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this author had thoroughly examined the Gamow paper prior to carefully selecting those sentences and phrases that suited the purpose at hand. Thus this author could not have been other than well aware of the highly speculative nature of the Gamow statements about the undiscovered neutrino.
As done in a previous article, let us hypothesize that Paper 41 was written by a scientist (or extremely knowledgeable non-scientist) for the purpose of supporting the revelatory claim of The Urantia Book. Could this hypothetical person justify using such a highly speculative description of a supernova? What were the chances of being right and what were the chances of being wrong? Perhaps this is best illustrated with facts about a 1987 supernova that occurred in our neighboring Cloud of Magellan. Since the late 1950's, an enormous volume of theoretical papers have been published on the nature of supernovae, most of them supported by elegant and highly sophisticated computer simulation. But up to 19952, nobody had succeeded in making a supernova explode in a computer simulation, thus illustrating the continuing ignorance about the true mechanism of star collapse. And even today, theory does not correctly account for the measured flow of neutrinos derived from stars such as our sun.
Gamow was guessing. Whoever wrote Paper 41 knew full well that this was so. Does it make sense for a human author to offer guesswork in support of a revelatory claim? But if the author was truly a celestial revelator seeking to help this planet arise from its spiritual mire, then things are different, are they not? In my view, Matthew's disclosure of the 1940's articles has strengthened rather than weakened the case for the prophetic nature of the materials under discussion.
References.
1. Gamow, G. and M. Schoenberg, Neutrino Theory of Stellar Collapse, Physical Reviews 59, 539 (1941).
2. Sky and Telescope, August 1995
[note: The discussion of Shepperd's paper on the mesotron will appear in the next issue of Innerface]
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