PARTICLE PHYSICS

The Urantia Papers, received in 1934, described a weak force carrier, release of tiny neutral particles (antineutrinos) in radioactive beta decay, release of more tiny neutral particles during gravitational collapse of massive stairs (neutrinos), and the existence of a then unknown strong nuclear force. The existence of the weak force carrier was demonstrated in 1983, the existence of neutrinos was confirmed in 1956, the existence of neutron stars whose formation gives rise to the release of vast quantities of neutrinos was confirmed by X-ray telescope in 1967, and the theory of the strong nuclear force involving quarks and gluons became accepted theory during the late 1970’s.
REFERENCES: The Urantia Book, p. 479; “Two Remarkable Predictions”, K.T. Glasziou, 6-0-6 Newsletter, vol 9 (no.3),1988; Brotherhood of Man Library, file GLASZ07.DOC,1988.

PARTICLE PHYSICS

The Urantia Papers contain accounts of the physical structure of the universe, the formation and evolution of the Solar system, the evolution of life, and the subsequent evolution and history of man some of which does not accord with currently held views of scientists. In contrast, there is much in the Book that was highly speculative at the time of receipt of the Urantia Papers (1934) that has since turned out to be correct.

In my view there are two commentaries that are quite outstanding in that their chances of being correct were infinitely small excepting that they were based upon a pre-existing bank of knowledge. One of these commentaries refers to atomic structure. The other concerns continental drift. There are, of course, many other remarkable comments, but these two, by themselves, tell me that I have to take the claims of The Urantia Book seriously.

Quoting from page 464 we read as follows:

“in large suns when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensures, and such a’body is not sufficiently opaque 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 devoid of electric potential, and such particles readily escape from the solar interior thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun within a few days.” (41:8.3)

No tiny particles devoid of electric charge were known to exist in 1934, and certainly none that could escape readily from the star’s interior under the conditions being considered. In fact such particles were not shown to exist until 1956, one year after the publication of The Urantia Book. The existence of particles that might have such properties had been put forward as a suggestion by Wolfgang Pauli in 1932, because studies on radioactive beta decay of atoms had indicated that a neutron could decay to a proton and an electron, but measurements had shown that the combined masses of the electron and proton did not add up to the mass of the neutron. To account for the missing mass, Pauli suggested a little neutral particle was emitted, and then, on the same day, while lunching with the eminent astrophysicist Walter Baade, Pauli commented that he had done the worst thing a theoretical physicist could possibly do, he had proposed a particle that could never be discovered because it had no properties. However, not long after, the great Enrico Fermi took up Pauli’s idea and attempted to publish a paper on the subject in the journal Nature, which is where scientists like to make their spectacular suggestions. The editors rejected Fermi’s paper on the grounds that it was too speculative. This was in 1933, the year before receipt of the relevant Urantia document.

Now an interesting thing to note is that the Urantia Paper says that tiny particles devoid of electric charge would be released in vast quantities during the collapse of the star. If the author had in mind the formation of a neutron star, another wildly speculative proposal from Zwicky and Baade, then surely he was thinking about the reversal of beta decay in which a proton, an electron and Pauli’s little neutral particle would be squeezed together to form a neutron.

Radioactive beta decay can be written…

neutron ——> proton + electron + LNP where LNP stands for little neutral particle. Hence the reverse should be: LNP + electron + proton ——> neutron

For this to occur an electron and a proton have to be compressed to form a neutron but somehow they would have to add a little neutral particle in order to make up for the missing mass. Thus, in terms of available speculative knowledge in 1934, the Urantia paper appears to have put things back to front, it has predicted a vast release of LNP’S, when it should have been mopping them up.

The idea of a neutron star was classified along with other gee-whiz science fiction right up until 1967. Most astronomers believed that stars, from average size like our sun up to very massive stars, finished their lives as white dwarfs. The theoretical properties of neutrons stars were just too preposterous; for example, a thimble full would weigh about 100 million tonnes; and so large stars were presumed to blow off their surplus mass a piece at a time until they got below the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses, when they could retire as respectable white dwarfs. Thisprocess did not entail the release of vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric charge as mentioned in The Urantia Book.

Let us move now to p.479 of The Urantia Book, the section on sub-atomic physics. Firstly, note that the word mesotron is used to denote a carrier that shuffles backwards and forwards between neutrons and protons in the nucleus of the atom, carrying both energy and positive electric charge and serving to help bond the nucleus together. In 1934 there was no word to signify this carrier, but it was given the name meson in 1935 by the Japanese physicist, Yukawa, who first proposed the theory. (Actually, for a short period, the term mesotron was used in scientific circles). Further down the page, the word mesotron is used a second time in discussing the radioactive disintegration of the neutron in which it is stated that the neutron decays to a proton and a mesotron and that the latter subsequently decays to yield an electron and a small uncharged particle. This particle could be identified with Pauli’s and Feffni’s little neutral particles that later became known as neutrinos.

The Urantia Book is obviously discussing two different mesotton energy carriers, one the carrier of positive charge between proton and neutron, the other the carrier of negative charge from neutron to electron. Many, many years passed, and many different theories became extinct before the characteristics of these two carriers were sorted out. The carrier of positive charge was detected and named the pion in 1946. The carrier of negative charge became known as W-, and remained a theoretical construct until 1983, when it was finally detected.

The idea of anti-matter and negative energy was introduced by that great physicist, Paul Dirac in about 1930, and this also was thought by many to be science fiction material. Eventually the idea achieved respectability, and modern theories proclaim that every sub-atomic particle has an anti-particle, and that includes Pauli’s little neutral particle, the neutrino. Its anti-particle is called the anti-neutrino, and both are tiny uncharged particles that to date have not been shown to have detectable mass. Modern quantum theory requires that the absorption of an anti-neutrino is effectively the same thing as the emission of a neutrino.

Modern theory also tells us that beta decay is really:

neutron ——> proton + W-

W- ——> electron + anti-neutrino

This is the reaction described in The Urantia Book as breakdown of the mesotron energy carrier to electron and small, uncharged particles, during radioactive decay of the neutron. The force involved is called the weak force, and the first theoretical treatment was by Enrico Fermi in 1934, who proposed a force carrier that had impossible properties. It was analogous to the photon, the force carrier in quantum theory for electromagnetism, that has no mass and acts over infinite distance. Pauli’s weak force carrier acted over very small distances and Pauli thought it must have infinite mass. No significant advances were made until Yang and Mills developed the key mathematical treatment in 1954. An improved theory was proposed in 1967 by Weinberg and Salam. ne new theory proposed a pair of charge carriers, W- & W+, and a neutral energy carrier, Z. The theory on which they were based required that the particles be massless, which also meant they would act over infinite distance. This was wrong because the weak force of beta decay was known to act only over the extremely small distances within the atomic nucleus. Weinberg and Salam got around the difficu4 by introducing another field, the Higgs field, in which Higgs’ particles coalesced with W & Z and endowed them with mass, but unfortunately their theory now endowed the weak force with infinite strength. All of this remained gee-whiz theoretical physics until a Dutchman, Gerhardt Hooft, showed that the theory was renonnalisable, which really is a neat mathematical trick to get rid of unwanted infinities. Hooft’s results were sufficiently exciting to set the experimental physicists searching for the W & Z particles, and these were duly found in 1983, perhaps the most significant discovery of physics in the last 50 years. The work resulted in the Nobel prize to Weinberg and Salam, also Glashow who was involved in the very early work.

For the gravity contraction of large suns described in The Urantia Book as “giving origin to vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric potential which readily escape from the solar interior thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun within a few days”, the sub-atomic reaction that comes about is the squeezing together of electrons and protons to form neutrons. Whereas anti-neutrinos are released in beta decay, during star collapse when a proton and an electron are squeezed together to form a neutron, it is a neutrino that is released. Both the anti-neutrinos and the neutrinos are tiny uncharged particles, just as described in The Urantia Book.

There is another remarkable statement on the remarkable page 479. At the end of the section on atomic cohesion we are told that whereas the mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, it does not explain cohesion of proton to proton and neutron to neutron. It then tells us that the powerful force that does this is as yet undiscovered on Urantia.

In 1934, the proton and the neutron were thought of as fundamental particles. There was no need for any other binding force than Yukawa’s meson to account for the stability of the atomic nucleus, and The Urantia Book ‘s powerful force was an enigma. This situation continued until, in the 1950’s, a multitude of new particles called hadrons were discovered. Eventually physicists were forced to consider that all these particles, including the proton and neutron, were really made up from even smaller particles. In 1963, a theory was put forward giving these new particles the name quark, but it took another IO to IS years before a respectable theory had developed with adequate experimental support. By 1979, the powerful undiscovered force of p.479 of The Urantia Book was firmly established as a force mediated by particles called gluons that were responsible for the binding together of the quarks that made up the proton, neutron and other hadrons. So again The Urantia Book was correct in telling us of the existence of this undiscovered force that appeared to be totally unnecessary in 1934.

It is probably difficult for the modem generation to realize what a remarkable thing it is for The Urantia Book to have accurately described these particles and forces in 1934, or for that matter, 1955. The basis of these discoveries is quantum theory, now having general acceptance, but in the 1930’s, it was vigorously opposed by such men as the great Albert Einstein, and even most of its founders regarded it as a makeshift mathematical invention that would soon be displaced by something more sensible. One of its most important founders was Edwin Schrodinger, who at a later stage in his life found the theory so bizarre that he stated that he wished he had never had anything to do with it. And even today, quantum theory reads more like something out of Alice in Wonderland than a serious scientific theory. Ile neutron star also was more of a science fiction scenario until, in 1967, the orbiting Einstein X-ray Observatory beamed back pictures of the neutron star at the center of the Crab nebula, confirming observations made by radio telescopes, and forcing astronomers to take seriously, that which previously had been regarded as science fiction.

In describing correctly the weak force carrier (Urantia Book mesotron) and the release of a tiny uncharged particle (anti-neutrinos) in radioactive beta decay as well as the release of vast quantities of tiny uncharged particles (neutrinos) during gravitational collapse of large stars (which also infers the reality of the neutron star), the authors of the Urantia Papers stayed marginally within their instructions not to reveal anything that was not already conjectured by Earth scientists. As far as I am aware, the additional force to Yukawa’s meson for maintaining the stability of the atomic nucleus was not proposed until at least the late 1950’s. However, in 1934, for any Earth scientist, posing as a revelator, to guess at the existence of anything as unlikely as the weak force carrier, neutrinos, anti-neutrinos, neutron stars, and the undiscovered strong nuclear force would have been sheer stupidity. But perhaps no more stupid than the next remarkable prediction, the concept of continental drift.

REFERENCES: The Urantia Book, p. 479; K.T. Glasziou, 6-0-6 Newsletter, vol. 9 (No.3),1988; The Brotherhood of Man Library file GLASZO7.DOC, 1988.