Eric J. Lerner (born May 31, 1947) is an American popular science writer and independent plasma researcher.[2] He wrote the 1991 book The Big Bang Never Happened, which advocates Hannes Alfvén's plasma cosmology instead of the Big Bang theory. He is founder, president, and chief scientist of LPP Fusion.[3][4]
Lerner received a BAinphysics from Columbia University[5] 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.[6][7] He then pursued a career in popular science writing.
Lerner is an active general science writer, estimating that he has had about 600 articles published.[3] 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 ObservatoryinChile.[8]
In 1984, he began studying plasmaphenomena 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.[9][10] He believes that a dense plasma focus can also be used to produce useful aneutronic fusion energy.[11][12] Lerner explained his "Focus Fusion" approach in a 2007 Google Tech Talk.[13]
On November 14, 2008, Lerner received funding for continued research, to test the scientific feasibility of Focus Fusion.[14] On January 28, 2011, LPP published preliminary results.[15] 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.[16][17] In 2012 the company announced a collaboration with a lab at the Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch in Iran.[18] In 2017, Lerner et al. published evidence of confined ion energies in excess of 200 keV, with the best “shot” having a mean ion energy of 240 keV ± 20 keV which was reported as a record for confined fusion plasmas.[19]
In October 2021, the company announced improved results with the latest version of its device, with reduced erosion and higher temperatures,[20] but the prior month, an independent expert stated that they were not close to a commercial fusion reactor with this device.[21]
In March, 2023 Lerner et al published a paper in a special issue of the Journal of Fusion Energy showing that LPPFusion led all fusion companies in achieving” the highest ratio of fusion energy generation to device energy input (wall-plug efficiency). [22]
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.[6] Adopting an eternal universe,[23] 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.[6][24] 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 American astrophysicist Eric Chaisson.[25]
Lerner's ideas have been rejected by mainstream physicists and cosmologists. 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.[26][27][28] Anisotropies were discovered in subsequent analysis of both the COBE and BOOMERanG experiments and were more fully characterized by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe[26][27] and Planck.
Physical cosmologists who have commented on the book have generally dismissed it.[26][28][29][30][31][32] In particular, American astrophysicist and cosmologist Edward L. Wright criticized Lerner for making errors of fact and interpretation, arguing that:[27]
Lerner's alternative model for Hubble's Law is dynamically unstable
More recently, Lerner sought civil rights protection for immigrants as a member and spokesman for the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee.[39][40] He participated in the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.[41]
^Lerner, Eric J.; S. Krupakar Murali; Derek Shannon; Aaron M. Blake; Fred Van Roessel (March 23, 2012). "Fusion reactions from >150 keV ions in a dense plasma focus plasmoid". Physics of Plasmas. 19 (3): 032704. Bibcode:2012PhPl...19c2704L. doi:10.1063/1.3694746. S2CID120207711.
^Halper, Mark (March 28, 2012). "Fusion breakthrough". Smart PLanet. Retrieved April 1, 2012.
^Lerner, Eric J.; Hassan, Syed M.; Karamitsos, Ivana; Von Roessel, Fred (October 1, 2017). "Confined ion energy >200 keV and increased fusion yield in a DPF with monolithic tungsten electrodes and pre-ionization". Physics of Plasmas. 24 (10). Bibcode:2017PhPl...24j2708L. doi:10.1063/1.4989859. ISSN1070-664X.