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Cosmic Reflections. Oops!!!
Dick Bain
The astronomy and cosmology of The Urantia Book has been a problem for many of us who care about this field of knowledge. We find it difficult to harmonize the descriptions and numbers in The Urantia Book with the current concepts of our astronomers. One of my recent attempts to do so in an Innerface article [1] has a serious flaw caused by a simple math error, as well as some typos.
In the article, "Visible Universe," I thought I proved that all the galaxies our astronomers can see using the latest generation of telescopes would fit in the first outer space level described in The Urantia Book. Sad to say, they won't. The eagle-eyed Norm DuVal spotted several typos in the article. When I checked over the article, I noticed the flawed calculation. Now let me set the record straight.
First, the typos: On page 12, column 2, "500 light years in diameter" should be "500 thousand light years in diameter;" "Milky Way galaxy at 100 light years diameter" should be "Milky Way galaxy at 100 thousand light years diameter." On page 13, first column, "Even if the average spacing between galaxies were 100 l.y" should be "Even if the average spacing between galaxies were 100 million l.y." And next come the math problems.
For purposes of calculation, I chose a cube five million light years on a side to contain each galaxy. This would space galaxies at an average distance of five million light years apart. The spacing may be closer in galactic clusters, but there is a good deal of nearly empty space between clusters, so I think my proposed volume per galaxy is reasonable, perhaps even on the small side. In the article, my calculation of the volume of this space was given as 125 million cubic light years, which of course really should be 125 quadrillion cubic light years or 125 x 1018. This is 125 followed by 18 zeros. If you divide this into the volume I calculated for the first OSL, 327 x 1021, you get a capacity of 2616 galaxies for the first OSL. The authors indicate that the stars we see are all in the first OSL, yet they say we will one day observe 375 million galaxies through better telescopes. And based on the number of galaxies seen on a 1996 deep probe by the Hubble Space Telescope, some astronomers think there may be as many as 50 billion galaxies in the visible universe. The difference between 2616 and 50 billion galaxies is such a disparity that it is mind boggling!
After noting my mistake, I had thought to invoke the 2nd OSL as a candidate for all the galaxies. My calculations show that it has a volume of 327 x 1027 cubic light years, and could hold 2.6 x 109 (2.6 billion) galaxies. Unfortunately, the authors seem to indicate that all the visible galaxies are in the first outer space level. Now if the astronomers estimate of 50 billion galaxies in the universe is in the ballpark, then we're really short of space. This many galaxies would require a volume of 6.25 x 1030 cubic light years. If we use the astronomers best guess for the size of the universe, which is about 12 billion light years in radius, then the volume of that sphere (Vs=4 x PI x r3) is 1.7330 cubic light years. Oops, the astronomers' universe isn't large enough to hold all of its galaxies! Of course, if we reduce the number of galaxies to 10 billion or reduce the space per galaxy, we can squeeze them into the Big Bang universe.
Another item that affects our picture of the universe is the concept of red shift. All the determinations of distances greater than about 100 million light years depend mainly on the red shift of the light from these distant galaxies. The Urantia Book authors tell us that most of the red shift is due to the passage of light through space and not to "the speed of recession" of the galaxies away from us. In either case, since the amount of red shift is proportional to the distance of the galaxy from us, then the more distant galaxies have the greatest red shift. The effect is the same whether the red shift is due to speed of recession or the effect of space on light passing through it. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to calibrate distance if we throw out the Hubble formula for distance based on the amount of red shift due to speed of recession.
However we gauge the size of the universe, it must be large enough to contain all of the visible galaxies. There needs to be adequate space between neighboring galaxies or they will mutually disrupt each other. Of course, there are some collisions between galaxies and consequent merging on a cosmic time scale, but most of the galaxies we see seem not to be in the process of being disrupted by neighboring galaxies. While I doubt that we will ever have an accurate count of all the galaxies, if the astronomers estimates are reasonable, then we need a universe with at least a 12 billion light year radius to house them all.
I don't see any way we can reconcile a universe containing billions of stars with a volume as small as the first outer space level. If the universe doesn't look like the picture in The Urantia Book, then what does it look like? What were the authors trying to tell us when they painted a universe that appears too small? Is the shape of The Urantia Book universe correct, but the size is not? Or are both inaccurate? The astronomers are attempting to map the universe and plot its structure. In a few years or a few decades, we may have a clearer picture of the structure of the visible universe. Perhaps then we will have a clearer picture of what the authors were trying to tell us.
1. "The Visible Universe," Innerface International, Volume 5, Number 6, November/December 1998
2. "Brahma Breathed" Article.
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