The Big Bang Never Happened

by Eric J. Lerner    466 pages

Lerner lays bare some painful and embarrassing features of the Big Bang Theory. He covers the history of science in a nutshell, and ventures into other fields related to the human condition, fields that may yet be accessible to inquiry by the scientific method -- the nature of life and other self-organizing systems, Quantum Mechanics and the idea of free will, and the role of echo systems in filtering energy in a cooperative and competitive-cooperative, game-of-life, Gaia world.

If these topics seem a bit too Velikofskian, wait until you examine with Lerner the step-by-step exposition of these themes. He begins by mentioning the problems with current Cosmology, the not-so-often advertised problems of Big Bang. Here are some:

• The recent COBE satellite's picture of a homogeneous, smooth background radiation (it's apparently not like "looking at the hand of God", after all, contrary to the furor in the press).

• The missing matter that scientists have postulated and for which they are now searching. ("Cosmologists decided to represent the density of the universe as a ratio to the density needed to stop the expansion, a ratio they termed 'omega'. If there were just enough matter to stop the expansion, omega would equal 1. It appeared, however, that omega was really about .01 or .02 -- only a few hundredths of the matter needed to stop the expansion of the universe, and far too little to magnify the fluctuations fast enough to form galaxies.") Since this edition of Lerner's book was published, 1995 Hubble data show that so-called brown dwarf stars and smaller ones, which could have helped to supply a substantial amount of matter, do not seem exist in sufficient quantity.

• The similarity of Big Bang on to the creation of Genesis, both finite in space and time, both from the void. And both, the author shows, are at odds with observation.

• The author describes how the abundance of Helium, Deuterium and Lithium is at odds with observation and provides a better hypothesis.

• The (usual) absence of anti-matter.

• The existence of extremely large-scale structures, such as the recently, partially mapped 'Great Wall'.

Lerner offers alternatives from the plasma perspective, which some readers may find strange at first. But he takes us through his exposition, step by step, with many examples of both scale and kind. Much of the first part of the book, is devoted to the elucidation of Big Bang, and to the enumeration of its problems.

The book's second part is a book in itself; at length is discussed the flow of time, the history of entropy, and how its common usage in science came about. The evolution of the universe, and how order comes about out of chaos is described (without once mentioning the word fractal!). Amongst other things, Lerner delves into the history of life, mass extinctions, even infinity and free will.

Lerner speculates on problems with -- the structure and behavior of atoms and molecules. He even offers some thought about the light at the end of the quantum tunnel. Lerer describes Alain Aspect's photon pair experiment which shows that under some instances superluminous information flow has been proved.

In a later chapter, Lerner addresses the interplay of theology and science more directly. I found this treatise irksome. He mentions various religious authorities and how their doctrines clash with reason, observed facts, and with pure logic. He has mentioned the influence of Plato on science throughout the book, and that is well deserved, I think, but now he belabors the point:

"Such events are not limited to the Old World. In the U.S. the two leading bookstore chains stopped selling Salman Rushdie's novel 'The Satanic Verses' after it was condemned by the Ayatollah as blasphemous, and its author condemned to death in absentia. The chains restored the book only after mass protests from writers' organizations. During the furor over the book, the New York Times printed a letter from the president of the Pakistan League of America, who argued that he had a constitutional right to murder Rushdie: "The United States Constitution grants freedom to all religions," he writes. "If my religion calls for the death penalty for blasphemy, wouldn't I be renouncing my religion to deny it?"

Humorous though this may be for some, the downright odiousness of this and similar occult beliefs is driven home ad nauseam, as well as how religionist apologists often use out-of-context science to bolster their faith(1), and that of others.

In short, Lerner, with this book, exposes why, in English writing, we have come to capitalize Big Bang and Inquisition.

The book is "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Eric J. Lerner.

• Part one--COSMOLOGICAL DEBATE
• A History of Creation
• The Rise of Science
• The Strange Career of Modern Cosmology
• The Spears of Odin
• The Plasma Universe

• Part Two--IMPLICATIONS
• The Endless Flow of Time
• Matter
• Infinite in Time and Space
• Cosmos and Society
• Appendix, Bibliography, Index

For more on this subject, check out John Kierein's page about Why the Big Bang is Wrong -- Links.

   Check out Bill Mitchell's book The Cult of the Big Bang: Was There a Bang? -- You can order it here .
   What Mitchell's The Cult of the Big Bang book is all about.

Update by the reviewer, Jul 2007:  I no longer think that the Big Bang never happened.  This book is interesting but the arguments for the Big Bang are even more so.  Now I think that the "universe" has always existed, and that our universe is a small fractal part of the immortal, eternal, infinite universe.  (see The Life of the Cosmos and On a Finite Universe with no Beginning or End ).  As for the rest, I'm going to remain an agnostic. NB:  This book and review were written before the discovery of so-called of dark matter and dark energy.

Hold on to your hats! Lee Smolin,  a professor at the   Center for Gravitational  Physics and Geometry at   Pennsylvania State University,   is about to take you on the ride of your life! by Lee Smolin On Amazon.com

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