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5.These mesotrons are found abundantly in the space rays which so incessantly impinge upon your planet. (479)
Firstly we'll be looking at the beginning paragraphs from p. 479 of The Urantia Book that can be found at the top of p. 7 of the science booklet.
A mental picture of the atom
In order to be able to communicate with one another in terms of normal, everyday experience, we can visualize an atomic nucleus as being a kind of spherical container in which other little spherical containers are found (Fig 1.). One kind is called a proton and it carries a positive electric charge. The other kind could be described as a mirror image of the proton minus its electric charge, and is given the name "neutron." The simplest of all atoms is the hydrogen atom and it consists of a single proton with its single positive charge. It is a fact of creation that for every positive charge in the universe there exists an equal and opposite charge that we call negative. The proton is accompanied by its negatively charged electron that is thought of as being smeared out in a cloud skirting the spherical proton. The size of an atomic nucleus is in the order of 10-15cm and the electron cloud is of the order of 10-8cm. Putting that into more familiar terms, if the electron cloud was a mist clinging to the surface of the earth, and the nucleus of the atom was at the very center of the earth, that nucleus would be about the size of a football field and situated 4000 miles away from its electron cloud. Which all goes to show how powerful is the electric field that holds the electrons to the nucleus and permits matter to exist.
As atoms get larger, Nature endows them with more and more protons with their positive charges and these are highly repellent to one another. To help alleviate the problem, Nature adds neutrons to the protons, on a roughly one to one basis to start with, but as the bundles gets bigger, Nature has to supply more neutrons than protons in order to stop things falling apart. The number of protons in the mix decides whether a particular mix, called an element, will be hydrogen, oxygen, silver, gold, iron, aluminum, or what have you. The number of neutrons accompanying the protons does not influence which element a mix will be, but it does determine its stability. Carbon, for example, has only six protons, but can have from 5 to 8 neutrons. The last one is called carbon 14; it is unstable, and breaks down radioactively, which is very convenient for those archaeologists who use it to carbon date the remnants of their ancestors.
On making nuclear peace
Par.1 of page 479 is about how the atomic nucleus holds itself together despite the antipathy of the protons for one another. Fig. 2 shows diagrammatically, a theory published by a Japanese physicist, Hideki Yukawa, that is almost the exact equivalent of what is stated in Par.1. Eventually Yukawa was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, which, of course, was not just a simple drawing like Fig. 2, but a highly developed mathematical treatment of his proposal. Effectively, it assumes that this particle, termed the mesotron or meson, picks up a positive electric charge from the charged protons of the nucleus and switches it to the neutron which thereupon becomes a proton while the proton that lost its charge is now a neutron.
Why does it have two names? Well the Greeks used the word "mesos" to mean middle and Yukawa's particle had a calculated mass somewhere between the electron, the proton, and the neutron. So there were three choices, meson, mesoton, or mesotron simply meaning middle sized particle. Eventually "meson" won the day.
A breach of the mandate?
Yukawa's theory was published in 1935, one year after receipt of the Urantia Paper. Does that controvert the mandate about the proscription of unearned knowledge? Not necessarily, because Yukawa's memoirs state that he had been thinking about the problem ever since the discovery of the neutron in 1932. It is customary in most research laboratories to have internal seminars, often on a weekly basis, in which research workers present progress reports on their projects. Although the mandate for the revelators proscribed the disclosure of unearned knowledge, there was no stipulation that it had to be published before it could be used in their revelation. Presumably the revelators could have used Yukawa's seminar notes, or even his spoken addresses as source material for the book.
We do need to note that Yukawa's idea was only one among other possible theories attempting to account for nuclear stability. We also need to note that in Par. 4., p. 479, the revelators point out that Yukawa's explanation of nuclear binding is only partial. The book actually says, "The mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia."
That particular comment appears to be highly prophetic, and would have remained so even if our Triple "A" authors had written it in during the 1950's. For example, Nobel Prize winner, Leon Lederman, wrote: "The hot particle of 1950 was the pion or pi meson. 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,
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