|
about the same comparative room the planets have as they revolve about the sun in the space of the solar system." (477) [note: the term "central proton" instead of "central nucleus" is almost certainly a copying error as in the very next paragraph, the revelators speak of electrons revolving about the atomic nucleus.]
In its previous paragraph, The Urantia Book speaks of energy units (electrons) that revolve around a central body and "are faintly comparable to the planets encircling the sun."
In Sheppard's statement there is no trace of the planetary concept being only a "faintly comparable" one. Why have the revelators diverged from Sheppard's description which, being a 1940 review article from a reputable journal, should have been more up-to-date than W.F.G. Swann's The Architecture of the Universe (1934) which mentions the planetary model and is also a human source work for Paper 42?
I was actually surprised to read Sheppard's statement that "most persons know that atoms... are constructed like tiny "solar systems." In reality, the planetary model of the atom, having been introduced firstly by Rutherford in about 1911, and further elaborated by Bohr around 1913, was superseded by the mid-1920's. By then, electrons were no longer thought of as solid, planet-like particles, wave-particle duality having taken over. Today, this wave-particle duality is firmly entrenched, being supported by incontrovertible experimental evidence. Thus in saying that the atomic model is only faintly comparable to a solar system model, the revelators have shown "knowledgeable discriminatory selection" of what they would or would not use from Sheppard (who is supposed to be an expert in the field he is reviewing). This "knowledgeable discriminatory selection" by the revelators becomes more evident as we get further into the paper.
Sheppard's main topic was the role of the mesotron (meson) in the Yukawa model for nuclear stability and also in beta radioactive decay of certain atoms, models that appear on p. 479 of The Urantia Book. Previous commentary on this material is in "Science, Anthropology, and Archaeology in The Urantia Book" and in Innerface vol. 4 (1), available from the addresses on our front page. Again we will leave it to Matthew to point out the similarities while we note some of the differences.
The Urantia Book describes beta radioactive decay as follows: "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."
Sheppards description of this phenomenon is: "There are certain radio-active substances...which eject electrons....It is known that, when a nucleus shoots such a particle out, a certain definite amount of energy is let loose. Unfortunately, however, if one examines the electron after it is emitted, one finds that it usually doesn't have the correct amount of energy, but a good deal less. Scientists therefore have been forced to say that the missing part of the energy has been carried away by a phantom particle which has no charge and practically no mass...This particle has been named the neutrino but it has never actually been detected." (Note: The neutrino is what The Urantia Book terms "certain small uncharged particles." At this point, ask yourself if you were a physicist faking a revelation would you really think it valid to infer that these particles were real when all attempts to demonstrate them since they were first proposed in 1932 had failed.)
Sheppard continues: "We have said that the nucleus consists of protons, neutrons, and carrier mesotrons alone. If this is true, where do the ejected electron and neutrino come from? The suggestion soon was made that the mesotron is not a stable particle but that it disintegrates into an electron and a neutrino....Calculations showed that on this assumption the mesotron could last only a few millionths of a second before this decay process occurred."
Note that there is no mention in The Urantia Book about any rapid decay of the mesotron of beta radioactive decay. Writing in 1992, Nobel prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, tells us that this mesotron-mediated radioactive decay is actually a relatively slow process that takes place in about one hundredth of a second.
Sheppard's discussion of the rapidity of mesotron disruption in radioactive decay takes up about one third of his paper. So have the revelators again shown "knowledgeable discriminatory selection" in choosing not to mention this rapid decay claimed by Sheppard?
Sheppard makes no mention of the time taken for the exchange process in which the mesotron functions as charge-carrier between the proton and the neutron of the nucleus. The Urantia Book does so: "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." (479) Weinberg confirms that these alternations take place in a million million million millionth of a second. Were the revelators again showing "knowledgeable discriminatory selection?"
As a point of interest, Yukawa's "mesotron," the one described in The Urantia Book as
|
|
