On the basis that the Urantia revelation was given to us in the 1934/5 period, I have previously considered certain statements in The Urantia Book to be prophetic. Among these were descriptions of the force that holds the atomic nucleus together, also the so-called weak force of radio-active decay, and the role of the neutrino in supernova explosions. Through his exploration of human sources for Urantia Book materials, Matthew Block has now discovered scientific papers, published in the early 1940's, that very obviously provided source material for what I had considered to be prophetic statement.

In the world of science, publication date is the normal criterion for claims to originality in authorship. Hence the year 1955, when The Urantia Book was first published, would be the normal date to evaluate possible prophetic material from that book. However, on the basis of firm assurances from former members of the group known as the Forum that was concerned with receipt and subsequent publication of the Papers, and also from one-time trustees of the Urantia Foundation (two), I accepted that no alterations had been made to the original text either after the original date of receipt or since the first printing.

Matthew's work, plus other discoveries, have shown these assurances to have been unmerited. Matthew has now provided me with copies of original papers from the early 1940's period that are indisputably source papers for statements in the book that I examined in previous articles. To be reviewed in this and the next Innerface are: G. Gamow, Neutrinos VS Supernovae, Science Monthly (January 1942), and C. W. Sheppard, The Evanescent Mesotron, Scientific American (October 1940).

It is unfortunate that I made the error of not sticking to the established practice of using publication date to establish priorities. It has now transpired that a long-suppressed document written by Dr. Sadler has come to light that clearly states that extra material was added to the Urantia Papers by the revelators between 1935 and 1942.

My error in using a starting date of 1935 affects only a relatively small volume of the prophetic materials uncovered in The Urantia Book. And even for the material under review, all is not lost since there are interesting departures and omissions by the Urantia Paper author from what the human authors of the source papers actually wrote. On page 464, the book states:

In those suns which are encircuited in the space-energy channels, solar energy is liberated by various complex nuclear-reaction chains, the most common of which is the hydrogen-carbon-helium reaction. In this metamorphosis, carbon acts as an energy catalyst since it is in no way actually changed by this process of converting hydrogen into helium. Under certain conditions of high temperature the hydrogen penetrates the carbon nuclei. Since the carbon cannot hold more than four such protons, when this saturation state is attained, it begins to emit protons as fast as new ones arrive. In this reaction the ingoing hydrogen particles come forth as a helium atom. (464)

The above description comes from work of Hans Bethe who described the so-called carbon cycle for energy production in stars in 1939. In actuality, this hydrogen-carbon-helium reaction occurs mainly in stars hotter than our sun. For cooler stars like our sun, Bethe and Critchfield (1938) described a different sequence of reactions, called the proton-proton chain, that is responsible for the hydrogen to helium conversion. Quoting Bethe's work, Gamow states that the carbon cycle is the "particular nuclear reaction...responsible for the energy production in the sun and all other stars of the main sequence"-- which is a little strange since it was known to be incorrect at the time he wrote. The Urantia Paper author has not repeated that error.

The "space energy channels" in the Urantia Paper passage are Urantia Book terminology and are unknown to science. They are channels by which energy encircuits the material creations, with origin and destiny in the Isle of Paradise. Stars directly in those channels can "feed" on that energy and burn indefinitely. Stars not too far off apparently can partially maintain themselves, while those far off become exhausted when their own fuel supply burns out.

Gamow estimates that our sun will decrease its hydrogen content from 35% to 1% in the next 10 billion years. Long before that time, our planet would be uninhabitable. Contradicting Gamow, on p. 465 The Urantia Book states that our sun will function at its present efficiency for another 25 billion years. Possibly this means that our sun is at least partially encircuited on the "space-energy channels."

Urantia Paper 41 has, "Reduction of hydrogen content increases the luminosity of a sun. In the suns destined to burn out, the height of luminosity is attained at the point of hydrogen exhaustion. Subsequent to this point, brilliance is maintained by the resultant process of gravity contraction. Eventually, such a star will become a so-called white dwarf, a highly condensed sphere." (464)

Gamow states as follows: "Since the nuclear reactions transforming hydrogen to helium cause definite changes in the physical properties of stellar matter, one should expect changes of the observed characteristics of the star itself...the steady decrease of the hydrogen content in the star must lead to a quite considerable increase of its luminosity... After the star...reaches...state of maximum luminosity, the hydrogen content of its body will be entirely exhausted....In the absence of hydrogen...the star is bound to start a slow contraction...radiation of the star is supported by the gravitational energy liberated in contraction...the final stage...represented by a very dense star...the so-called "white dwarfs.'

The Urantia Book continues: "In large suns--small circular nebulae--when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensues, if 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. 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 of Urantia time." (464)

As I read the Urantia Paper, it appears that its author is trying to make a clear distinction between stars around the size of our sun that are destined to burn out and become white dwarfs, and those that are considerably larger--those up to a "gigantic" size. At the mid-stage of his paper, Gamow states, "In spite of the tremendous difference in luminosity, the phenomena of supernova explosions show many similar features with ordinary novae." Then, at the end of his paper he concludes that the final result for stars collapsing in either nova or supernova is a white dwarf. He presumes that the difference in behavior must be a larger initial mass for those collapsing in a supernova.

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The idea that supernova explosions result in the formation of neutron stars and not white dwarfs had been put forward by Zwicky and Baade in the early 1930's and intensively publicized by Zwicky. In 1939, in a theoretical paper, Oppenheimer and co-workers concluded that the collapse of very large stars could continue to a Schwarzchild singularity (now called a black hole). But the idea of black holes and neutron stars was opposed vigorously by both Einstein and Eddington, and perhaps this was the reason for Gamow plumbing for the final point of supernova collapse being a white dwarf. It is now known that both black holes and neutron stars can result from the collapse of very large stars.

The key difference between nova and supernova is the participation of "vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric potential" also called "runaway particles"  by both Gamow and the Urantia Paper, and by Gamow only, the  "neutrinos."

A little more than 10 years before Gamow wrote his article, precise energy balance measurements for a process termed "beta radioactive decay" appeared to contradict a long established principle in classical physics that energy could neither be created nor destroyed. The energy budget for this process came up short, resulting in speculation by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, that there must exist an undetectable particle having no properties.

The unthinkable alternative to Pauli's particle, soon to be named the neutrino by Enrico Fermi, was that the law of conservation of energy is wrong, at least at the sub-atomic level. In actuality there was room for doubt, for no set of measurements can be perfect, and physicists used a term called "entropy" that is similar to the "sundries" or "miscellaneous" used by accountants to square off a budget deficit.

As time progressed, the need for Pauli's particle became acute. However, it remained factual that the only real evidence for its existence was located in the energy balance accounting. The Gamow paper we are reviewing here had a forerunner, a highly speculative paper published in 1941 by Gamow and Schoenberg¹ entitled Neutrino Theory of Stellar Collapse in which the still undiscovered neutrino provided the hypothetical means for a star to collapse in record time. The major problem for getting a star to collapse was in the way energy could escape from the interior to the surface unhindered. It was already known that light energy could take a million years to make the journey, and x-rays and cosmic rays not much less.

In his paper, Gamow glibly states, "it can be calculated that neutral particles of small mass would easily pass through many thousands of kilometers of lead without suffering any absorption," while seeming to ignore that the properties of neutrality and zero mass apply also to the photons of light that take a million years for the journey. Nevertheless, the speculation was correct and when finally discovered in 1956, the neutrino was found to have the appropriate properties to make the journey. However, the Gamow and Schoenberg paper did contain an escape clause in its summary that remarked, "the neutrinos are still hypothetical particles because of the failure of all efforts to detect them."

Approximately one tenth of the Gamow paper is devoted to describing the reasons for speculating upon the existence of the neutrino and the properties needed from it. He writes, "The character of the neutrinos has been very ingeniously summarized by Dr. Swann, who said, 'The neutrinos are like world war debts. You never expect to see it paid, but you satisfy your conscience and the conscience of your debtor by keeping it on the records.'"

Prior to Matthew's discovery, we could have no idea of how much the author, human or celestial, of Paper 41 knew about novae, supernovae, and neutrinos. It is now obvious that this author had thoroughly examined the Gamow paper prior to carefully selecting those sentences and phrases that suited the purpose at hand. Thus this author could not have been other than well aware of the highly speculative nature of the Gamow statements about the undiscovered neutrino.

As done in a previous article, let us hypothesize that Paper 41 was written by a scientist (or extremely knowledgeable non-scientist) for the purpose of supporting the revelatory claim of The Urantia Book. Could this hypothetical person justify using such a highly speculative description of a supernova? What were the chances of being right and what were the chances of being wrong? Perhaps this is best illustrated with facts about a 1987 supernova that occurred in our neighboring Cloud of Magellan. Since the late 1950's, an enormous volume of theoretical papers have been published on the nature of supernovae, most of them supported by elegant and highly sophisticated computer simulation. But up to 1995², nobody had succeeded in making a supernova explode in a computer simulation, thus illustrating the continuing ignorance about the true mechanism of star collapse. And even today, theory does not correctly account for the measured flow of neutrinos derived from stars such as our sun.

Gamow was guessing. Whoever wrote Paper 41 knew full well that this was so. Does it make sense for a human author to offer guesswork in support of a revelatory claim? But if the author was truly a celestial revelator seeking to help this planet arise from its spiritual mire, then things are different, are they not? In my view, Matthew's disclosure of the 1940's articles has strengthened rather than weakened the case for the prophetic nature of the materials under discussion.

Ken Glasziou, Australia.

References:

1. Gamow, G. and M. Schoenberg, Neutrino Theory of Stellar Collapse, Physical Reviews 59, 539 (1941).

2. Sky and Telescope, August 1995.