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horses pulling plows, apples falling off trees, etc. It was not known whether the law held good in the micro-world of the atom. Einstein came along and said the gravity concepts were wrong and also introduced a new idea, the equivalence of mass and energy for which there was nothing comparable in classical physics. In radioactive beta decay a neutron changes into a proton and an electron but the energy equivalent to the loss in mass does not correspond to what was measured. Hence the invention of the undetectable neutrino to preserve the validity of the law that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Now if our Triple "A" people were at work faking a revelation, right here, in Par. 3, they took the unprecedented step of ignoring the top physicists of the day and introducing their own concept of beta-decay as illustrated in Fig. 4. Please note that I did not draw Fig. 4, but copied it from a modern text book because The Urantia Book concept has become the modern theory.
The major difference from the Heisenberg scheme (Fig. 3) was the introduction of another unidentified (and in those days, unidentifiable) particle that the revelators have called a mesotron, but is now known as the W- particle. Clearly it is not the same mesotron as postulated for mediating nucleus stability since that mesotron shuttles a positive charge, and this second mesotron carries negative charge as shown by its breaking down to the negatively charged electron and the small uncharged particle.
The Urantia Paper that provided this information was dated as having been delivered to the Contact Commission in 1934. In 1938, Hideki Yukawa made an attempt to reformulate the Heisenberg scheme for beta decay using one similar to that in The Urantia Book. In it, he called his carrier a weak photon rather than a mesotron. The work was not taken seriously as the four fermion process of Fig. 3 was considered adequate and remained so until into the 1950's.
The speculative(?) predictions on p. 479 of the book
Here we can reasonably ask the question of why a physicist of the Triple "A" committee would indulge in a guessing game that could discredit all the work entailed in amassing a 2000-page revelation. All told, there are six highly speculative suggestions that could easily have been wrong.
1. The Yukawa meson (identified in 1947),
2. The small uncharged particles (neutrinos) of radioactive decay proposed in 1932 and identified in 1956. Note that in an article in the February 1996 issue of Scientific American, one of their discoverers, Dr Frederick Reines, says, "For 25 years the neutrino was little more than a figment of the theoretical physicists' imagination." So even when the book was first printed, the neutrino was still a figment of the imagination.
3. The mesotron of radioactive beta decay that became known as the W-- boson (discovered 1981)
4. The force other than Yukawa's meson that holds proton to proton and neutron to neutron and which was finally clarified in the period between 1950 and 1970.
5. In Par. 5, the book states that, "These mesotrons are found abundantly in the space rays which so incessantly impinge upon your planet." The first report of a meson being discovered in cosmic rays occurred in 1936, two years after the Paper was received--but turned out not to be a meson.
6. Then there is another highly speculative suggestion in Par. 2. The book says, "The mesotron causes the electric charge of the nuclear particles to be incessantly tossed back and forth between protons and neutrons. At one infinitesimal part of a second a given nuclear particle is a charged proton and the next an uncharged neutron. And these alternations of energy status are so unbelievably rapid that the electric charge is deprived of all opportunity to function as a disruptive influence." In effect, it is as if the charge is smeared out rather than being localized. Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg (1992), remarks that these alternations occur in the order of a million, million, million, millionth of a second. In contrast, the movement of electric charge from neutron to electron during the beta radioactive decay process takes about one hundredth of a second. In 1934, there was no hard evidence available to make such comparisons.
About collapsing suns
Now we move from the small uncharged particles of beta decay to meet these particles once more in the book's description of the death throes of large stars. From page 464 of The Urantia Book and repeated on P. 9 of the science booklet, we have:
In large suns--small circular nebulae--when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensues, if such a body is not sufficiently opaque (1) 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 (2)devoid of electric potential, and such particles readily escape from the solar interior (3), thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun (4) 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 (5) of Urantia time. (464)
The collapsed star that does this trick usually winds up as a neutron star and sometimes
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