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After the star...reaches...state of maximum luminosity, the hydrogen content of its body will be entirely exhausted....In the absence of hydrogen...the star is bound to start a slow contraction...radiation of the star is supported by the gravitational energy liberated in contraction...the final stage...represented by a very dense star...the so-called "white dwarfs.'
The Urantia Book continues: "In large suns--small circular nebulae--when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction ensues, if such a body is not sufficiently opaque 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 devoid of electric potential, and such particles readily escape from the solar interior, thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun 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 of Urantia time." (464)
As I read the Urantia Paper, it appears that its author is trying to make a clear distinction between stars around the size of our sun that are destined to burn out and become white dwarfs, and those that are considerably larger--those up to a "gigantic" size. At the mid-stage of his paper, Gamow states, "In spite of the tremendous difference in luminosity, the phenomena of supernova explosions show many similar features with ordinary novae." Then, at the end of his paper he concludes that the final result for stars collapsing in either nova or supernova is a white dwarf. He presumes that the difference in behavior must be a larger initial mass for those collapsing in a supernova.
The idea that supernova explosions result in the formation of neutron stars and not white dwarfs had been put forward by Zwicky and Baade in the early 1930's and intensively publicized by Zwicky. In 1939, in a theoretical paper, Oppenheimer and co-workers concluded that the collapse of very large stars could continue to a Schwarzchild singularity (now called a black hole). But the idea of black holes and neutron stars was opposed vigorously by both Einstein and Eddington, and perhaps this was the reason for Gamow plumbing for the final point of supernova collapse being a white dwarf. It is now known that both black holes and neutron stars can result from the collapse of very large stars.
The key difference between nova and supernova is the participation of "vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric potential" also called "runaway particles" by both Gamow and the Urantia Paper, and by Gamow only, the "neutrinos."
A little more than 10 years before Gamow wrote his article, precise energy balance measurements for a process termed "beta radioactive decay" appeared to contradict a long established principle in classical physics that energy could neither be created nor destroyed. The energy budget for this process came up short, resulting in speculation by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, that there must exist an undetectable particle having no properties.
The unthinkable alternative to Pauli's particle, soon to be named the neutrino by Enrico Fermi, was that the law of conservation of energy is wrong, at least at the sub-atomic level. In actuality there was room for doubt, for no set of measurements can be perfect, and physicists used a term called "entropy" that is similar to the "sundries" or "miscellaneous" used by accountants to square off a budget deficit.
As time progressed, the need for Pauli's particle became acute. However, it remained factual that the only real evidence for its existence was located in the energy balance accounting. The Gamow paper we are reviewing here had a forerunner, a highly speculative paper published in 1941 by Gamow and Schoenberg1 entitled Neutrino Theory of Stellar Collapse in which the still undiscovered neutrino provided the hypothetical means for a star to collapse in record time. The major problem for getting a star to collapse was in the way energy could escape from the interior to the surface unhindered. It was already known that light energy could take a million years to make the journey, and x-rays and cosmic rays not much less.
In his paper, Gamow glibly states, "it can be calculated that neutral particles of small mass would easily pass through many thousands of kilometers of lead without suffering any absorption," while seeming to ignore that the properties of neutrality and zero mass apply also to the photons of light that take a million years for the journey. Nevertheless, the speculation was correct and when finally discovered in 1956, the neutrino was found to have the appropriate properties to make the journey. However, the Gamow and Schoenberg paper did contain an escape clause in its summary that remarked, "the neutrinos are still hypothetical particles because of the failure of all efforts to detect them."
Approximately one tenth of the Gamow paper is devoted to describing the reasons for speculating upon the existence of the neutrino and the properties needed from it. He writes, "The character of the neutrinos has been very ingeniously summarized by Dr. Swann, who said, 'The neutrinos are like world war debts. You never expect to see it paid, but you satisfy your conscience and the conscience of your debtor by keeping it on the records.'"
Prior to Matthew's discovery, we could have no idea of how much the author, human or celestial, of Paper 41 knew about novae, supernovae, and neutrinos. It is now obvious that
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