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we think of the strong force in terms of gluons. But back then, mesons which fly back and forth between the protons to hold them together tightly in the nucleus were the key, and we needed to make and study them." Here Lederman appears to indicate that, in the 1950's, most physicists thought the Yukawa theory was still adequate--and perhaps they should have for they had only just awarded him the Nobel Prize because of it. The Urantia Book, of course, says it was inadequate--a comment that turned out to be true.
A development causing mini-excitement occurred in 1936 when Anderson and his co-workers announced the discovery of a particle in cosmic ray experiments that appeared to correspond to Yukawa's meson as it had almost exactly the mass that Yukawa had predicted. However, the euphoria was short-lived when it was discovered that Anderson's meson had a negative charge and not the positive charge required by Yukawa theory. Even later Anderson's meson turned out not to be a meson at all, but a heavy electron, now called the muon. Yukawa's meson was finally discovered in 1947.
Colliders bring confusion in the 1950's
In the 50's, confusion broke loose as powerful accelerators collided nuclear particles at higher and higher energy levels and generated an absolute profusion of new particles, including 4 or 5 kinds of mesons.
The confusion in the fifties was such that one prominent physicist is reported to have advocated presenting the Nobel Prize to the next physicist not to discover a new particle. That brings up a point. It has been claimed (by Martin Gardner) that the text of The Urantia Book could have been modified until the books started to roll off the presses in 1955. If so, then the enormous confusion in the world of sub-atomic physics during the early 1950's should have generated enough anxiety in our Triple "A" committee physicist for him to become uncertain about any of his prophetic commentary--and surely he would have been impelled to remove it if he gave thought to the potential effects upon the revelatory status of the book.
Let's now examine the details of Par. 3.
On radioactive decay of the neutron
The presence and function of the mesotron also explains another atomic riddle. When atoms perform radioactively, they emit far more energy than would be expected. This excess of radiation is derived from the breaking up of the mesotron "energy carrier," which thereby becomes a mere electron. The mesotronic disintegration is also accompanied by the emission of certain small uncharged particles. (479)
Here we are told about two kinds of undiscovered particles that result from the beta radioactive decay of the neutron. One of them, called in the book, a "small uncharged particle," had been predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1932 to account for the missing energy when a neutron decayed radioactively to a proton and an electron. This tiny particle became known as the neutrino. A word of explanation. The mass of the neutron was known to be greater than the masses of the proton and the electron combined. From Einstein's famous equation E = MC2, the change in energy can be calculated from the change in mass and since all the energy could not be accounted for, Pauli invented his little particle with no properties that he said could never be discovered.
The accepted theory of beta radioactive decay in 1934/5 was that proposed in 1932 by one of the most famous physicists of this century, Werner Heisenberg. It became known as the four fermion theory and is shown in our Fig. 3. Here a single neutron arrives at a single space-time point (position A) whereupon it decides it is sick of being what it is and opts for a new life as three new particles, a proton, an electron, and a little uncharged particle, a neutrino. This theory was shown to be entirely satisfactory for the low energy conditions available in those days, except for one thing. Nobody could demonstrate that the neutrino actually existed.
Conservation of energy. True or false?
We'll digress for a moment to consider the status of a law in classical physics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This energy-balance problem we have referred to during neutron decay required an implicit faith that this law would hold good despite the fact that many classical concepts had withered and failed in the new physics introduced in the early part of this century. Among the new theories were relativity and quantum physics. As time went by, and on onto the 1940's, faith in this law of the immortality of energy began to wither. Many asked the question of whether it was really valid to postulate a little uncharged particle that could never be detected because it had no properties, for the sole purpose of preserving what may well have become an outdated law of classical physics.
If this p. 479 material in the book was really written by our Triple "A" committee, then its members show some pretty strange behavior. In Par.4, they go against front line physics by pointing out that the theory that earned Yukawa the Nobel Prize in 1948 is inadequate to account for aspects of the binding of the nucleus, and in Par. 3, they bet on the conservation of energy law holding up under circumstances in which it had yet to be tested. This law was derived from the effects of heat, work, and gravity on steam engines, hydraulic pumps,
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