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In his book6, Thorne further states: "astronomers in the 1930's responded enthusiastically to the Baade-Zwicky concept of a supernova, but treated Zwicky's neutron star and cosmic ray ideas with disdain...In fact it is clear to me from a detailed study of Zwicky's writings of the era that he did not understand the laws of physics well enough to be able to substantiate his ideas."
This opinion was also held by Robert Oppenheimer who published a set of papers with collaborators Volkoff, Snyder, and Tolman, on Russian physicist Lev Landau's ideas about stellar energy originating from a neutron core at the heart of a star.
Einstein and Eddington opposed neutron star concept
These Oppenheimer papers concluding that either neutron stars or black holes could be the outcome of massive star implosion were about as far as physicists could go at that time. However, the most prominent physicist of the time, Albert Einstein, and the doyen of astronomers, Sir Arthur Eddington, both vigorously opposed the concepts involved in stellar collapse beyond the white dwarf stage. Thus the subject appears to have been put on hold coincident with the outbreak of war in 1939.
During the 1940's, virtually all capable physicists were occupied with tasks relating to the war effort. Apparently this was not so for Russian-born astronomer-physicist, George Gamow, a professor at Leningrad who had taken up a position at George Washington University in 1934. Gamow conceived the beginning of the Hubble expanding universe as a thermonuclear fireball in which the original stuff of creation was a dense gas of protons, neutrons, electrons, and gamma radiation which transmuted by a chain of nuclear reactions into the variety of elements that make up the world of today. Referring to this work, Overbye4 writes: "In the forties, Gamow and a group of collaborators wrote a series of papers spelling out the details of thermonucleogenesis. Unfortunately their scheme didn't work. Some atomic nuclei were so unstable that they fell apart before they could fuse again into something heavier, thus breaking the element building chain. Gamow's team disbanded in the late 40's, its work ignored and disdained."
Among this work was a paper by Gamow and Schoenfeld that included a suggestion that energy loss from aging stars could be mediated by an efflux of neutrinos. This proposal appears to have been overlooked or ignored until the 1960's. However it appears to be the direct source for the P. 464 quotation from the Urantia Papers and bears similarities to the use of the direct quotations from the Swann book (see p.10) by the Papers' authors in that the authors selectively use that which is right and ignore that which is wrong. In their conclusions, Gamow and Schoenfeld drew attention to the fact that, "the neutrinos are still considered as highly hypothetical particles because of the failure of all efforts to detect them," also noting that "the dynamics of the collapse represents very serious mathematical difficulties." And in other papers from this Gamow group, the neutron star idea is ignored in favor of large stars gradually shedding their excess mass and retiring gracefully as white dwarfs.
Conservation of energy law under fire
As time went by, the need for the neutrino grew, firstly to save the law of conservation of energy, but also laws of conservation of momentum, angular momentum (spin), and lepton number. As knowledge of what it ought to be like grew, plus the knowledge accruing from the intense efforts to produce the atom bomb, possible means of detecting this particle began to emerge. In 1953, experiments were begun by a team led by C.L. Cowan and F. Reines. Fission reactors were now in existence in which the breakdown of uranium yielded free neutrons that, outside of the atomic nucleus, were unstable and broke down via beta decay to yield a proton, an electron, and, if it existed, the missing particle.
Detection of the elusive neutrino
The Cowan and Reines team devised an elaborate scheme to detect the antineutrinos from a reactor. By 1956 their system was detecting 70 such events per day, unequivocally ascribable to antineutrinos. It now remained to prove that this particle was not its own antiparticle, as is the case with the photon. This was done by R.R. Davis in 1956 using a detection system designed specifically for what the properties of the neutrino should be and testing it with an antineutrino source from a fission reactor.
Search resumed
According to eminent Russian astrophysicist, Igor Novikov, no searches in earnest for neutron stars or black holes were attempted by astronomers before the 1960's. He says, "It was tacitly assumed that these objects were far too eccentric and most probably were the fruits of theorists' wishful thinking…at any rate, if they existed, then they could not be detected.4"
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