Hideki Yukawa nobel prize
versus
Urantia book
MesotronHideki Yukawa
(1907-1981)
In 1949 Hideki Yukawa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting the existence of the meson.
He originally named it 'mesotron', but was corrected by Werner Heisenberg (whose father was a professor in Greek at University of Munich) that there is no 'tr' in the Greek word 'mesos'.
Japanese physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1949 for research in the theory of elementary particles.
Graduating from Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) in 1929, Yukawa became a lecturer there, moving in 1933 to Osaka Imperial University (now Osaka University), where in 1938 he was awarded his doctorate. He rejoined Kyoto Imperial University as professor of theoretical physics (1939-50), held faculty appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., U.S., and at Columbia University in New York City, and became director of the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics in Kyoto (1953-70).
In 1935, while a lecturer at Osaka Imperial University, Yukawa proposed a new theory of nuclear forces in which he predicted the existence of mesons, or particles that have masses between those of the electron and the proton. The discovery of one type of meson among cosmic rays by American physicists in 1937 suddenly established Yukawa's fame as the founder of meson theory, which later became an important part of nuclear and high-energy physics. After devoting himself to the development of meson theory, he started work in 1947 on a more comprehensive theory of elementary particles based on his idea of the so-called nonlocal field.
Urantia 1934
Paper 42 Atomic CohesionThe charged protons and the uncharged neutrons of the nucleus of the atom are held together by the reciprocating function of the
mesotron, a particle of matter 180 times as heavy as the electron. Without this arrangement the electric charge carried by the protons would be disruptive of the atomic nucleus.
As atoms are constituted, neither electric nor gravitational forces could hold the nucleus together. The integrity of the nucleus is maintained by the reciprocal cohering function of the
mesotron, which is able to hold charged and uncharged particles together because of superior force-mass power and by the further function of causing protons and neutrons constantly to change places. 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. Thus does the mesotron function as an " energy-carrier" particle which mightily contributes to the nuclear stability of the atom.
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.
The mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia.
These mesotrons are found abundantly in the space rays which so incessantly impinge upon your planet.
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The Strong Force in the Atomic Nucleus 1998
Prophesied in 1934
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1."The charged protons and the uncharged neutrons of the nucleus of the atom are held together by the reciprocating function of the mesotron, a particle of matter 180 times as heavy as the electron. Without this arrangement the electric charge carried by the protons would be disruptive of the atomic nucleus.
2. "As atoms are constituted, neither electric nor gravitational forces could hold the nucleus together. The integrity of the nucleus is maintained by the reciprocal cohering function of the mesotron, which is able to hold charged and uncharged particles together because of superior force-mass power and by the further function of causing protons and neutrons constantly to change places. 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. Thus does the mesotron function as an "energy-carrier" particle which mightily contributes to the nuclear stability of the atom.
3. "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 particle.
4. "The mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia." (479)
For me, this is one of the truly remarkable passages on science from a Urantia Paper said to have been written in 1934. I first read it in the early 1970's and recognized paragraphs 1 and 2 as the basic postulates of a theory for which Hideki Yukawa was awarded the Nobel prize in 1948. From the 1950's to the 1970's, particle physics was in a state of confusion because of the multitudes of sub-atomic particles that came spewing forth from particle accelerators. As new concepts and discoveries were announced, I kept noting them in the margins of page 479, which eventually became somewhat messy. At times I felt that there was not much that was right on this page, at other times I marvelled at its accuracy.
In recent years, a considerable amount of information has been forthcoming on the history of development of the present "standard model" for atomic structure. Though recognized as being incomplete, the standard model has enormously increased our understanding of the basic nature of matter. The electromagnetic force and the weak force of radiocactive decay have been successfully unified to yield the "electroweak" theory. As yet this has not been unified with the theory of the "strong" force that holds the atomic nucleus together. The force of gravity remains intractable to unification with the others.
Para's 1-3 above from The Urantia Book, ostensibly presented in 1934, could have come directly from the mind of Hideki Yukawa. In the quantum theory of electromagnetism, two charged particles interact when one emits a photon and the other absorbs it. In 1932 Yukawa had decided to attempt a similar approach to describe the nuclear force field. He wrote, "...it seemed likely that the nuclear force was a third fundamental force, unrelated to gravitation or electromagnetism... which could also find expression as a field... Then if one visualizes the force field as a game of 'catch' between protons and neutrons, the crux of the problem would be to find the nature of the 'ball' or particle." This work was published in Japanese in 1935, but was not well known in the U.S.A.
At first, Yukawa followed the work of Heisenberg and used a field of electrons to supply the nuclear force between protons and neutrons. This led to problems. In 1934 he decided "to look no longer among the known particles for the particle of the nuclear force field. He wrote: "The crucial point came one night in October. The nuclear force is effective at extremely small distances, on the order of 0.02 trillionth of a centimeter. My new insight was the realization that this distance and the mass of the new particle I was seeking are inversely related to each other." He realized he could make the range of the nuclear force correct if he allowed the ball in the game of 'catch' to be heavy-- approximately 200 times heavier than the electron."
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Para. 3 above extends Fermi's 1934 theory of radio-active decay of the neutron. In his early work, Yukawa had considered that his mesotron might act as the 'ball' in the 'catch' game during radioactive decay. After re-running his calculations, in 1938 he published a paper predicting the properties of such a mesotron which he now called a 'weak' photon, from which it became known as the 'W' particle.
Para's 1-3 come close to being the contemporary, but incredibly speculative, science of 1934. They include three unknown particles--the pion mesotron (found 1947), the W particle mesotron (found 1983), and the small uncharged particles (neutrinos found 1953). Few would have bet on these predictions being right.
Para 2. comments, "the alternations of energy status are unbelievably rapid..." According to Nobel prize winner, Steven Weinberg, they occur in the order of a million, million, million, millionth of a second. In contrast, the process described in para. 3 takes about a hundredth of a second.
Para. 4 states that the mesotron (pion) does not account for certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus. It then tells us that there is an aspect of this force that is as yet undiscovered on Urantia.
Leon Lederman was a young research worker in 1950 who later became director of the Fermi Laboratory. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988. In his book, "The God Particle", he comments: "The hot particle of 1950 was the pion or pi meson, as it is also called. The pion had been predicted in 1936 by a Japanese theoretical physicist, Hideki Yukawa. It was thought to be the key to the strong force, which in those days was the big mystery. Today we think of the strong force in terms of gluons. But back then (i.e. 1950's), pions which fly back and forth between the protons to hold them together tightly in the nucleus were the key, and we needed to make and study them."
This force, unknown in 1934, (and for that matter in 1955 when The Urantia Book was published) is now known as the color force. Writing about it in their book, "The Particle Explosion," Close, Marten, and Sutton state, "Back in the 1940's and 1950's, theorists thought that pions were the transmitters of the strong force. But experiments later showed that pions and other hadrons are composite particles, built from quarks, and the theory of the strong force had to be revised completely. We now believe that it is the color within the proton and the neutron that attracts them to each other to build nuclei. This process may have similarities to the way that electrical charge within atoms manages to build up complex molecules. Just as electrons are exchanged between atoms bound within a molecule, so are quarks and anti-quarks--in clusters we call 'pions'--exchanged between the protons and neutrons in a nucleus."
The mandate to the revelators permitted "the supplying of information which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge." (1110) Whether any physicist ever effectively utilized the information in para. 4 of page 479, we will probably never know. But there are "more things on heaven and earth"... For example, "Physics, it is hoped, will one day reach the ultimate level of nature in which everything can be described and from which the entire universe develops. This belief could be called the quest for the ultimon." (from E David Peat, 1988, "Superstrings and the Search for the Theory of Everything.") There is a curious coincidence here. The particle The Urantia Book called a mesotron became shortened to meson. It calls the basic building block of matter an ultimaton. Will it one day be called the ultimon?
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Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Australia. retired physicist
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A mental picture of the atom
In order to be able to communicate with one another in terms of normal, everyday experience, we can visualize an atomic nucleus as being a kind of spherical container in which other little spherical containers are found (Fig 1.). One kind is called a proton and it carries a positive electric charge. The other kind could be described as a mirror image of the proton minus its electric charge, and is given the name "neutron." The simplest of all atoms is the hydrogen atom and it consists of a single proton with its single positive charge. It is a fact of creation that for every positive charge in the universe there exists an equal and opposite charge that we call negative. The proton is accompanied by its negatively charged electron that is thought of as being smeared out in a cloud skirting the spherical proton. The size of an atomic nucleus is in the order of 10-15cm and the electron cloud is of the order of 10-8cm. Putting that into more familiar terms, if the electron cloud was a mist clinging to the surface of the earth, and the nucleus of the atom was at the very center of the earth, that nucleus would be about the size of a football field and situated 4000 miles away from its electron cloud. Which all goes to show how powerful is the electric field that holds the electrons to the nucleus and permits matter to exist.
As atoms get larger, Nature endows them with more and more protons with their positive charges and these are highly repellent to one another. To help alleviate the problem, Nature adds neutrons to the protons, on a roughly one to one basis to start with, but as the bundles gets bigger, Nature has to supply more neutrons than protons in order to stop things falling apart. The number of protons in the mix decides whether a particular mix, called an element, will be hydrogen, oxygen, silver, gold, iron, aluminum, or what have you. The number of neutrons accompanying the protons does not influence which element a mix will be, but it does determine its stability. Carbon, for example, has only six protons, but can have from 5 to 8 neutrons. The last one is called carbon 14; it is unstable, and breaks down radioactively, which is very convenient for those archaeologists who use it to carbon date the remnants of their ancestors.
On making nuclear peace
Par.1 of page 479 is about how the atomic nucleus holds itself together despite the antipathy of the protons for one another. Fig. 2 shows diagrammatically, a theory published by a Japanese physicist, Hideki Yukawa, that is almost the exact equivalent of what is stated in Par.1. Eventually Yukawa was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, which, of course, was not just a simple drawing like Fig. 2, but a highly developed mathematical treatment of his proposal. Effectively, it assumes that this particle, termed the mesotron or meson, picks up a positive electric charge from the charged protons of the nucleus and switches it to the neutron which thereupon becomes a proton while the proton that lost its charge is now a neutron.
Why does it have two names? Well the Greeks used the word "mesos" to mean middle and Yukawa's particle had a calculated mass somewhere between the electron, the proton, and the neutron. So there were three choices, meson, mesoton, or mesotron simply meaning middle sized particle. Eventually "meson" won the day.
A breach of the mandate?
Yukawa's theory was published in 1935, one year after receipt of the Urantia Paper. Does that controvert the mandate about the proscription of unearned knowledge? Not necessarily, because Yukawa's memoirs state that he had been thinking about the problem ever since the discovery of the neutron in 1932. It is customary in most research laboratories to have internal seminars, often on a weekly basis, in which research workers present progress reports on their projects. Although the mandate for the revelators proscribed the disclosure of unearned knowledge, there was no stipulation that it had to be published before it could be used in their revelation. Presumably the revelators could have used Yukawa's seminar notes, or even his spoken addresses as source material for the book.
We do need to note that Yukawa's idea was only one among other possible theories attempting to account for nuclear stability. We also need to note that in Par. 4., p. 479, the revelators point out that Yukawa's explanation of nuclear binding is only partial. The book actually says, "The mesotron explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia."
That particular comment appears to be highly prophetic, and would have remained so even if our Triple "A" authors had written it in during the 1950's. For example, Nobel Prize winner, Leon Lederman, wrote: "The hot particle of 1950 was the pion or pi meson. The pion had been predicted in 1936 by a Japanese theoretical physicist, Hideki Yukawa. It was thought to be the key to the strong force, which in those days was the big mystery. Today, we think of the strong force in terms of gluons. But back then, mesons which fly back and forth between the protons to hold them together tightly in the nucleus were the key, and we needed to make and study them." Here Lederman appears to indicate that, in the 1950's, most physicists thought the Yukawa theory was still adequate--and perhaps they should have for they had only just awarded him the Nobel Prize because of it. The Urantia Book, of course, says it was inadequate--a comment that turned out to be true.
A development causing mini-excitement occurred in 1936 when Anderson and his co-workers announced the discovery of a particle in cosmic ray experiments that appeared to correspond to Yukawa's meson as it had almost exactly the mass that Yukawa had predicted. However, the euphoria was short-lived when it was discovered that Anderson's meson had a negative charge and not the positive charge required by Yukawa theory. Even later Anderson's meson turned out not to be a meson at all, but a heavy electron, now called the muon. Yukawa's meson was finally discovered in 1947.
Colliders bring confusion in the 1950's
In the 50's, confusion broke loose as powerful accelerators collided nuclear particles at higher and higher energy levels and generated an absolute profusion of new particles, including 4 or 5 kinds of mesons.
The confusion in the fifties was such that one prominent physicist is reported to have advocated presenting the Nobel Prize to the next physicist not to discover a new particle. That brings up a point. It has been claimed (by Martin Gardner) that the text of The Urantia Book could have been modified until the books started to roll off the presses in 1955. If so, then the enormous confusion in the world of sub-atomic physics during the early 1950's should have generated enough anxiety in our Triple "A" committee physicist for him to become uncertain about any of his prophetic commentary--and surely he would have been impelled to remove it if he gave thought to the potential effects upon the revelatory status of the book.
Let's now examine the details of Par. 3.
On radioactive decay of the neutron
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. (479)
Here we are told about two kinds of undiscovered particles that result from the beta radioactive decay of the neutron. One of them, called in the book, a "small uncharged particle," had been predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1932 to account for the missing energy when a neutron decayed radioactively to a proton and an electron. This tiny particle became known as the neutrino. A word of explanation. The mass of the neutron was known to be greater than the masses of the proton and the electron combined. From Einstein's famous equation E = MC2, the change in energy can be calculated from the change in mass and since all the energy could not be accounted for, Pauli invented his little particle with no properties that he said could never be discovered.
The accepted theory of beta radioactive decay in 1934/5 was that proposed in 1932 by one of the most famous physicists of this century, Werner Heisenberg. It became known as the four fermion theory and is shown in our Fig. 3. Here a single neutron arrives at a single space-time point (position A) whereupon it decides it is sick of being what it is and opts for a new life as three new particles, a proton, an electron, and a little uncharged particle, a neutrino. This theory was shown to be entirely satisfactory for the low energy conditions available in those days, except for one thing. Nobody could demonstrate that the neutrino actually existed.
Conservation of energy. True or false?
We'll digress for a moment to consider the status of a law in classical physics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This energy-balance problem we have referred to during neutron decay required an implicit faith that this law would hold good despite the fact that many classical concepts had withered and failed in the new physics introduced in the early part of this century. Among the new theories were relativity and quantum physics. As time went by, and on onto the 1940's, faith in this law of the immortality of energy began to wither. Many asked the question of whether it was really valid to postulate a little uncharged particle that could never be detected because it had no properties, for the sole purpose of preserving what may well have become an outdated law of classical physics.
If this p. 479 material in the book was really written by our Triple "A" committee, then its members show some pretty strange behavior.
In Par.4, they go against front line physics by pointing out that the theory that earned Yukawa the Nobel Prize in 1948 is inadequate to account
for aspects of the binding of the nucleus, and in Par. 3, they bet on the conservation of energy law holding up under circumstances in which it
had yet to be tested. This law was derived from the effects of heat, work, and gravity on steam engines, hydraulic pumps, horses pulling
plows, apples falling off trees, etc. It was not known whether the law held good in the micro-world of the atom.
Einstein came along and said the gravity concepts were wrong and also introduced a new idea, the equivalence of mass and energy for which
there was nothing comparable in classical physics. In radioactive beta decay a neutron changes into a proton and an electron but the energy
equivalent to the loss in mass does not correspond to what was measured. Hence the invention of the undetectable neutrino to preserve
the validity of the law that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Now if our Triple "A" people were at work faking a revelation, right here, in Par. 3, they took the unprecedented step
of ignoring the top physicists of the day and introducing their own concept of beta-decay as illustrated in Fig. 4.
Please note that I did not draw Fig. 4, but copied it from a modern text book because The Urantia Book concept has become the modern theory.
http://www.urantiabook.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol4_1/page7.html The major difference from the Heisenberg scheme (Fig. 3) was the introduction of another unidentified (and in those days, unidentifiable) particle that the revelators have called a mesotron, but is now known as the W- particle. Clearly it is not the same mesotron as postulated for mediating nucleus stability since that mesotron shuttles a positive charge, and this second mesotron carries negative charge as shown by its breaking down to the negatively charged electron and the small uncharged particle.
The Urantia Paper that provided this information was dated as having been delivered to the Contact Commission in 1934. In 1938, Hideki Yukawa made an attempt to reformulate the Heisenberg scheme for beta decay using one similar to that in The Urantia Book. In it, he called his carrier a weak photon rather than a mesotron. The work was not taken seriously as the four fermion process of Fig. 3 was considered adequate and remained so until into the 1950's.
The speculative(?) predictions on p. 479 of the book
Here we can reasonably ask the question of why a physicist of the Triple "A" committee would indulge in a guessing game that could discredit all the work entailed in amassing a 2000-page revelation. All told, there are six highly speculative suggestions that could easily have been wrong.
1. The Yukawa meson (identified in 1947),
2. The small uncharged particles (neutrinos) of radioactive decay proposed in 1932 and identified in 1956. Note that in an article in the February 1996 issue of Scientific American, one of their discoverers, Dr Frederick Reines, says, "For 25 years the neutrino was little more than a figment of the theoretical physicists' imagination." So even when the book was first printed, the neutrino was still a figment of the imagination.
3. The mesotron of radioactive beta decay that became known as the W-- boson (discovered 1981)
4. The force other than Yukawa's meson that holds proton to proton and neutron to neutron and which was finally clarified in the period between 1950 and 1970.
5. In Par. 5, the book states that, "These mesotrons are found abundantly in the space rays which so incessantly impinge upon your planet." The first report of a meson being discovered in cosmic rays occurred in 1936, two years after the Paper was received--but turned out not to be a meson.
6. Then there is another highly speculative suggestion in Par. 2. The book says, "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." In effect, it is as if the charge is smeared out rather than being localized. Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg (1992), remarks that these alternations occur in the order of a million, million, million, millionth of a second. In contrast, the movement of electric charge from neutron to electron during the beta radioactive decay process takes about one hundredth of a second. In 1934, there was no hard evidence available to make such comparisons. http://www.urantiabook.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol4_1/page5.html