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Neutrinos, Neutrons, and Neutron Stars.
Summary
Prior to the 1960's, the response from any astrophysicist reading the Urantia Papers' page 464 quotation given below, would likely have been, "Who wrote that rubbish."
These 'tiny particles devoid of electric potential' were first postulated in the early 1930's by Wolfgang Pauli as a possible answer for a missing energy source during the radioactive beta decay of atoms. (Pauli immediately apologized for speculating about something he believed could never be proved) However that page 464 quotation turned out to be an accurate description of a process involving Pauli's little particles that took almost 30 years to confirm.
A star like our sun fails to collapse under gravity because of an equal and opposite back pressure generated by nuclear reactions at its core. The major factor preventing collapse is the slowness by which light energy is conducted to the exterior--about a million years. The importance of Pauli's 'tiny particles devoid of properties' is that even in the sun's interior they travel close to the speed of light in a vacuum. And if generated "in vast quantities" they must have the potential to eliminate that back pressure and ensure collapse of the star.
For many years, much uncertainty remained about neutron star formation. Fortunately, in 1987, our companion galaxy, the Clouds of Magellan, cleared matters up by hosting a supernova explosion--which was followed up by a shower of neutrinos being recorded at the huge neutrino detectors built at Kamiokande in Japan.
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"In large suns when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensues, 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."(P. 464)
No tiny particles devoid of electric potential that could escape readily from the interior of a collapsing star were known to exist in 1934. In fact, the reality of such particles was not confirmed 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 mass energy of the electron and proton did not add up with that of the neutron. To account for the missing energy, 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. Not long after, the great Enrico Fermi took up Pauli's idea and attempted to publish a paper on the subject in the prestigious science journal Nature. The editors rejected Fermi's paper on the grounds that it was too speculative.
An interesting thing to note is The Urantia Book statement that tiny particles devoid of electric potential would be released in vast quantities during the collapse of the star. If, prior to about 1960, any author other than a knowledgeable particle physicist was prophesying about the formation of a neutron star (a wildly speculative proposal from Zwicky and Baade in the early 1930's), then surely that author would have been 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:
1. neutron ----> proton + electron + LNP (where LNP stands for little neutral particle.)
Hence the reverse should be:
2. 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-energy. Thus, in terms of available speculative scientific concepts in 1934, The Urantia Book appears to have put things back to front, it has predicted a vast release of LNP's, when the reversal of radioactive beta decay would appear to demand that LNPs should disappear.
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