© 2002 Larry Mullins
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
| Issue Content, Fall 2002 | Fall 2002 — Index | An Old-Fashioned Conference of Urantia Believers at Unity Village |
One of the historically renowned quantum physicists, Richard Feynman, once suggested that all physicists should put up a sign in there office with a particular three-digit number on it that would remind them of how much science doesn’t know. Werner Heisenberg, of the famous uncertainty principle, declared that all the quandaries of quantum physics would shrivel up if this same three-digit number was ever explained! In The God Particle by Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist, Leon Lederman, the same perplexing three-digit number is referred to as showing up: “ . . naked all over the place. This means that a scientist on Mars, or the fourteenth planet of the star Sirius, using whatever god-awful units they have for charge, speed, and their version of Plank’s constant, would get [the same three digit number]. It is a pure number.” Lederman goes even further: “Physicists have agonized over [this three digit number] for fifty years . . . I tell my undergraduate students that if they are ever in a major city anywhere in the world, they should write [this three digit number] on a sign and hold it up on a busy street corner. Eventually a physicist will see that they’re distressed and come to their assistance.”
Long-time readers may laugh aloud, as I did, when they learn that the mysterious number is 137 .
To readers of less experience, 137 is the key number that would represent the primary distribution of the First Source and Center. In the Urantia Papers: number one representing the First Source and Center, number three representing the Paradise Trinity, and number seven representing the Sevenfold Relationship, God the Sevenfold. (Seven exhausts all possible combinations of the Trinity).
But how could the cosmic revelatory significance of number 137 be explained to a scientist like Lederman? He would have to study the Urantia Papers to grasp it. Even if he chose to do so, what value would the information be to his career? If he sought to disclose it publicly he would be disgraced in his chosen profession.
And therein lies the problem of the many experts of particular disciplines who are potential readers of the Urantia Papers. The quantum physics scientist peers at gauges and screens to study the world of the very, very small, and is baffled. A good student of the Urantia Papers might explain to her: “Of course what you are seeing here violates the precepts of what we know as time and space. You are looking into the emerging Unqualified Absolute. The puzzling transactions you see are simply the mind of God engaged in the cancellation of both past and future to ‘make room’ for time and space — the Universal Absolute.” However, would any scientist spend the months of study required to grasp this principle of how the Absolute “makes room” for the finite?
This is also a problem for the older scientific minds in the Urantia Movement. It is a disappointment to me that the majority of our selfappointed Urantian “scientists” have never delved into the really difficult issues, such as the significance of “137.” They prefer the safer course of sawing the sawdust of the science in the Papers, even though it was disclaimed in the sense it would soon be in “need of revision.” Nor will they take on the daunting task of developing a revised body of science as an adjunct to the Papers. (For even if the science were thoroughly updated, the philosophical foundations of the Papers would not be damaged in any way). Then, in this dry desert of Urantia science, along comes Donald Briglia, of Palo Alto, California.
Joan and I visited a Urantia Study group in California a summer ago, and I mentioned the number 137 in context with quantum mechanics. Donald, a physicist, launched into an intriguing discussion of the number. At my request, he wrote an article on it. Part One is published in this issue.
Some will find this article a bit difficult, but it is well worth the effort of reading. It is well documented and offers a wealth of possible threads that could be picked up and developed by some of our younger, creative scientific minds. And, regarding science, keep in mind that Richard Feynman once noted that nothing we know about elementary particles and forces can tell us anything about green reptiles that go croak in the night, or the music of Mozart, or the Ten Commandments.
| Issue Content, Fall 2002 | Fall 2002 — Index | An Old-Fashioned Conference of Urantia Believers at Unity Village |