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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." (Paper 41, Sect. 8, p.464)
The "vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric potential" are the neutrinos, not shown to exist until 1956. The paper that provided the theoretical basis for understanding supernovae was written in 19573 but did not concede a role to neutrinos. Proof of the actual existence of the neutron star did not come until the 1960's when observations with radiotelescopes identified a rapidly rotating body named a pulsar in the Crab nebula that could not be a white dwarf star. The final proof came from observations made from the orbiting X-ray observatory in 1967 and neutrino bursts detected from a supernova in the Cloud of Magellan in 1987.
Gamow's intuition about the role of neutrinos was correct but he succumbed to opinion of the day and decided against the Zwicky hypothesis of neutron star formation. Instead he concluded that for large stars above the so-called Chandresekhar critical mass of 1.4 sun masses, the rapid collapse of supernovae would still culminate in the formation of a white dwarf star, as often happens with smaller stars.
It is noteworthy that the author of the Urantia Paper has described the formation of white dwarf stars in the paragraph preceding our last p. 464 quotation, but has again avoided repeating Gamow's error of concluding that the same fate awaits those large stars that collapse as supernovae. The chances of doing this must be small for any other than a highly knowledgeable author.
So what were the chances of even the professional scientist correctly guessing in the early 1940's that an unconfirmed particle with no properties would be the catalyst for the formation of neutron stars? Surely they must be exceedingly remote. Zwicky himself made no such assertion, concluding that cosmic rays were the outcome of the explosion. And the Burbidges who, with Fowler and Hoyle wrote the theoretical basis for understanding supernovae in 1957, also failed to ascribe a role to the neutrino.
So is the Urantia Paper account "prophetic" despite the addition of materials subsequent to 1935? Each must decide for themselves. My own guess is that there is very highly probability of it being so.
References
1. Thorne, Kip S. "Black Holes and Time Warps." (W.W. Norton, N.Y. 1994)
2. Gamow. G. Science Monthly, January 1942
3. Burbidge, E.M., G.R. Burbidge, W.A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle. (1957)
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