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Little Things Mean a Lot.
by Dick Bain
For many years, physicists have been arguing about whether or not neutrinos have mass. While this isn't the sort of thing that would cause a family feud around the dinner table for most of us, it has profound implications for cosmology.
The neutrino is a very small particle that carries no electric charge. It was first proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1930's to explain the different energies of electrons produced during radioactive decay. The existence of neutrinos was confirmed in 1957 by Clyde Le Cowen and Fredrick Reines. The neutrino is difficult to detect because it seldom interacts with other forms of matter. It has been estimated that a neutrino can pass entirely through the earth with only a one in 200 million chance of interacting with the matter it passes through. (1)
Cosmologists have proposed that as much as 90% of the matter in the universe is unseen, so-called dark matter. They tell us that this must be so because the amount of matter we see is not adequate to produce a strong enough gravitational field to hold the galaxies together. They propose that the galaxies have an extensive halo of dark matter that generates the additional gravitational field to hold the galaxy together. And what is this dark matter composed of? Brown dwarfs, heavy exotic particles, and neutrinos have all been proposed. Brown dwarfs are falling out of favor since searches for them to date have found few potential candidates for them. The heavy exotic particles likewise have not been detected, and may be only exotic dream stuff. Neutrinos on the other hand are produced in copious numbers both by normal star processes and by supernovas, those cataclysmic events like the one that produced the Crab Nebula. As the authors of The Urantia Book put it:
"In large suns--small circular nebulae--when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensues, if 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. It was such an emigration of these 'runaway particles' that occasioned the collapse of the giant nova of the Andromeda nebula about fifty years ago. This vast stellar body collapsed in forty minutes of Urantia time." (464)
The "tiny particles devoid of electric potential" are obviously neutrinos. Such a stream of neutrinos from the supernova of 1987 of a star in the Small Magellenic Cloud was detected by neutrino detection sites in the US and Japan. But in order for neutrinos to qualify as dark matter, they would have to have some mass, and until recently, it was thought that they had no mass.
There is another group of people who are concerned about neutrinos, namely astrophysicists who study the sun. The number of neutrinos produced by the sun is much smaller than had been predicted. The theorists worried that there was some mistake of their model of the processes within the sun. However, a recent experiment affirmed the correctness of their model. (2) The only way out of the dilemma would be if neutrinos had some mass. And perhaps they do.
There are three varieties of neutrino: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino. If neutrinos have any mass, neutrinos of one variety could change into one of the other type of neutrinos. A two year experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory has produced evidence that neutrinos do change from one type to another and have a small mass, of from one millionth to one hundred thousandth the mass of an electron. (3, 4) This doesn't seem like much mass, but there are so many of them in the universe that they add up to a significant amount.
If the astronomers who study the sun are pleased, then the cosmologists must be dancing in the streets! One problem encountered with the Big Bang theory is that the galaxies would had to have developed quite soon after the Big Bang in order to account for the present state of the universe. If evolution of the galaxies had proceeded at its present pace, the galaxies would still be in a primitive state today. To account for the maturity of the galaxies, cosmologists invented the inflation theory. They theorize that the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation just after the Big Bang. They require two sorts of dark matter to make this theory fly: hot dark matter and cold dark matter. Neutrinos with some mass are exactly the sort of hot dark matter the cosmologists need to make their theory feasible.
It appears that rumors of the death of the Big Bang theory are highly exaggerated. As long as cosmologists can find ideas to prop up the Big Bang and ignore any evidence suggesting other origins for the universe, it will be difficult to convince some people that the purposeful evolution of the universe portrayed in The Urantia Book is valid. But we can appreciate the cosmologists problem; if they admitted purpose operating in the universe, they would have to abandon the idea that there are only accidental causes for things. Heaven knows, it would be a terrible thing for cosmologists to admit there were some ultimate mysteries they can't explain! How could they ever have credibility again after being so humbled? Perhaps if they hadn't claimed they could come up with a theory that explains everything, they wouldn't have so far to fall when they fail. But then, there really is a theory of everything, isn't there? When the cosmologists pursue truth to its ultimate source, they will find the First Source and Center. Then they'll be real cosmologists.
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