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as a black hole. This whole Urantia Book paragraph is packed with unconfirmed physics--the opaqueness failing to support the internal pressure so that collapse occurs; the vast quantities of neutral particles; that these readily escape from the interior (actually in about 3 secs. in contrast to light energy that can take a million years in large stars); the escape of the neutrinos being sufficient to collapse a gigantic sun, and doing so in as little as forty minutes.
For the mid-thirties, this paragraph is close to being a ridiculous statement. The tiny particles devoid of electric potential could have been the same undiscovered particles proposed by Pauli to account for the missing energy of radio-active decay, but whoever heard of a proposal such as a "vast stellar body collapsing in forty minutes"? The craziest astrophysicist outside the gates of a mental asylum at this particular time was an Austrian immigrant working at the California Institute of Technology. His name was Fritz Zwicky and his main interests in life were the supernovae he was investigating in collaboration with Walter Baade from the Mt. Wilson Observatory that then housed the world's largest telescope. Between them they had amassed data on novae occurring in this century that appeared to be outside of our galaxy. These novae had roughly the same brightness as novae from within our galaxy but if they were millions or billions of light years out into space, then they must have been tremendously bright and have originated from really mighty explosions. These are what became known as supernovae.
At the beginning of the 30's, Baade collected detailed data on six of these and he and Zwicky set to work to provide a theoretical explanation. At first they achieved little, then, in 1932, Chadwick reported his discovery of the neutron, in effect an uncharged proton. This was just what Zwicky needed to calculate that if a star imploded until it reached the density of an atomic nucleus, it might transform into a gas of neutrons devoid of the repulsive effect of the positively charged protons--thus permitting gravitational collapse to shrink it to tiny core. In the process, according to Zwicky, such a star should lose about 10% of its mass. The energy equivalent of that mass loss would then supply the explosive force to blast the star apart.
From Prof. Thorne, currently Feynmann Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltec comes an important statement relative to the neutron star material in The Urantia Book. Thorne says: "Zwicky did not know what might initiate implosion nor how the core might behave as it imploded. Hence he could not estimate how long the process might take--is it a slow contraction or a high speed implosion? Details of this process were not worked out until the 1960's and later." So what was the basis for our Triple "A" committee physicist making the statement about a collapse of a star in forty minutes? In fact there was none until high speed computers became available, and it is only in the 1990's that there has been a successful computer-simulation of a supernova.
Accidentally I came across some comments on Zwicky that said he was in Chicago in the mid-thirties. Since he and Baade appear to have been the only research astrophysicists working on the supernova problem when the relevant Urantia Paper was received, Zwicky certainly looked like a "best bet" for being a physicist from Triple "A." On my books, he remained so for many years until I came across Thorne's 1994 book that provided a detailed account of Baade and Zwicky's work. Thorne writes:
"At this time (1932-33), cosmic rays were receiving much attention and Zwicky, with his love of extremes, managed to convince himself that most of the cosmic rays were coming from outside our solar system and that most were from far outside our Milky Way galaxy (which was incorrect)--indeed from the most distant reaches of the universe--and he then convinced himself that the total energy carried by all the universe's cosmic rays was about the same as the total energy released by supernovae throughout the universe. The conclusion was obvious to Zwicky. Cosmic rays must be made in supernova explosions."
Zwicky thought that cosmic rays, not neutrinos, dissipated the energy of a supernova explosion
There was not a word anywhere in Zwicky's work about a role for tiny particles devoid of electric potential that escape readily from the interior of an exhausted star and bring about its collapse in as little as forty minutes. So, in my humble opinion, because he assigned the major role to cosmic rays for energy dissipation during a supernova explosion and failed to mention a role for little neutral particles, Zwicky must be eliminated as a possible Triple "A" committee physicist. Thorne's book provides us with the background thought of workers interested in that field at this time:
"Astronomers in the 1930's responded enthusiastically to the Baade-Zwicky concept of supernovae, but treated Zwicky's neutron star and cosmic ray ideas with disdain...In fact a detailed study of Zwicky's writings of the era showed 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, with H. Snyder, wrote the most authoritative paper during the 1930's on the subject of stellar collapse. In it, he completely ignored Zwicky's work even though he must have been well acquainted with it, since he spent half of each year at Caltec.
Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Eddington all rejected the neutron star idea
The Oppenheimer papers of 1939 drew attention to the subject of neutron stars and the possibility of black holes which, in turn, brought comment from Albert Einstein and the doyen
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