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In 1955, this Urantia Book Section could appear to be a fanciful extract from a science fiction novel. For one thing, antigravity was considered to be nonsense by most of the physics fraternity. Only recently has it attained a degree of respectability. And despite Einstein's E = mc2, very few people believed that energy could be converted to matter or that the weight (mass) of an object could be affected by its rate of rotation.
Nowadays we might not be surprised to read something like: "Bottomonium, for example, is what you get by putting together a bottom quark and its antiquark. They can come together to form a number of different mesons, depending on how they move relative to one another. The simplest is the "upsilon." It has the lowest energy--and the smallest mass--because the bottom quark and its antiquark rotate about one another as slowly as possible. Set these quarks rotating more vigorously, and you get other mesons with larger masses."
Science fiction? No, it comes from a serious 1998 discussion on lattice quantum chromodynamics computations. For more information ask a physicist.
"Highly energized cold bodies of condensed matter" from the Urantia Paper quotation could only mean black holes to the modern day physicist. Pre-1960's, condensed matter was known to exist in white dwarf stars but these could have a surface temperature in the order of 3000 degrees. The then hypothetical neutron star was even more condensed but both the neutron star and black holes remained undiscovered and their existence severely in doubt.
A respectability status for black holes is a very recent acquirement. In 1939, after Oppenheimer and co-workers demonstrated (via a highly simplified mathematical model) that black holes could be a possibility, Einstein and Eddington both vigorously rejected that concept. At the time, Einstein had a God-like status among physicists while Eddington had a similar status among astronomers, possibly attributable to his claim that only two people in the world understood relativity and Einstein was the other. To go against either of these demigods was akin to denying God himself.
Is a black hole devoid of heat? Nobody knows the answer. Matter entering black holes is accelerating under the influence of enormous gravitational forces and is assumed to carry on to a Schwarzchild singularity, a dimensionless point at the hole's center where the laws of physics are assumed to breakdown. However, all agree that heat cannot escape from a blackhole, so even a pinpoint-size black hole could not be used to heat the household hearth. Actually it would extract heat from the home so, for all practical purposes, we can consider black holes to be dead cold.
That brings us to "collisions among the dead giants of space"--colliding black holes? If it were not for quasars, we would not know that such was a realistic possibility. A quasar was a "quasistellar radio source." The original quasar was an extremely powerful radiosource discovered in Australia in 1962. After plotting its position, details were sent to the Mount Palomar Observatory where its optical spectrum revealed only a hydrogen spectrum and a location about 2 billion light-years from earth. "Quasar" was a misnomer as these bodies radiate over the full range of the spectrum and now are more often known as quasistellar objects--QSO's.
Since the repair job on the Hubble telescope, new work has revealed that a "typical" QSO is embedded in a host galaxy which, in turn, is surrounded by a fuzzy halo and about three quarters of them are either colliding with or swallowing other galaxies. The most likely explanation for the observations is that a very high proportion of galaxies have a black hole at their center. The QSO characteristics are due to the black hole swallowing stars that then provide for their enormous energy output.
A recent survey of nearby galaxies indicates that 11 of 27 may harbor a black hole. It would seem, at least to me, that if both partners of colliding galaxies have black holes then, sooner or later, in some collisions the gravitational fields of the two black holes would overlap to the point that their collision became inevitable, perhaps with fusion, a doubling of mass and a rain of in-falling stars consequent upon the increased gravitational field--a hyperquasar maybe!!
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