Eric Lerner - The Big Bang Never Happened

The Big Bang Never Happened

The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe (1991) is Lerner's controversial book which rejects mainstream Big Bang cosmology, and instead advances a non-standard plasma cosmology originally proposed by Hannes Alfvén in the 1960s. The book appeared at a time when results from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite were of some concern to astrophysicists who expected to see cosmic microwave background anisotropies but instead measured a blackbody spectrum with little variation across the sky. Lerner referred to this as evidence that the Big Bang was a failed paradigm. He also denigrated the observational evidence for dark matter and recounted a well known cosmological feature that superclusters are larger than the largest structures that could have formed through gravitational collapse in the age of the universe.

As an alternative to the Big Bang, Lerner adopted Alfvén's model of plasma cosmology that relied on plasma physics to explain most, if not all, cosmological observations by appealing to electromagnetic forces. Adopting an eternal universe, Lerner's explanation of cosmological evolution relied on a model of thermodynamics based on the work of the Nobel Chemistry prize winner Ilya Prigogine under which order emerges out of chaos. This is in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Lerner asserts that away from equilibrium order can spontaneously form by taking advantage of energy flows, as argued more recently by Eric Chaisson, an American astrophysicist.

Lerner's criticisms of the Big Bang theory have been rejected by physicists and cosmologists who have reviewed his book. The size of superclusters is a feature that has been limited by subsequent observations to the end of greatness and explained in the astronomical journals as arising from a power spectrum of density fluctuations growing from the quantum fluctuations predicted in inflationary models. Anisotropies were discovered in subsequent analysis of the both COBE and BOOMERanG experiments and were more fully characterized by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

While there was favorable reaction from non-experts to Lerner's book, physical cosmologists who have commented on the book have generally dismissed it. In particular, Edward L. Wright, the American astrophysicist and cosmologist, was critical of Lerner for making errors of fact and interpretation and criticized specifics of Lerner's alternative cosmology, claiming that:

• Lerner's alternative model for Hubble's Law is dynamically unstable
• the number density of distant radio sources falsifies Lerner's explanation for the cosmic microwave background
• Lerner's explanation that the helium abundance is due to stellar nucleosynthesis fails because of the small observed abundance of heavier elements

Lerner has disputed Wright's critique.