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What fuels our Sun and other Stars?
"In those suns which are encircuited in the space-energy channels, solar energy is liberated by various complex nuclear-reaction chains, the most common of which is the hydrogen-carbon-helium reaction. In this metamorphosis, carbon acts as an energy catalyst since it is in no way actually changed by this process of converting hydrogen into helium. Under certain conditions of high temperature the hydrogen penetrates the carbon nuclei. Since the carbon cannot hold more than four such protons, when this saturation state is attained, it begins to emit protons as fast as new ones arrive. In this reaction the ingoing hydrogen particles come forth as a helium atom." (Paper 41, Sect. 8, p. 464)
During the early years of the century, attempts to account for the energy liberated by stars such as our sun had all failed. In 1929, Atkinson and Houtermans were able to show that some kind of nuclear process is the only way that would account for the exceedingly high temperatures thought to exist at the center of the sun. In 1938, Bethe and Critchfield formulated the proton-proton chain reaction by which smaller stars such as our sun produced their energy and in 1939, Bethe described another reaction in which carbon catalyses helium production in larger stars.
When I first read The Urantia Book account of the carbon cycle, it unsettled me. I knew about Hans Bethe having published it and a check told me 1939 was the date of publication. From literature accounts it was doubtful that he had proposed it as early as 1935 and it did not appear to fit the Urantia Paper's definition in the mandate of categories of unearned knowledge that were permitted to be revealed. But I was assured that nothing had been added to the text after 1935 and so had to accept it as in the "prophetic" category. Not until after Matthew Block began to uncover human source materials published between 1935 and 1943 did I learn about the process of questions and answers I've already described.
It was through Matthew's careful comparison of word sequences in phrases in the relevant Urantia Paper, and in a paper published in 1942 by George Gamow, a Russian-born physicist resident in the USA, that I became aware of additions and alterations made post-1935.
The skeptics would say I told you so and dismiss the Urantia Paper material as irrelevant rather than prophetic. However there are points of interest that indicate that the Urantia Paper's author did not simply copy bits of the Gamow paper but had the necessary specialist knowledge to weed out the wheat from the chaff so as not to copy Gamow's errors.
Gamow states that the carbon cycle, as described by Bethe in 1939, is the chain of reactions "responsible for energy production in the sun and all other stars of the main sequence..."
In contrast, the Urantia Paper tells us that the energy of the stars is "liberated by various complex nuclear reaction chains, the most common of which is the hydrogen-carbon-helium reaction…" In actuality, our sun is small enough to be one of the class of stars that is fuelled by the proton-proton chain reaction during its hydrogen to helium burning stage. The Urantia Paper avoids Gamow's mistake which states that the sun utilizes the carbon cycle.
Gamow next discusses the later stages of a star's lifetime and follows that with a section called "Stellar Catastrophes" which includes novae and supernovae, events in which stars first contract and later explode.
Following the discovery of the neutron in 1932,Baade and Zwicky proposed that neutron stars were the final product of supernova implosion. The evidence was slender indeed and because of Zwicky's reputation of unreliability, the idea was largely ignored. Gamow was a better physicist than Zwicky but also was considered unreliable by many.1
In 1941, Gamow and Schoenberg2 published a paper proposing that a hypothetical particle, known to physicists as the neutrino, was the means by which the energy of a supernova explosion could be conducted from the star's interior to its exterior thus permitting it to collapse in a matter of minutes. Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli had originally invented the neutrino in 1932 as a particle with no properties to account for energy balance discrepancies during radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus. This particle was not actually proven to exist until 1956. Gamow and his group also published a series of highly speculative papers in the 1940 period in which the Hubble expansion of the universe was conceived to originate from a thermonuclear fireball. Unfortunately many of their details of thermonucleogenesis by which elements were interconverted were later shown to be erroneous and Gamow's team was disbanded, "its work ignored and disdained."
From Matthew Block's comparisons I have to accept that the Gamow's 1942 review paper was also the source of the following Urantia Book comment.
"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
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