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of astronomers, Sir Arthur Eddington, both of whom vigorously opposed the concepts involved in stellar collapse that implied either the formation of neutron stars or black holes.
One possible scenario of what might have happened with the Urantia Papers following their receipt is that they were checked over by Dr Sadler's cohort of workers until put into a form ready to go to the printer. Funds to pay for the printing were being amassed by Dr Lena Sadler in the late thirties, and apparently a draft was ready to send to the printers, R.R. Donnelley & Sons in the early forties. Following a check by a professional copy editor, the contract to prepare the printing plates was accepted in September 1941, under the signature of Wilfred Kellogg. Letters exist from the 1942/43 period from Forum members that speak of checking the galley proofs supplied by the printer, and this could only happen after completion of the type setting of the printing plates.
Changes to the text during draft stages are always possible, but once a publication gets to the galley proof stage and the printing plates have been made, any extensive changes are very much frowned upon and can be very expensive.
New information that provided a possible reason for a Triple "A" committee physicist to write in the page 464 material on neutron stars was forthcoming in 1942 when the book was, supposedly, at galley proof stage. During the 1940's virtually all capable physicists were occupied with tasks relating to the war effort. Apparently this was not so for George Gamow, a Russian-born astrophysicist, formerly a professor at Leningrad, who had taken up a position at George Washington University. The Hubble expansion of the universe was already an established theory and Gamow conceived this as indicating that the start of expansion of the universe was as a thermonuclear fireball, now called the Big Bang.
According to Gamow and his team, 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. The work was really highly speculative as there was little real knowledge on which to base his theories and the computer machinery needed for complex calculations was unavailable. Referring to this work Overbye 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 into something heavier, thus breaking the element building chain. Gamow's team disbanded in the late 40's, its work ignored and discredited."
The Gamow-Schoenberg proposal
However one paper emerged from Gamow's group in 1941 that could be meaningful for our task. In it Gamow and Schoenberg proposed that the energy loss from aging stars in a supernova explosion would be mediated by an efflux of neutrinos. But at that time there was insufficient knowledge, and also a complete lack of the tools, for making the necessary calculations to support their proposal and the work appears to have received no subsequent mention in the literature. In the summary for their paper, these authors remarked that, "the neutrinos are still hypothetical particles because of the failure of all efforts to detect them."
The question we must ask is could the Gamow and Schoenberg paper of 1941 be the source of The Urantia Book's comments on the collapse of gigantic suns? If our Triple "A" physicist did decide to use it, it had to be added in the galley proof stage of preparation for printing of The Urantia Book. The idea of the neutron star had been only recently been condemned by Einstein and Eddington, and Gamow and Schoenberg had provided no convincing evidence in support of their proposals. Hence, it would appear to have been sheer foolishness for our Triple "A" physicist to go to the trouble of getting printing plates altered on the basis of the Gamow and Schoenberg work which admitted that nine years after Pauli's initial suggestion, there was still no evidence for the existence of the neutrino, a particle that was of central importance for their proposal. But note though that if celestial revelators became aware of this work, and knowing that the neutrino proposal was correct, they could have used it and been within the terms of their mandate--provided that alterations to the printing plates were permitted to the Revelatory Commission at that time.
Since we have posed the question of whether a Triple "A" physicist would have added the collapsing star material of page 464 in 1942, perhaps we should also ask whether page 479's "mesotron" material could have been either added or reviewed at this time. Yukawa's theory was published in 1935 and in 1942, his meson remained as a figment of a theoretical physicist's imagination. None of the three hypothetical particles of page 479, the meson, the neutrino, or the W- boson, had yet been discovered. Remembering that the purpose of the speculative material would be to support the concept that the Papers are revelatory, what would a Triple "A" physicist have done about this material in 1942? In my view, since no supporting evidence had emerged in the intervening years, at the very least, it would have been very considerably modified, if not completely omitted.
Emerging theory of and evidence for the existence of neutron stars
Getting back to supernova explosions, the theoretical basis for them is said to have been laid by the Burbidges, Fowler, and Hoyle in a 1957 paper. All of these were eminent workers in the field of thermonuclear synthesis which covers the ways that elements are formed and
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