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this distance and the mass of the new particle I was seeking are inversely related to each other." He realized he could make the range of the nuclear force correct if he allowed the ball in the game of 'catch' to be heavy-- approximately 200 times heavier than the electron."
Para. 3 above extends Fermi's 1934 theory of radio-active decay of the neutron. In his early work, Yukawa had considered that his mesotron might act as the 'ball' in the 'catch' game during radioactive decay. After re-running his calculations, in 1938 he published a paper predicting the properties of such a mesotron which he now called a 'weak' photon, from which it became known as the 'W' particle.
Para's 1-3 come close to being the contemporary, but incredibly speculative, science of 1934. They include three unknown particles--the pion mesotron (found 1947), the W particle mesotron (found 1983), and the small uncharged particles (neutrinos found 1956). Few would have bet on these predictions being right.
Para 2. comments, "the alternations of energy status are unbelievably rapid..." According to Nobel prize winner, Steven Weinberg, they occur in the order of a million, million, million, millionth of a second. In contrast, the process described in para. 3 takes about a hundredth of a second.
Para. 4 states that the mesotron (pi meson) does not account for certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus. It then tells us that there is an aspect of this force that is as yet undiscovered on Urantia.
Leon Lederman was a young research worker in 1950 who later became director of the Fermi Laboratory. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988. In his book, The God Particle, he comments: "The hot particle of 1950 was the pion or pi meson, as it is also called. The pion had been predicted in 1936 by a Japanese theoretical physicist, Hideki Yukawa. It was thought to be the key to the strong force, which in those days was the big mystery. Today we think of the strong force in terms of gluons. But back then (i.e. 1950's), pions which fly back and forth between the protons to hold them together tightly in the nucleus were the key, and we needed to make and study them."
This force, unknown in 1934, (and for that matter in 1955 when The Urantia Book was published) is now known as the color force. Writing about it in their book, The Particle Explosion, Close, Marten, and Sutton state, "Back in the 1940's and 1950's, theorists thought that pions were the transmitters of the strong force. But experiments later showed that pions and other hadrons are composite particles, built from quarks, and the theory of the strong force had to be revised completely. We now believe that it is the color within the proton and the neutron that attracts them to each other to build nuclei. This process may have similarities to the way that electrical charge within atoms manages to build up complex molecules. Just as electrons are exchanged between atoms bound within a molecule, so are quarks and anti-quarks--in clusters we call 'pions'--exchanged between the protons and neutrons in a nucleus."
The strong force is also responsible for proton-proton and neutron-neutron interaction--such that, for example, if just a few percent stronger (says Freeman Dyson) two protons could combine in a relatively stable form ( though with distrous effects on the rate of star burn-out).
The mandate to the revelators permitted "the supplying of information which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge." (1110) The Urantia Papers were not in circulation before 1955, by which time the information provided in these paragraphs would have been redundant. However it does illustrate the degree of knowledge held by the authors of the Papers.
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