hydrogen

58:3.1Dur­ing the ear­lier times of uni­verse ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion the space re­gions are in­ter­spersed with vast hy­dro­gen clouds, just such as­tro­nomic dust clus­ters as now char­ac­ter­ize many re­gions through­out re­mote space. Much of the or­ga­nized mat­ter which the blaz­ing suns break down and dis­perse as ra­di­ant en­ergy was orig­i­nally built up in these early ap­pear­ing hy­dro­gen clouds of space. Un­der cer­tain un­usual con­di­tions atom dis­rup­tion also oc­curs at the nu­cleus of the larger hy­dro­gen masses. And all of these phe­nom­ena of atom build­ing and atom dis­so­lu­tion, as in the highly heated neb­u­lae, are at­tended by the emer­gence of flood tides of short space rays of ra­di­ant en­ergy. Ac­com­pa­ny­ing these di­verse ra­di­a­tions is a form of space-en­ergy un­known on Uran­tia.

58:3.2This short-ray en­ergy charge of uni­verse space is four hun­dred times greater than all other forms of ra­di­ant en­ergy ex­ist­ing in the or­ga­nized space do­mains. The out­put of short space rays, whether com­ing from the blaz­ing neb­u­lae, tense elec­tric fields, outer space, or the vast hy­dro­gen dust clouds, is mod­i­fied qual­i­ta­tively and quan­ti­ta­tively by fluc­tu­a­tions of, and sud­den ten­sion changes in, tem­per­a­ture, grav­ity, and elec­tronic pres­sures.

58:3.3These even­tu­al­i­ties in the ori­gin of the space rays are de­ter­mined by many cos­mic oc­cur­rences as well as by the or­bits of cir­cu­lat­ing mat­ter, which vary from mod­i­fied cir­cles to ex­treme el­lipses. Phys­i­cal con­di­tions may also be greatly al­tered be­cause the elec­tron spin is some­times in the op­po­site di­rec­tion from that of the grosser mat­ter be­hav­ior, even in the same phys­i­cal zone.

58:3.4The vast hy­dro­gen clouds are ver­i­ta­ble cos­mic chem­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries, har­bor­ing all phases of evolv­ing en­ergy and meta­mor­phos­ing mat­ter. Great en­ergy ac­tions also oc­cur in the marginal gases of the great bi­nary stars which so fre­quently over­lap and hence ex­ten­sively com­min­gle. But none of these tremen­dous and far-flung en­ergy ac­tiv­i­ties of space ex­erts the least in­flu­ence upon the phe­nom­ena of or­ga­nized life—the germ plasm of liv­ing things and be­ings. These en­ergy con­di­tions of space are ger­mane to the es­sen­tial en­vi­ron­ment of life es­tab­lish­ment, but they are not ef­fec­tive in the sub­se­quent mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the in­her­i­tance fac­tors of the germ plasm as are some of the longer rays of ra­di­ant en­ergy. The im­planted life of the Life Car­ri­ers is fully re­sis­tant to all of this amaz­ing flood of the short space rays of uni­verse en­ergy.

42:6.7Each atom is a tri­fle over 1/100,000,000^th of an inch in di­am­e­ter, while an elec­tron weighs a lit­tle more than 1/2,000^th of the small­est atom, hy­dro­gen. The pos­i­tive pro­ton, char­ac­ter­is­tic of the atomic nu­cleus, while it may be no larger than a neg­a­tive elec­tron, weighs al­most two thou­sand times more.

57:8.3The real ge­o­logic his­tory of Uran­tia be­gins with the cool­ing of the earth’s crust suf­fi­ciently to cause the for­ma­tion of the first ocean. Wa­ter-va­por con­den­sa­tion on the cool­ing sur­face of the earth, once be­gun, con­tin­ued un­til it was vir­tu­ally com­plete. By the end of this pe­riod the ocean was world-wide, cov­er­ing the en­tire planet to an av­er­age depth of over one mile. The tides were then in play much as they are now ob­served, but this prim­i­tive ocean was not salty; it was prac­ti­cally a fresh-wa­ter cov­er­ing for the world. In those days, most of the chlo­rine was com­bined with var­i­ous met­als, but there was enough, in union with hy­dro­gen, to ren­der this wa­ter faintly acid.

41:8.1In 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.

41:8.2Re­duc­tion of hy­dro­gen con­tent in­creases the lu­mi­nos­ity of a sun. In the suns des­tined to burn out, the height of lu­mi­nos­ity is at­tained at the point of hy­dro­gen ex­haus­tion. Sub­se­quent to this point, bril­liance is main­tained by the re­sul­tant pro­cess of grav­ity con­trac­tion. Even­tu­ally, such a star will be­come a so-called white dwarf, a highly con­densed sphere.

12:9.3Math­e­mat­ics, ma­te­rial sci­ence, is in­dis­pens­able to the in­tel­li­gent dis­cus­sion of the ma­te­rial as­pects of the uni­verse, but such knowl­edge is not nec­es­sar­ily a part of the higher re­al­iza­tion of truth or of the per­sonal ap­pre­ci­a­tion of spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties. Not only in the realms of life but even in the world of phys­i­cal en­ergy, the sum of two or more things is very of­ten some­thing more than, or some­thing dif­fer­ent from, the pre­dictable ad­di­tive con­se­quences of such unions. The en­tire sci­ence of math­e­mat­ics, the whole do­main of phi­los­o­phy, the high­est physics or chem­istry, could not pre­dict or know that the union of two gaseous hy­dro­gen atoms with one gaseous oxy­gen atom would re­sult in a new and qual­i­ta­tively super­ad­di­tive sub­stance—liq­uid wa­ter. The un­der­stand­ing knowl­edge of this one phys­io­chem­i­cal phe­nom­e­non should have pre­vented the de­vel­op­ment of ma­te­ri­al­is­tic phi­los­o­phy and mech­a­nis­tic cos­mol­ogy.