Текст книги "The British Study Edition of the Urantia Papers"

Автор книги: Tigran Aivazian

PAPER № 41
PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE LOCAL UNIVERSE

Archangel

^41:0.1 The characteristic space phenomenon which sets off each local creation from all others is the presence of the Creative Spirit. All Nebadon is certainly pervaded by the space presence of the Divine Minister of Salvington, and such presence just as certainly terminates at the outer borders of our local universe. That which is pervaded by our local universe Mother Spirit is Nebadon; that which extends beyond her space presence is outside Nebadon, being the extra-Nebadon space regions of the superuniverse of Orvonton – other local universes.

^41:0.2 ¶ While the administrative organization of the grand universe discloses a clear-cut division between the governments of the central, super-, and local universes, and while these divisions are astronomically paralleled in the space separation of Havona and the 7 superuniverses, no such clear lines of physical demarcation set off the local creations. Even the major and minor sectors of Orvonton are (to us) clearly distinguishable, but it is not so easy to identify the physical boundaries of the local universes. This is because these local creations are administratively organized in accordance with certain creative principles governing the segmentation of the total energy charge of a superuniverse, whereas their physical components, the spheres of space – suns, dark islands, planets, etc. – take origin primarily from nebulae, and these make their astronomical appearance in accordance with certain precreative (transcendental) plans of the Architects of the Master Universe.

^41:0.3 One or more – even many – such nebulae may be encompassed within the domain of a single local universe even as Nebadon was physically assembled out of the stellar and planetary progeny of Andronover and other nebulae. The spheres of Nebadon are of diverse nebular ancestry, but they all had a certain minimum commonness of space motion which was so adjusted by the intelligent efforts of the power directors as to produce our present aggregation of space bodies, which travel along together as a contiguous unit over the orbits of the superuniverse.

^41:0.4 Such is the constitution of the local star cloud of Nebadon, which today swings in an increasingly settled orbit about the Sagittarius centre of that minor sector of Orvonton to which our local creation belongs.

^41:1.1 The spiral and other nebulae, the mother wheels of the spheres of space, are initiated by Paradise force organizers; and following nebular evolution of gravity response, they are superseded in superuniverse function by the power centres and physical controllers, who thereupon assume full responsibility for directing the physical evolution of the ensuing generations of stellar and planetary offspring. This physical supervision of the Nebadon preuniverse was, upon the arrival of our Creator Son, immediately co-ordinated with his plan for universe organization. Within the domain of this Paradise Son of God, the Supreme Power Centres and the Master Physical Controllers collaborated with the later appearing Morontia Power Supervisors and others to produce that vast complex of communication lines, energy circuits, and power lanes which firmly bind the manifold space bodies of Nebadon into one integrated administrative unit.

^41:1.2 100 Supreme Power Centres of the fourth order are permanently assigned to our local universe. These beings receive the incoming lines of power from the third-order centres of Uversa and relay the down-stepped and modified circuits to the power centres of our constellations and systems. These power centres, in association, function to produce the living system of control and equalization which operates to maintain the balance and distribution of otherwise fluctuating and variable energies. Power centres are not, however, concerned with transient and local energy upheavals, such as sun spots and system electric disturbances; light and electricity are not the basic energies of space; they are secondary and subsidiary manifestations.

^41:1.3 The 100 local universe centres are stationed on Salvington, where they function at the exact energy centre of that sphere. Architectural spheres, such as Salvington, Edentia, and Jerusem, are lighted, heated, and energized by methods which make them quite independent of the suns of space. These spheres were constructed – made to order – by the power centres and physical controllers and were designed to exert a powerful influence over energy distribution. Basing their activities on such focal points of energy control, the power centres, by their living presences, directionize and channelize the physical energies of space. And these energy circuits are basic to all physical-material and morontia-spiritual phenomena.

^41:1.4 10 Supreme Power Centres of the fifth order are assigned to each of Nebadon’s primary subdivisions, the 100 constellations. In Norlatiadek, your constellation, they are not stationed on the headquarters sphere but are situated at the centre of the enormous stellar system which constitutes the physical core of the constellation. On Edentia there are 10 associated mechanical controllers and 10 frandalanks who are in perfect and constant liaison with the near-by power centres.

^41:1.5 One Supreme Power Centre of the sixth order is stationed at the exact gravity focus of each local system. In the system of Satania the assigned power centre occupies a dark island of space located at the astronomic centre of the system. Many of these dark islands are vast dynamos which mobilize and directionize certain space-energies, and these natural circumstances are effectively utilized by the Satania Power Centre, whose living mass functions as a liaison with the higher centres, directing the streams of more materialized power to the Master Physical Controllers on the evolutionary planets of space.

^41:2.1 While the Master Physical Controllers serve with the power centres throughout the grand universe, their functions in a local system, such as Satania, are more easy of comprehension. Satania is one of 100 local systems which make up the administrative organization of the constellation of Norlatiadek, having as immediate neighbours the systems of Sandmatia, Assuntia, Porogia, Sortoria, Rantulia, and Glantonia. The Norlatiadek systems differ in many respects, but all are evolutionary and progressive, very much like Satania.

^41:2.2 Satania itself is composed of over 7,000 astronomical groups, or physical systems, few of which had an origin similar to that of your solar system. The astronomic centre of Satania is an enormous dark island of space which, with its attendant spheres, is situated not far from the headquarters of the system government.

^41:2.3 ¶ Except for the presence of the assigned power centre, the supervision of the entire physical-energy system of Satania is centred on Jerusem. A Master Physical Controller, stationed on this headquarters sphere, works in co-ordination with the system power centre, serving as liaison chief of the power inspectors headquartered on Jerusem and functioning throughout the local system.

^41:2.4 The circuitizing and channelizing of energy is supervised by the 500,000 living and intelligent energy manipulators scattered throughout Satania. Through the action of such physical controllers the supervising power centres are in complete and perfect control of a majority of the basic energies of space, including the emanations of highly heated orbs and the dark energy-charged spheres. This group of living entities can mobilize, transform, transmute, manipulate, and transmit nearly all of the physical energies of organized space.

^41:2.5 Life has inherent capacity for the mobilization and transmutation of universal energy. You are familiar with the action of vegetable life in transforming the material energy of light into the varied manifestations of the vegetable kingdom. You also know something of the method whereby this vegetative energy can be converted into the phenomena of animal activities, but you know practically nothing of the technique of the power directors and the physical controllers, who are endowed with ability to mobilize, transform, directionize, and concentrate the manifold energies of space.

^41:2.6 ¶ These beings of the energy realms do not directly concern themselves with energy as a component factor of living creatures, not even with the domain of physiological chemistry. They are sometimes concerned with the physical preliminaries of life, with the elaboration of those energy systems which may serve as the physical vehicles for the living energies of elementary material organisms. In a way the physical controllers are related to the preliving manifestations of material energy as the adjutant mind-spirits are concerned with the prespiritual functions of material mind.

^41:2.7 ¶ These intelligent creatures of power control and energy direction must adjust their technique on each sphere in accordance with the physical constitution and architecture of that planet. They unfailingly utilize the calculations and deductions of their respective staffs of physicists and other technical advisers regarding the local influence of highly heated suns and other types of supercharged stars. Even the enormous cold and dark giants of space and the swarming clouds of star dust must be reckoned with; all of these material things are concerned in the practical problems of energy manipulation.

^41:2.8 The power-energy supervision of the evolutionary inhabited worlds is the responsibility of the Master Physical Controllers, but these beings are not responsible for all energy misbehaviour on Urantia. There are a number of reasons for such disturbances, some of which are beyond the domain and control of the physical custodians. Urantia is in the lines of tremendous energies, a small planet in the circuit of enormous masses, and the local controllers sometimes employ enormous numbers of their order in an effort to equalize these lines of energy. They do fairly well with regard to the physical circuits of Satania but have trouble insulating against the powerful Norlatiadek currents.

^41:3.1 There are upward of 2,000 brilliant suns pouring forth light and energy in Satania, and your own sun is an average blazing orb. Of the 30 suns nearest yours, only three are brighter. The Universe Power Directors initiate the specialized currents of energy which play between the individual stars and their respective systems. These solar furnaces, together with the dark giants of space, serve the power centres and physical controllers as way stations for the effective concentrating and directionizing of the energy circuits of the material creations.

^41:3.2 The suns of Nebadon are not unlike those of other universes. The material composition of all suns, dark islands, planets, and satellites, even meteors, is quite identical. These suns have an average diameter of about 1,600,000 km, that of your own solar orb being slightly less. The largest star in the universe, the stellar cloud Antares, is 450 times the diameter of your sun and is 60,000,000 times its volume. But there is abundant space to accommodate all of these enormous suns. They have just as much comparative elbow room in space as one dozen oranges would have if they were circulating about throughout the interior of Urantia, and were the planet a hollow globe.

^41:3.3 ¶ When suns that are too large are thrown off a nebular mother wheel, they soon break up or form double stars. All suns are originally truly gaseous, though they may later transiently exist in a semiliquid state. When your sun attained this quasi-liquid state of supergas pressure, it was not sufficiently large to split equatorially, this being one type of double star formation.

^41:3.4 When less than 0.1 the size of your sun, these fiery spheres rapidly contract, condense, and cool. When upwards of 30 times its size – rather 30 times the gross content of actual material – suns readily split into two separate bodies, either becoming the centres of new systems or else remaining in each other’s gravity grasp and revolving about a common centre as one type of double star.

^41:3.5 ¶ The most recent of the major cosmic eruptions in Orvonton was the extraordinary double star explosion, the light of which reached Urantia in A.D. 1572. This conflagration was so intense that the explosion was clearly visible in broad daylight.

^41:3.6 ¶ Not all stars are solid, but many of the older ones are. Some of the reddish, faintly glimmering stars have acquired a density at the centre of their enormous masses which would be expressed by saying that 1 cm³ of such a star, if on Urantia, would weigh 166 kg. The enormous pressure, accompanied by loss of heat and circulating energy, has resulted in bringing the orbits of the basic material units closer and closer together until they now closely approach the status of electronic condensation. This process of cooling and contraction may continue to the limiting and critical explosion point of ultimatonic condensation.

^41:3.7 Most of the giant suns are relatively young; most of the dwarf stars are old, but not all. The collisional dwarfs may be very young and may glow with an intense white light, never having known an initial red stage of youthful shining. Both very young and very old suns usually shine with a reddish glow. The yellow tinge indicates moderate youth or approaching old age, but the brilliant white light signifies robust and extended adult life.

^41:3.8 ¶ While all adolescent suns do not pass through a pulsating stage, at least not visibly, when looking out into space you may observe many of these younger stars whose gigantic respiratory heaves require from 2 to 7 days to complete a cycle. Your own sun still carries a diminishing legacy of the mighty upswellings of its younger days, but the period has lengthened from the former 3.5 day pulsations to the present 11.5 year sunspot cycles.

^41:3.9 Stellar variables have numerous origins. In some double stars the tides caused by rapidly changing distances as the two bodies swing around their orbits also occasion periodic fluctuations of light. These gravity variations produce regular and recurrent flares, just as the capture of meteors by the accretion of energy-material at the surface would result in a comparatively sudden flash of light which would speedily recede to normal brightness for that sun. Sometimes a sun will capture a stream of meteors in a line of lessened gravity opposition, and occasionally collisions cause stellar flare-ups, but the majority of such phenomena are wholly due to internal fluctuations.

^41:3.10 In one group of variable stars the period of light fluctuation is directly dependent on luminosity, and knowledge of this fact enables astronomers to utilize such suns as universe lighthouses or accurate measuring points for the further exploration of distant star clusters. By this technique it is possible to measure stellar distances most precisely up to more than 1,000,000 light-years. Better methods of space measurement and improved telescopic technique will sometime more fully disclose the 10 grand divisions of the superuniverse of Orvonton; you will at least recognize 8 of these immense sectors as enormous and fairly symmetrical star clusters.

^41:4.1 The mass of your sun is slightly greater than the estimate of your physicists, who have reckoned it as about 2·10³⁰ kg[1] [1]
  2·10³⁰ kg, Note that the current scientific estimate of Sun's mass is 1.98892·10³⁰ kg.


[Закрыть]. It now exists about halfway between the most dense and the most diffuse stars, having about 1.5 times the density of water. But your sun is neither a liquid nor a solid – it is gaseous – and this is true notwithstanding the difficulty of explaining how gaseous matter can attain this and even much greater densities.

^41:4.2 ¶ Gaseous, liquid, and solid states are matters of atomic-molecular relationships, but density is a relationship of space and mass. Density varies directly with the quantity of mass in space and inversely with the amount of space in mass, the space between the central cores of matter and the particles which whirl around these centres as well as the space within such material particles.

^41:4.3 ¶ Cooling stars can be physically gaseous and tremendously dense at the same time. You are not familiar with the solar supergases, but these and other unusual forms of matter explain how even nonsolid suns can attain a density equal to iron – about the same as Urantia – and yet be in a highly heated gaseous state and continue to function as suns. The atoms in these dense supergases are exceptionally small; they contain few electrons. Such suns have also largely lost their free ultimatonic stores of energy.

^41:4.4 One of your near-by suns, which started life with about the same mass as yours, has now contracted almost to the size of Urantia, having become 40,000 times[2] [2]
  40,000 times, In 1955 text: sixty thousand times. Textual consistency and current scientific estimates of our sun’s density both support the change to “40,000.” The first paragraph of this section states that our sun is about 1.5 times the density of water 1 g/cm³, and 40,000 times this is 40 kg/cm³; the current scientific estimate of the sun’s density is 1.4 times the density of water; 40,000 times that is 56 kg/cm³. The likely cause of this error in the 1955 text is that the number in question was written as a numeral in the manuscript (40,000 not forty thousand), and the error was caused by a simple keystroke error in which 6 was mis-keyed for 4, creating 60,000 instead of 40,000. When the text was formatted for printing, the numerals were changed to words, and an error that formerly consisted of one digit was transformed into an incorrect word. The formatting of words and numbers for printing is not a revelatory issue; it is a matter of style, and is covered extensively in the Chicago Manual of Style. (The problem at 43:1.6 in the text appears to have had an identical origin, and 42:5.1 in the text is very closely related.)


[Закрыть] as dense as your sun. The density of this hot-cold gaseous-solid is about 61 kg/cm³. And still this sun shines with a faint reddish glow, the senile glimmer of a dying monarch of light.

^41:4.5 Most of the suns, however, are not so dense. One of your nearer neighbours has a density exactly equal to that of your atmosphere at sea level. If you were in the interior of this sun, you would be unable to discern anything. And temperature permitting, you could penetrate the majority of the suns which twinkle in the night sky and notice no more matter than you perceive in the air of your earthly living rooms.

^41:4.6 The massive sun of Veluntia, one of the largest in Orvonton, has a density only 0.001 that of Urantia’s atmosphere. Were it in composition similar to your atmosphere and not superheated, it would be such a vacuum that human beings would speedily suffocate if they were in or on it.

^41:4.7 Another of the Orvonton giants now has a surface temperature a trifle under 1,600 degrees. Its diameter is over 482,803,200 km – ample room to accommodate your sun and the present orbit of the earth. And yet, for all this enormous size, over 40,000,000 times that of your sun, its mass is only about 30 times greater. These enormous suns have an extending fringe that reaches almost from one to the other.

^41:5.1 That the suns of space are not very dense is proved by the steady streams of escaping light-energies. Too great a density would retain light by opacity until the light-energy pressure reached the explosion point. There is a tremendous light or gas pressure within a sun to cause it to shoot forth such a stream of energy as to penetrate space for millions upon millions of kilometres to energize, light, and heat the distant planets. 4.6 m of surface of the density of Urantia would effectually prevent the escape of all X rays and light-energies from a sun until the rising internal pressure of accumulating energies resulting from atomic dismemberment overcame gravity with a tremendous outward explosion.

^41:5.2 Light, in the presence of the propulsive gases, is highly explosive when confined at high temperatures by opaque retaining walls. Light is real. As you value energy and power on your world, sunlight would be economical at a million pounds sterling a kilogram.

^41:5.3 The interior of your sun is a vast X-ray generator. The suns are supported from within by the incessant bombardment of these mighty emanations.

^41:5.4 It requires more than 500,000 years for an X-ray-stimulated electron to work its way from the very centre of an average sun up to the solar surface, whence it starts out on its space adventure, maybe to warm an inhabited planet, to be captured by a meteor, to participate in the birth of an atom, to be attracted by a highly charged dark island of space, or to find its space flight terminated by a final plunge into the surface of a sun similar to the one of its origin.

^41:5.5 The X rays of a sun’s interior charge the highly heated and agitated electrons with sufficient energy to carry them out through space, past the hosts of detaining influences of intervening matter and, in spite of divergent gravity attractions, on to the distant spheres of the remote systems. The great energy of velocity required to escape the gravity clutch of a sun is sufficient to ensure that the sunbeam will travel on with unabated velocity until it encounters considerable masses of matter; whereupon it is quickly transformed into heat with the liberation of other energies.

^41:5.6 ¶ Energy, whether as light or in other forms, in its flight through space moves straight forward. The actual particles of material existence traverse space like a fusillade. They go in a straight and unbroken line or procession except as they are acted on by superior forces, and except as they ever obey the linear-gravity pull inherent in material mass and the circular-gravity presence of the Isle of Paradise.

^41:5.7 ¶ Solar energy may seem to be propelled in waves, but that is due to the action of coexistent and diverse influences. A given form of organized energy does not proceed in waves but in direct lines. The presence of a second or a third form of force-energy may cause the stream under observation to appear to travel in wavy formation, just as, in a blinding rainstorm accompanied by a heavy wind, the water sometimes appears to fall in sheets or to descend in waves. The raindrops are coming down in a direct line of unbroken procession, but the action of the wind is such as to give the visible appearance of sheets of water and waves of raindrops.

^41:5.8 The action of certain secondary and other undiscovered energies present in the space regions of your local universe is such that solar-light emanations appear to execute certain wavy phenomena as well as to be chopped up into infinitesimal portions of definite length and weight. And, practically considered, that is exactly what happens. You can hardly hope to arrive at a better understanding of the behaviour of light until such a time as you acquire a clearer concept of the interaction and interrelationship of the various space-forces and solar energies operating in the space regions of Nebadon. Your present confusion is also due to your incomplete grasp of this problem as it involves the interassociated activities of the personal and nonpersonal control of the master universe – the presences, the performances, and the co-ordination of the Conjoint Actor and the Unqualified Absolute.