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Radii of the Electron and Proton.
"If the mass of matter should be magnified until that of an electron equaled one tenth of an ounce, then were the size to be proportionately magnified, the volume of such an electron would become as large as the earth." (Paper 42, Sect. 6, p. 477)
I've often wondered how many Urantia Book readers went to the trouble of working through the sums and then put their answer to one side in puzzlement. For it was not until about 1990 that this statement started to make any sense.
If the mass of the electron is taken to be 9.1 x 10-28 grams, 1/10th of an ounce as 2.8 grams and the radius of the earth as 6.4 x 106 meters, then the radius of an electron calculates to be 2 x 10-21 meters.
At the time that the Urantia Papers were received many physicists had assumed the electron was a dimensionless point, hence had no radius. Others, by circuitous reasoning, assigned it a radius of 5 x 10-15 meters, which is of the order of a million times larger than is calculated from the Urantia papers statement.
The statement remained an anomoly until Stefan Tallqvist, a reader from Finland became aware of new work by Nobel Prize winner, Hans Dehmelt, who had devised a way to trap single electrons and maintain them in that state for an extended period of time. With this new technology, Dehmelt was able to measure electron parameters which permitted him to assign a radius of between 10-19 and 10-22 meters!!
Dehmelt's initial work was carried out about 10 years ago. Since that time further refinements have led to a recent announcement1 that places the electron radius at about 10-22 meters.
For those not accustomed to thinking in terms of orders of magnitude the following illustration may help. Assume you are asked to estimate the weight of an iguana about 2 meters in length. In terms of orders of magnitude, is it closer to 10 lbs than to 1 or 100 lbs? Or perhaps it weighs in as heavy as a decent size crocodile, say 1000lbs. We have covered a range of 100, 101, 102, to 103 orders of magnitude. The Urantia Papers obviously approximate calculation for electron radius is:
0.000,000,000,000,000,000,002 meters.
The most recent measurement says about:
0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,1 meters.
The difference is eight parts in a thousand million, million, million. Not too bad for approximations.
The question posed is how could such an estimate have been made more than fifty years ago? And how can the skeptically minded simply ignore it?
The Urantia Paper also has:
"If the volume of a proton--eighteen hundred times as heavy as an electron--should be magnified to the size of the head of a pin, then, in comparison, a pin's head would attain a diameter equal to that of the earth's orbit around the sun." (Paper 42, Sect. 6, p.477)
Again, we are indebted to Stefan Tallqvist for going to the trouble of actually doing the calculations and drawing attention to the results.
Taking the radius of the Earth's orbit around the sun as 1.5 x 1014 mm and the radius of the pinhead as 1.0 mm, the radius of the proton calculates to be 7 x 10-15 mm which is 7 x 10-18 meters.
The "classical" proton radius is 0.85 x 10-15 meters and again deviated considerably from that given by the calculation from the Urantia Papers.
However the proton is now known to consist of three quarks plus virtual particles that flip in and out of existence. So what actually is the radius of the "real" part of the proton, the three quark system? Modern measurements put it at 7.7 x 10-18 meters.
Do such measurements "prove" that Urantia Papers are all of what they claim to be? At one time I would probably have answered yes, but after having studied the Papers for so many years and having considered statements of their authors such as "The existence of God can never be proved by scientific experiment" and "revelation is validated only by human experience," my conclusion would now be more conservative.
I am aware that I want these Papers to be truth. I also believe that if they are not the truth, then they ought to be. By that I mean that the God whom I first came to know through the revelation of his nature as described in the Gospels stories, is depicted better in the Urantia Papers than anywhere else that I know of.
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