© 1995 Nigel Nunn
© 1995 International Urantia Association (IUA)
By Nigel Nunn
Canberra, Australia
Energy is close of kin to divinity when it is Paradise energy. We incline to the belief that monota is the living, nonspirit energy of Paradise- an eternity counterpart of the living, spirit energy of the Original Son…
We cannot differentiate the nature of Paradise spirit and Paradise monota; they are apparently alike. They have different names, but you can hardly be told very much about a reality whose spiritual and whose nonspiritual manifestations are distinguishable only by name. UB 42:2.19-20
By projecting energy from the absolute realm onto the constrained region we call the master universe, the chance to endlessly rearrange that energy arose. And over the last hundred years, it has been the important and increasingly profitable work of physicists to map these rearrangements.
In the same way that their precursors were able to agree to, and work in accordance with, a reality consisting of arrangements of earth, air, fire, and water, so too, had 20 th century physicists given in to the evidence, and agreed that material reality is built upon the foundation of atoms of matter: arrangements of nuclei and their orbiting electrons. This description was quickly sharpened. It was found that the whole phenomenon could be more accurately described as clever arrangements of two families of particles: leptons and quarks (the nuclear particles, protons and neutrons, being seen as triads of point-like quarks). It was thought that by including the forces responsible for animating these particles, a few equations should tie the whole thing into a testable model and a neat philosophical package.
In the article The Matter of Leptoquarks in the October 1995 edition of the IUA Journal, we left the ladies and gentlemen of Science stuck in a siege before the walls of Quark, lacking the tools required to break through to the next mystery. To learn more about the nature of matter meant probing beyond the fields and behaviours already known to be associated with quarks. Their tools have since been sharpened, and it seems that some chinks in the wall have begun to appear.
Roger Cashmore, professor of particle physics at the University of Oxford, and Christine Sutton, are members of an Oxford team working with the ZEUS detector at HERA, the Hadron Electron Ring Accelerator, beneath suburban Hamburg in Germany. Prompted by earlier evidence that a proton must be more than a few quarks, they designed and ran experiments to investigate deeper into the patterns of matter. The results they got were both satisfying and surprising. The data seemed to confirm the quark-based model of the proton, but at the same time hinted that quarks and gluons are only phenomena associated with the components of which matter is actually made
Apparently the deeper we probe, the richer and riper a region for speculation the heart of a proton is proving to be.
As early as 1973 , there were signs that protons must contain more than just the three quarks proposed in the “standard model”. The quarks themselves could account for at most half of the proton’s momentum, indicating that the proton must “harbour something else as well”. That something was later identified as “gluons”, the carriers of the strong nuclear force that binds quarks to each other. The picture became interesting when it was found that these gluons seem able to temporarily transform themselves into quark-antiquark pairs, before returning to their “gluon state”.
During the 1980’s experiments at Fermilab near Chicago and CERN near Geneva, were able to probe down to a resolution of 10-16 metres, which meant they could give only a very coarse view of protons which have a diameter of about 10-15 metres. However, during recent experiments at the DESY lab in Hamburg, HERA has been able to probe features as small as 10-18 metres, a hundred times finer than previously possible.
The earlier experiments had shown that the three “effective” or “valance” quarks were caught in an ephemeral sea of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, and that each of these sea quarks and antiquarks has relatively little momentum: no more (and perhaps much less) ten per cent of the proton’s total. “The surprise from HERA is just how many gluons there seem to be. HERA can measure momentum fractions more than ten times smaller than before. down to less than 1 / 1000th the momentum of the proton, and the results show that there are in the region of 100 gluons overall - many more than simple extrapolations of data from pervious experiments suggested.”
Recall Paper 42: Energy - Mind and Matter. On 42:6.4-6, in section 6. Ultimatons, Electrons And Atoms, a Mighty Messenger describes the arrangements of ultimatons of which “atomic matter” consists:
The ultimatons, unknown on Urantia, slow down through many phases of physical activity before they attain the revolutionary-energy prerequisites to electronic organization. Ultimatons have three varieties of motion: mutual resistance to cosmic force, individual revolutions of antigravity potential. and the intraelectronic positions of the one hundred mutually interassociated ultimatons.
Mutual attraction holds one hundred ultimatons together in the constitution of the electron.
Ultimatons do not describe orbits or whirl about in circuits within the electrons, but they do spread or cluster in accordance with their axial revolutionary velocities, thus determining the differential electronic dimensions. This same ultimatonic velocity of axial revolution also determines the negative or positive reactions of the several types of electronic units. The entire segregation and grouping of electronic matter, together with the electric differentiation of negative and positive bodies of energy-matter, results from these various functions of the component ultimatonic interassociation. UB 42:6.4-6
In these paragraphs, the narrator seems to be implying that both electrons and the nuclear particles (protons and neutrons) share the same fundamental nature, being arrangements of ultimatons. The differences between the particles arise from the different arrangements of their components. (Note that the HERA experiments investigate the proton. The electron still defies our probes.)
The results from HERA include much discussed and speculation about colour, a property which gives rise to the strong force in the same way that electric charge gives rise to the electromagnetic force. “But whereas there is one electric charge (negative, say) and one anticharge (positive), there are three colours for the strong force and three anticolours. And just as electric charges give rise to an electric field, these ‘colour charges’ give rise to a colour field associated with the strong force.”
“It turns out that when the quarks combine to form particles they can do so only in combinations that have a net colour of zero. One way they can do this is to group together in threes, each quark with a different colour, so that the colours in effect neutralise each other, rather as the three primary colours (combine to) make white.” Quark triads of this type, such as protons and neutrons, are called baryons. Alternatively, a quark can pair with any appropriately anticoloured antiquark to form a meson (mesotron?).
On the matter of the meson/mesotron, recall the following from Paper 42 :
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. UB 42:8.3
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. UB 42:8.4
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 powerfil force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undisclosed on Urantia. UB 42:8.6
At HERA, an odd thing has been happening in about one tenth of its high energy collisions. Usually, an electron strikes a proton and violently knocks out a quark, which then emerges in the guise of a jet of new particles. The remainder of the proton is so disrupted that it breaks apart, its remaining component quarks and gluons recombining to form various colourless particles. However, about once in every ten collisions, this explosive disruption is not seen. Instead, what seems to be a “colourless island” (an entire colourless component) is cleanly detached from the proton
A possible explanation involves an almost forgotten object called a “pomeron”. The idea of such an object was first raised by the Russian physicist Isaac Pomeranchuk in 1958 . He predicted the existence of an object that has no properties except energy and momentum. The speculation is that just such an object is being detached in the ten per cent of unusual collisions recorded at HERA.
Can we URANTIA Book readers speculate that it is in fact an ultimaton that is being detached?
Has the human race detected its first isolated ultimaton?