Summary
This short excerpt from the Urantia Papers should be enough to send anyone with an elementary knowledge of high school mathematics scurrying to discover what it is these Papers have for them. For in this short article there is to be found what many would consider to be absolute proof that the authors were what they claimed to be--out of this world, off the planet. However, a word of caution. These authors brought us a unique work that could open our doorway to spiritual living, but they also denied that their revelation was 'inspired'--meaning 'has divine authority.'
In the 1930's, the electron and the proton were the best known sub-atomic particles. The proton was large enough for many of its properties to be measured even at the beginning of the 1900's. But the electron was so tiny that for most of the 20th century, it was considered by many to be a dimensionless point. The Urantia Papers include short 'fables' taken from a popular 1930's physics text book that involved the radii of the electron and the proton. But prior to the 1990's, there was no way for the reader to check these fables--which, in any case, appeared to be ridiculous.
All changed when, in the 1990"s, Nobel prize winner, Hans Dehmelt, found a way to hold a single electron in a trap. This enabled him to then measure the electron's diameter. In its turn, the way opened for Urantia Book reader, physicist Stefan Tallqvist, to check out the book's two fables--with the truly amazing results that, within the limits of Heisenberg uncertainty, both the radii of the electron and proton were correctly estimated.
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In a textbook published at an American university in 1934 entitled, "The Architecture of the Universe," physicist W.F.G. Swann wrote:
"The mass of the electron is so small that if you should magnify all masses so that the electron attains a mass of one tenth of an ounce, that one tenth of an ounce would, on the same scale of magnification, become as heavy as the earth."
The words of Swann were reproduced in Paper 42, Section 6 but with the comparison obviously deliberately changed from mass to volume. It reads:
"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." (P.477)
Taking the rest mass of the electron at 9.1 x 10-28 g, 0.1 ounce as 2.8 g, the radius of the earth as 6.4 x 106 m and putting k as the magnification constant, then:
k x 9.1 x 10-28 = 2.8……..1, and so
k = 3.1 x 1027…………….2
As the radius of the expanded electron (Re) x k is said to be equal to the radius of the earth, we have:
Re x k = 6.4 x 106……….3
And substituting for k in (3), we get the electron radius:
Re = 2 x 10-21 m ………...4
At the time of receipt of the Urantia Papers and up until the 1990's this made no sense. Many physicists treated the electron as a dimensionless point so at best its radius would be half the Planck length of 10-35 m. Others, by a process of circuitous reasoning, assigned it a radius of 5 x 10-15 m.
