had almost exactly the mass that Yukawa had predicted. However, the euphoria was short-lived when it was discovered that Anderson’s meson had a negative charge and not the positive charge required by Yukawa theory. Even later Anderson’s meson turned out not to be a meson at all, but a heavy electron, now called the muon. Yukawa’s meson was finally discovered in 1947.
¶ Colliders bring confusion in the 1950’s
In the 50’s, confusion broke loose as powerful accelerators collided nuclear particles at higher and higher energy levels and generated an absolute profusion of new particles, including 4 or 5 kinds of mesons.
The confusion in the fifties was such that one prominent physicist is reported to have advocated presenting the Nobel Prize to the next physicist not to discover a new particle. That brings up a point. It has been claimed (by Martin Gardner) that the text of The Urantia Book could have been modified until the books started to roll off the presses in 1955. If so, then the enormous confusion in the world of sub-atomic physics during the early 1950’s should have generated enough anxiety in our Triple “A” committee physicist for him to become uncertain about any of his prophetic commentary—and surely he would have been impelled to remove it if he gave thought to the potential effects upon the revelatory status of the book.
Let’s now examine the details of Par. 3.
¶ On radioactive decay of the neutron
The presence and function of the mesotron also explains another atomic riddle. When atoms perform radioactively, they emit far more energy than would be expected. This excess of radiation is derived from the breaking up of the mesotron “energy carrier,” which thereby becomes a mere electron. The mesotronic disintegration is also accompanied by the emission of certain small uncharged particles. (UB 42:8.5)
Here we are told about two kinds of undiscovered particles that result from the beta radioactive decay of the neutron. One of them, called in the book, a “small uncharged particle,” had been predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1932 to account for the missing energy when a neutron decayed radioactively to a proton and an electron. This tiny particle became known as the neutrino. A word of explanation. The mass of the neutron was known to be greater than the masses of the proton and the electron combined. From Einstein’s famous equation E = MC2, the change in energy can be calculated from the change in mass and since all the energy could not be accounted for, Pauli invented his little particle with no properties that he said could never be discovered.
The accepted theory of beta radioactive decay in 1934/5 was that proposed in 1932 by one of the most famous physicists of this century, Werner Heisenberg. It became known as the four fermion theory and is shown in our Fig. 3. Here a single neutron arrives at a single space-time point (position A) whereupon it decides it is sick of being what it is and opts for a new life as three new particles, a proton, an electron, and a little uncharged particle, a neutrino. This theory was shown to be entirely satisfactory for the low energy conditions available in those days, except for one thing. Nobody could demonstrate that the neutrino actually existed.
¶ Conservation of energy. True or false?
We’ll digress for a moment to consider the status of a law in classical physics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This energy-balance problem we have referred to during neutron decay required an implicit faith that this law would hold good despite the fact that many classical concepts had withered and failed in the new physics introduced in the early part of this century. Among the new theories were relativity and quantum physics. As time went by, and on onto the 1940’s, faith in this law of the immortality of energy began to wither. Many asked the question of whether it was really valid to postulate a little uncharged particle that could never be detected because it had no properties, for the sole purpose of preserving what may well have become an outdated law of classical physics.
If this UB 42:8.5 material in the book was really written by our Triple “A” committee, then its members show some pretty strange behavior. In Par.4, they go against front line physics by pointing out that the theory that earned Yukawa the Nobel Prize in 1948 is inadequate to account for aspects of the binding of the nucleus, and in Par. 3, they bet on the conservation of energy law holding up under circumstances in which it had yet to be tested. This law was derived from the effects of heat, work, and gravity on steam engines, hydraulic pumps, horses pulling plows, apples falling off trees, etc. It was not known whether the law held good in the micro-world of the atom. Einstein came along and said the gravity concepts were wrong and also introduced a new idea, the equivalence of mass and energy for which there was nothing comparable in classical physics. In radioactive beta decay a neutron changes into a proton and an electron but the energy equivalent to the loss in mass does not correspond to what was measured. Hence the invention of the undetectable neutrino to preserve the validity of the law that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Now if our Triple “A” people were at work faking a revelation, right here, in Par. 3, they took the unprecedented step of ignoring the top physicists of the day and introducing their own concept of beta-decay as illustrated in Fig. 4. Please note that I did not draw Fig. 4, but copied it from a modern text book because The Urantia Book concept has become the modern theory.
The major difference from the Heisenberg scheme (Fig. 3) was the introduction of another unidentified (and in those days, unidentifiable) particle that the revelators have called a mesotron, but is now known as the W- particle. Clearly it is not the same mesotron as postulated for mediating nucleus stability since that mesotron shuttles a positive charge, and this second mesotron carries negative charge as shown by its breaking down to the negatively charged electron and the small uncharged particle.
The Urantia Paper that provided this information was dated as having been delivered to the Contact Commission in 1934. In 1938, Hideki Yukawa made an attempt to reformulate the Heisenberg scheme for beta decay using one similar to that in The Urantia Book. In it, he called his carrier a weak photon rather than a mesotron. The work was not taken seriously as the four fermion process of Fig. 3 was considered adequate and remained so until into the 1950’s.
¶ The speculative(?) predictions on UB 42:8.5 of the book
Here we can reasonably ask the question of why a physicist of the Triple “A” committee would indulge in a guessing game that could discredit all the work entailed in amassing a 2000-page revelation. All told, there are six highly speculative suggestions that could easily have been wrong.
- The Yukawa meson (identified in 1947),
- The small uncharged particles (neutrinos) of radioactive decay proposed in 1932 and identified in 1956. Note that in an article in the February 1996 issue of Scientific American, one of their discoverers, Dr Frederick Reines, says, “For 25 years the neutrino was little more than a figment of the theoretical physicists’ imagination.” So even when the book was first printed, the neutrino was still a figment of the imagination.
- The mesotron of radioactive beta decay that became known as the W— boson (discovered 1981)
- The force other than Yukawa’s meson that holds proton to proton and neutron to neutron and which was finally clarified in the period between 1950 and 1970.
- In Par. 5 (UB 42:8.7), the book states that, “These mesotrons are found abundantly in the space rays which so incessantly impinge upon your planet.” The first report of a meson being discovered in cosmic rays occurred in 1936, two years after the Paper was received—but turned out not to be a meson.
- Then there is another highly speculative suggestion in Par. 2 (UB 42:8.4). The book says, “The mesotron causes the electric charge of the nuclear particles to be incessantly tossed back and forth between protons and neutrons. At one infinitesimal part of a second a given nuclear particle is a charged proton and the next an uncharged neutron. And these alternations of energy status are so unbelievably rapid that the electric charge is deprived of all opportunity to function as a disruptive influence.” In effect, it is as if the charge is smeared out rather than being localized. Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg (1992), remarks that these alternations occur in the order of a million, million, million, millionth of a second. In contrast, the movement of electric charge from neutron to electron during the beta radioactive decay process takes about one hundredth of a second. In 1934, there was no hard evidence available to make such comparisons.
¶ About collapsing suns
Now we move from the small uncharged particles of beta decay to meet these particles once more in the book’s description of the death throes of large stars. From page 464 of The Urantia Book and repeated on P. 9 of the science booklet, we have:
In large suns—small circular nebulae—when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensues, if such a body is not sufficiently opaque (1) to retain the internal pressure of support for the outer gas regions, then a sudden collapse occurs. The gravity-electric changes give origin to vast quantities of tiny particles (2)devoid of electric potential, and such particles readily escape from the solar interior (3), thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun (4) within a few days. It was such an emigration of these “runaway particles” that occasioned the collapse of the giant nova of the Andromeda nebula about fifty years ago. This vast stellar body collapsed in forty minutes (5) of Urantia time. (UB 41:8.3)
The collapsed star that does this trick usually winds up as a neutron star and sometimes as a black hole. This whole Urantia Book paragraph is packed with unconfirmed physics—the opaqueness failing to support the internal pressure so that collapse occurs; the vast quantities of neutral particles; that these readily escape from the interior (actually in about 3 secs. in contrast to light energy that can take a million years in large stars); the escape of the neutrinos being sufficient to collapse a gigantic sun, and doing so in as little as forty minutes.
For the mid-thirties, this paragraph is close to being a ridiculous statement. The tiny particles devoid of electric potential could have been the same undiscovered particles proposed by Pauli to account for the missing energy of radio-active decay, but whoever heard of a proposal such as a “vast stellar body collapsing in forty minutes”? The craziest astrophysicist outside the gates of a mental asylum at this particular time was an Austrian immigrant working at the California Institute of Technology. His name was Fritz Zwicky and his main interests in life were the supernovae he was investigating in collaboration with Walter Baade from the Mt. Wilson Observatory that then housed the world’s largest telescope. Between them they had amassed data on novae occurring in this century that appeared to be outside of our galaxy. These novae had roughly the same brightness as novae from within our galaxy but if they were millions or billions of light years out into space, then they must have been tremendously bright and have originated from really mighty explosions. These are what became known as supernovae.
At the beginning of the 30’s, Baade collected detailed data on six of these and he and Zwicky set to work to provide a theoretical explanation. At first they achieved little, then, in 1932, Chadwick reported his discovery of the neutron, in effect an uncharged proton. This was just what Zwicky needed to calculate that if a star imploded until it reached the density of an atomic nucleus, it might transform into a gas of neutrons devoid of the repulsive effect of the positively charged protons—thus permitting gravitational collapse to shrink it to tiny core. In the process, according to Zwicky, such a star should lose about 10% of its mass. The energy equivalent of that mass loss would then supply the explosive force to blast the star apart.
From Prof. Thorne, currently Feynmann Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltec comes an important statement relative to the neutron star material in The Urantia Book. Thorne says: “Zwicky did not know what might initiate implosion nor how the core might behave as it imploded. Hence he could not estimate how long the process might take—is it a slow contraction or a high speed implosion? Details of this process were not worked out until the 1960’s and later.” So what was the basis for our Triple “A” committee physicist making the statement about a collapse of a star in forty minutes? In fact there was none until high speed computers became available, and it is only in the 1990’s that there has been a successful computer-simulation of a supernova.
Accidentally I came across some comments on Zwicky that said he was in Chicago in the mid-thirties. Since he and Baade appear to have been the only research astrophysicists working on the supernova problem when the relevant Urantia Paper was received, Zwicky certainly looked like a “best bet” for being a physicist from Triple “A.” On my books, he remained so for many years until I came across Thorne’s 1994 book that provided a detailed account of Baade and Zwicky’s work. Thorne writes:
“At this time (1932-33), cosmic rays were receiving much attention and Zwicky, with his love of extremes, managed to convince himself that most of the cosmic rays were coming from outside our solar system and that most were from far outside our Milky Way galaxy (which was incorrect)—indeed from the most distant reaches of the universe—and he then convinced himself that the total energy carried by all the universe’s cosmic rays was about the same as the total energy released by supernovae throughout the universe. The conclusion was obvious to Zwicky. Cosmic rays must be made in supernova explosions.”
¶ Zwicky thought that cosmic rays, not neutrinos, dissipated the energy of a supernova explosion
There was not a word anywhere in Zwicky’s work about a role for tiny particles devoid of electric potential that escape readily from the interior of an exhausted star and bring about its collapse in as little as forty minutes. So, in my humble opinion, because he assigned the major role to cosmic rays for energy dissipation during a supernova explosion and failed to mention a role for little neutral particles, Zwicky must be eliminated as a possible Triple “A” committee physicist. Thorne’s book provides us with the background thought of workers interested in that field at this time:
“Astronomers in the 1930’s responded enthusiastically to the Baade-Zwicky concept of supernovae, but treated Zwicky’s neutron star and cosmic ray ideas with disdain. . . In fact a detailed study of Zwicky’s writings of the era showed that he did not understand the laws of physics well enough to be able to substantiate his ideas.” This opinion was also held by Robert Oppenheimer, who, with H. Snyder, wrote the most authoritative paper during the 1930’s on the subject of stellar collapse. In it, he completely ignored Zwicky’s work even though he must have been well acquainted with it, since he spent half of each year at Caltec.
¶ Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Eddington all rejected the neutron star idea
The Oppenheimer papers of 1939 drew attention to the subject of neutron stars and the possibility of black holes which, in turn, brought comment from Albert Einstein and the doyen of astronomers, Sir Arthur Eddington, both of whom vigorously opposed the concepts involved in stellar collapse that implied either the formation of neutron stars or black holes.
One possible scenario of what might have happened with the Urantia Papers following their receipt is that they were checked over by Dr Sadler’s cohort of workers until put into a form ready to go to the printer. Funds to pay for the printing were being amassed by Dr Lena Sadler in the late thirties, and apparently a draft was ready to send to the printers, R.R. Donnelley & Sons in the early forties. Following a check by a professional copy editor, the contract to prepare the printing plates was accepted in September 1941, under the signature of Wilfred Kellogg. Letters exist from the 1942/43 period from Forum members that speak of checking the galley proofs supplied by the printer, and this could only happen after completion of the type setting of the printing plates.
Changes to the text during draft stages are always possible, but once a publication gets to the galley proof stage and the printing plates have been made, any extensive changes are very much frowned upon and can be very expensive.
New information that provided a possible reason for a Triple “A” committee physicist to write in the page 464 material on neutron stars was forthcoming in 1942 when the book was, supposedly, at galley proof stage. During the 1940’s virtually all capable physicists were occupied with tasks relating to the war effort. Apparently this was not so for George Gamow, a Russian-born astrophysicist, formerly a professor at Leningrad, who had taken up a position at George Washington University. The Hubble expansion of the universe was already an established theory and Gamow conceived this as indicating that the start of expansion of the universe was as a thermonuclear fireball, now called the Big Bang.
According to Gamow and his team, the original stuff of creation was a dense gas of protons, neutrons, electrons, and gamma radiation which transmuted by a chain of nuclear reactions into the variety of elements that make up the world of today. The work was really highly speculative as there was little real knowledge on which to base his theories and the computer machinery needed for complex calculations was unavailable. Referring to this work Overbye writes, “In the forties, Gamow and a group of collaborators wrote a series of papers spelling out the details of thermonucleogenesis. Unfortunately their scheme didn’t work. Some atomic nuclei were so unstable that they fell apart before they could fuse into something heavier, thus breaking the element building chain. Gamow’s team disbanded in the late 40’s, its work ignored and discredited.”
¶ The Gamow-Schoenberg proposal
However one paper emerged from Gamow’s group in 1941 that could be meaningful for our task. In it Gamow and Schoenberg proposed that the energy loss from aging stars in a supernova explosion would be mediated by an efflux of neutrinos. But at that time there was insufficient knowledge, and also a complete lack of the tools, for making the necessary calculations to support their proposal and the work appears to have received no subsequent mention in the literature. In the summary for their paper, these authors remarked that, “the neutrinos are still hypothetical particles because of the failure of all efforts to detect them.”
The question we must ask is could the Gamow and Schoenberg paper of 1941 be the source of The Urantia Book’s comments on the collapse of gigantic suns? If our Triple “A” physicist did decide to use it, it had to be added in the galley proof stage of preparation for printing of The Urantia Book. The idea of the neutron star had been only recently been condemned by Einstein and Eddington, and Gamow and Schoenberg had provided no convincing evidence in support of their proposals. Hence, it would appear to have been sheer foolishness for our Triple “A” physicist to go to the trouble of getting printing plates altered on the basis of the Gamow and Schoenberg work which admitted that nine years after Pauli’s initial suggestion, there was still no evidence for the existence of the neutrino, a particle that was of central importance for their proposal. But note though that if celestial revelators became aware of this work, and knowing that the neutrino proposal was correct, they could have used it and been within the terms of their mandate—provided that alterations to the printing plates were permitted to the Revelatory Commission at that time.
Since we have posed the question of whether a Triple “A” physicist would have added the collapsing star material of UB 41:8.3 in 1942, perhaps we should also ask whether UB 42:8.3’s “mesotron” material could have been either added or reviewed at this time. Yukawa’s theory was published in 1935 and in 1942, his meson remained as a figment of a theoretical physicist’s imagination. None of the three hypothetical particles of 42.8.3, the meson, the neutrino, or the W- boson, had yet been discovered. Remembering that the purpose of the speculative material would be to support the concept that the Papers are revelatory, what would a Triple “A” physicist have done about this material in 1942? In my view, since no supporting evidence had emerged in the intervening years, at the very least, it would have been very considerably modified, if not completely omitted.
¶ Emerging theory of and evidence for the existence of neutron stars
Getting back to supernova explosions, the theoretical basis for them is said to have been laid by the Burbidges, Fowler, and Hoyle in a 1957 paper. All of these were eminent workers in the field of thermonuclear synthesis which covers the ways that elements are formed and transformed in the stars. However in this paper, no consideration is given to a role for neutrinos in the explosive conduction of energy away from the core during a supernova. Instead the authors proposed that when the temperature of a massive star rises to 7 billion degrees Kelvin, iron is rapidly converted to helium by a nuclear process that absorbs enormous amounts of energy, causing the core to cool and shrink catastrophically. It implodes in seconds and the outer collapsing envelope crashes into it. As the lighter elements are heated by the implosion, they burn so rapidly the envelope is blasted into space. But in this scheme, The Urantia Book’s tiny particles devoid of electric charge have no major role.
Nothing further of significance for us Urantia Book researchers appears to have occurred until 1959. A lot more was then known about sub-atomic physics; the elusive neutrino and its antiparticle had been detected during the previous three years, and an enormous amount of hard information had become available from the research on the atomic and hydrogen bombs. In addition high speed computers with the capacity to carry out enormous amounts of arithmetic had come into being.
At the laboratory of Philip Morrison, a Ph.D student, Hing-Yee Chiu was given the task of taking a further look at the neutron star problem and came up with the proposal that towards the end of its life, the core of a massive star would reach temperatures of about 3 billion degrees. By this time it was known that, at this temperature, electron-positron pairs should be formed and should give rise to neutrino-antineutrino pairs. Then, when the temperature rose high enough and an iron core developed, the flux of neutrino-antineutrino pairs would be able to carry off the explosive energy of the star in a single day.
¶ Before 1960, no hard evidence for the neutron star
All this work was strictly theoretical, the neutron star still being a construct of the human imagination. Distinguished Russian astrophysicist, Igor Novikov, has written, “Apparently no searches in earnest for neutron stars or black holes were attempted by astronomers before the 1960’s. It was tacitly assumed that these objects were far too eccentric and most probably were the fruits of theorists’ wishful thinking. Preferably, one avoided speaking about them. Sometimes they were mentioned vaguely with a remark yes, they could be formed, but in all likelihood this had never happened. At any rate, if they existed, then they could never be detected.”
Acceptance of the existence of neutron stars gained ground slowly with discoveries accompanying the development of radio-astronomy. The Crab nebula played a central role as ideas about it emerged in the decade, 1950-1960. Originally observed as an explosion in the sky by Chinese astronomers in the year 1054, the Crab nebula became the focus of attention when, in 1958, Walter Baade reported visual observations suggesting moving ripples in its nebulosity. When sensitive electronic devices replaced the photographic plate as a means of detection, the oscillation frequency of what was conjectured to be a white dwarf star at the center of the Crab nebula turned out to be about 30 times per second.
If a white dwarf with a diameter in the order of 1000 km revolved at even once per second it would fly apart. Hence this remarkable pulsation rate of 30 times per second indicated an object with a much, much smaller diameter and the only possible contender was the neutron star. Final acceptance came with pictures of the center of the Crab beamed back to earth by the orbiting Einstein X-Ray observatory in 1967.
The icing was put on the cake in 1987 when two laboratories deep under the earth with special equipment for the detection and study of neutrinos recorded a neutrino burst arriving on Urantia from a supernova occurring in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. I remember watching that supernova the night after it was reported and wondering whether a neutrino burst would be recorded on earth. Both of the detectors, one at Kamiokande in Japan, the other at Fairport, Ohio, recorded a twelve second burst on the recorders for their instruments, so finally proving beyond all doubt that the page 464 prophecies of The Urantia Book about the collapse of large suns were actual reality.
In just under 350 words, these statements we have discussed from UB 41:7.14 and UB 42:8.3 of The Urantia Book have correctly described events that occur in eleven different physical phenomena all of which were unconfirmed by Urantia science at the time they were described. Eight of these appear to have been original to the book, while the others were objects of speculation by Urantia’s theoretical physicists. If there had been a Triple “A” committee, what chance did they have of making such predictions and coming up right each time? My own judgment is no chance, hence no committee.
We’ve had the icing on the cake so now it is time for lighting the candles. Here we have a different kind of prediction that was hidden away in the text of the book and only recently uncovered by Stefan Tallquist, a scientist who works at the Technical Research Center of Finland.
If the mass of matter should be magnified until that of an electron equaled one tenth of an ounce, then were size to be proportionately magnified, the volume of such an electron would become as large as that of the earth. (UB 42:6.8) [means directly proportional not proportional to the 3rd power]
¶ Problem
Problem: How do we feed a large family when we have only a little loaf and a tiny fish?
Answer: Ask our friendly neighborhood magician to make them bigger. But how much by? The tiny fish and the little loaf will feed two people. We want to feed one hundred. So our magnification factor (K) is 100/2 or fifty times. That is big number / little number.
Data:
- Electron weight = 9.1 x 10-28 gm
- 1/10 oz is 2.8 gm
- Radius of Earth is 6.4 x 106 m
The magnification factor going from the electron to 2.8 g is:
Big number/little number, hence K = 2.8 / 9.1 x 10-28 which is 3.07 x 1027
The magnification factor for the radius of an electron going to the radius of the earth is again big number / little number, so:
K = radius of Earth (rE) / radius of electron (re)
We already know K, so:
Radius of the electron,
In 1934, the electron radius was thought to be the Dirac radius of zero, a dimensionless point particle. Many physicists believed this until present times. Others took the ‘classical’ radius to be 2.8 x 10-15m, which is about 1 million-fold out from The Urantia Book figure.
In the 1980’s, new techniques were developed to confine electrons in magnetic traps, it being possible to confine single electrons for lengthy periods. In the 1990’s, the new technology enabled Nobel Prize winner, Hans Dehmelt, to set limits for the electron radius as being between 1 x 10-19m and 1 x 10-22m. Hence, The Urantia Book estimate falls in between these limits.
¶ Question
Question: How could it be possible for a human being to make such an estimate prior to 1955?
My answer: Impossible!
If the volume of a proton—eighteen hundred times as heavy as an electron—should be magnified to the size of the head of a pin, then, in comparison, a pin’s head would attain a diameter equal to that of the earth’s orbit around the sun. (UB 42:6.8)
In the absence of exact data, we take the radius of the pinhead as 1.0 mm. The magnification factor is, again, big number / little number, so
K = 1.0 / radius of proton (rp) (1)
But if the radius of a pinhead is magnified by K, then it equals the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, so:
K x 1.0 = 1.5 x 1014mm (2)
from (1), substituting for (K), and re-arranging,
Radius of a proton (rp) = 1.0 / 1.5 x 1014mm = 7 x 10-15mm = 7 x 10-18m The classical proton radius is 0.853 x 10-15m, but modern measurements give the Bohr radius of a quark system as 7.7 x 10-18m.
Let’s see why the quark system radius is the best estimate of a proton radius. From “The World of Quarks” by Christine Sutton, New Scientist, Inside Science, No. 63.(1993): “If we could look inside a proton we would see a seething hive of activity. The three valence quarks, u, u, and d, endow the proton with its major properties, and are bound together by exchanging gluons, the carriers of the strong force. The gluons can radiate other gluons and can very briefly form quark-antiquark pairs, giving rise to an ephemeral “sea” of quarks and anti-quarks.”
Note that a u quark and a d anti-quark form a pion, the mesotron discussed earlier. These are virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, part of a cloud that extends to a mathematical infinity. The quark system is not enclosed within walls and is continually changing shape and form. It is the ‘permanent’ part of the proton, hence can justifiably be considered to define the proton radius.
¶ Question again
The question again arises: How could it be possible for a human being to make such an estimate prior to 1955?
My answer: Impossible!
There is, of course, a wealth of material in The Urantia Book that other readers have pointed out as “prophetic.” I hope that it should, by now, be obvious to all that our hypothesis about a secret Triple “A” committee writing the Urantia Papers and handing them over to Dr Sadler and his Contact Commission cannot explain figures that did not even exist until 25 years after the book was published, such as the radius of the electron and proton. Nor can it explain the prophetic science and historic material we, and others, have uncovered in The Urantia Book. In fact, I do not believe that the prophetic materials discussed herein can be accounted for in any other terms than that their source was non-human in origin.
Now a brief word about what I call the “funny” parts of the book such as the birth of invisible babies. We cannot pretend that they are not there, nor can we make them go away. Obviously the revelators have put them where they are for purposes of their own—which have not been revealed to us. What their purpose might be, can only be a matter of subjective personal opinion. Mine is that the “funny” bits are to do with preservation of our free will, something that may be assaulted by the correctness of the remarkable prophecies that have been uncovered. I see it this way. If, after a reasonable exposure to the book, persons reading it feel that they really would prefer it not to be true, then they will have little difficulty in finding something that will permit them to reject it with at least a partially placated conscience. Reader, Todd Moody, labels this feat of mental acrobatics as “plausible deniability.”
But if, on the other hand, book readers are filled with the hope that the revelation is true and they seek confirmation, then their Thought Adjusters will see to it that they find it, whether it be via the spiritual content, the prophetic material, or in some other manner. Whatever the result, the revelators will have succeeded in complying with the universe laws that we mere mortals must not be coerced into seeking the pathway to the Universal Father and that our freewill is sacrosanct.
For me, the remarkable spirituality of its total content means that the Fifth Epochal Revelation is exactly what it claims to be, and the confirmation via its prophetic component is simply a bonus. But regardless of how I came to that conclusion, its acceptance still puts me in the situation of having to decide what effect the revelation must have upon the remainder of my Urantian life. Fortunately this amazing book provides the answers to most of our questions if we but go to the trouble to search for them. It says:
Belief has attained the level of faith when it motivates life and shapes the mode of living. The acceptance of a teaching as true is not faith; that is mere belief. Neither is certainty nor conviction faith. A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it actually dominates the mode of living. (UB 101:8.1)
The attainment of salvation is by faith and faith alone. (UB 141:7.6)
Put another way, it says that the harvest of belief is faith; that just as even a record crop of grain has no monetary value until it has been harvested, so with beliefs—they have no spiritual value until we acquire the faith that permits our beliefs to motivate our lives and dominate our mode of living. And since we have wound up on the subject of faith, let me finish with Brian Appleyard’s gem one-liner: “If we had reason for faith, then it would not be faith at all, it would be logic. Faith can only be unreasonable.”
¶ References
- Asimov, I. “The Neutrino.” (Dobson Books Ltd, London, 1966)
- Burbidge, E.M., G.R. Burbidge, W.A. Fowler & F. Hoyle. (1957)
- Close, F., M. Marten, & C. Sutton. “The Particle Explosion.” (Oxford University Press, 1987)
- Gardner, M. “Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery.” (Prometheus Books, New York, 1995)
- Gamow, G. & M. Schoenberg. “Neutrino Theory of Stellar Collapse.” Physical Review, 59, 539 (1941)
- Hoyle, F., and J. Narliker. “The Physics Astronomy Frontier.” (W.H. Freeman & Co., San Francisco, 1980)
- Isham, C. “Quantum Gravity” in The New Physics (P. Davies, ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
- Lederman, L. “The God Particle.” (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1993)
- Morrison, P. Scientific American, 207 (2) 90.
- Novikov, I. “Black Holes and the Universe.” (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
- Overbye, D. “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.” (HarperCollins, 1991)
- Sutton, C. “Spaceship Neutrino” (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
- Thorne, K.S. “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy.” (Picador, London, London, 1994)
- Weinberg, S. “Dreams of a Final Theory.” (Pantheon Books, N.Y. 1992)
- Dehmelt, H. “Experiments with an isolated sub-atomic system at rest.” Rev. Mod. Phys. 62 (3) 1990
- Yukawa, H., Tabito, 190. (World Scientific, Singapore, 1982)
¶ External links
- Article in Innerface International: https://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol4_1/page4.html