Eric Lerner

Professional work

Lerner received a BA in physics from Columbia University and started as a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, but left after a year due to his dissatisfaction with the mathematical rather than experimental approach there. He then pursued a career in popular science writing.

In 1984, he began studying plasma phenomena and laboratory fusion devices, performing experimental work on a machine called a dense plasma focus (DPF). NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has funded mainstream as well as alternative approaches to fusion, and between 1994 and 2001 NASA provided a grant to Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, the company of which Lerner was the only employee, to explore whether Lerner's alternative approach to fusion might be useful to propel spacecraft; a 2007 New York Times article noted that Lerner had not received funding from the US Department of Energy. He believes that a dense plasma focus can also be used to produce useful aneutronic fusion energy. Lerner explained his "Focus Fusion" approach in a 2007 Google Tech Talk. On November 14, 2008, Lerner received funding for continued research, to test the scientific feasibility of Focus Fusion. On January 28, 2011, LPP published preliminary results. In March, 2012, the company published a paper saying that it had achieved temperatures of 1.8 billion degrees, beating the old record of 1.1 billion that had survived since 1978. One independent expert stated that they were not close to a commercial fusion reactor with this device. In 2012 the company announced a collaboration with a lab at the Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch in Iran.

Lerner is also an active general science writer, estimating that he has had about 600 articles published. He has received journalism awards between 1984 and 1993 from the Aviation Space Writers Association. In 2006 he was a Visiting Scientist at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

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 from chaos. This is in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. As a way of partially acknowledging this, 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 ideas have been rejected by the professional physicists and cosmologists who have reviewed them. In these critiques, critics have explained that, contrary to Lerner's assertions, the size of superclusters is a feature limited by subsequent observations to the end of greatness and is consistent with having arisen 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 and Planck.

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, making the following critiques:

Lerner has disputed Wright's critique.

Activism

While at Columbia, Lerner participated in the 1965 Selma March and helped organize the 1968 Columbia Student Strike.

In the 1970s, Lerner became involved in the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an offshoot of the Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society. Lerner left the National Caucus in 1978, later stating in a lawsuit that he had resisted pressure from the U.S. Labor Party, an organization led by Lyndon LaRouche, to violate election law by channeling profits of an engineering firm to the organization.

More recently, Lerner sought civil rights protection for immigrants as a member and spokesman for the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee. He participated in the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, with socialist movement.