Hey everyone. So over the past six weeks or so, a lot of people have been leaving comments on my
channel claiming that data from the James Webb Space Telescope disproves big bang cosmology.
This is very dumb and wrong. But it got me curious as to why so many people are saying
this. A little investigation turned up the fraud responsible, so let’s dig into this one, shall we?
As it turns out, the main culprit of the frenzy was this clickbait video from a
channel called Future Unity, which has amassed over three million views in just a couple weeks.
The latest pictures from the JWST have proven that big bang theory did not happen, sending
the scientific community into a frenzy. What are these latest pictures from the JWST? How do the
pictures prove the big bang was wrong? Join us as we dive into how the James Webb Space Telescope
finally proved the big bang theory is wrong. So that’s the story they’re peddling. But they
didn’t come up with this tripe, they’re just recycling the narrative for views. So where did
it come from? Well let’s hear what they cite as the proposed alternative to big bang cosmology.
Let’s pause here and ask what happens if the scientific establishment accepts that the big
bang theory is flawed. There must then be a new way to explain the universe’s beginnings.
One likely explanation is plasma filamentation, which has been around for about five decades.
This process can actually be explained using physical processes common in a laboratory.
Plasma is the electrically conducting gas that forms most of all the matter in space, including
the stars and the space between the stars. Surprise surprise, it’s plasma cosmology. For
those of you who don’t know, I’ve debunked about a half a dozen charlatans pushing this and related
electric universe crap on my channel already. This time it’s coming from a guy named Eric Lerner who
runs the channel LPPFusion. Here’s a taste. Oh, don’t pay attention to what Eric Lerner
is saying. He’s been saying that for thirty years, ever since he published
the book “The Big Bang Never Happened”. Why it even had the same title as the article, almost.
Lerner’s sarcasm is ironically a solid introduction to who he is. He wrote a
book in 1991 called “The Big Bang Never Happened”, and much more recently a crappy
blog post of the same title, which is what catalyzed this current insanity.
Apart from the bald-faced lies, all of the talking points in this article are
garbage and have been debunked many times by various astrophysicists. He’s just desperately
piggybacking on current events to try to gain the relevance he’s been wanting for 30 years,
but can’t get because he’s a complete buffoon. Let’s briefly read through for some laughs.
First, he points to some “surprises” that are causing cosmologists to “panic” so much that they
put the word panic in the title of a paper. Well the title of the paper begins with “Panic! At the
Disks”, which is a pun on the band name “Panic! At the Disco” and it has nothing to do with the
big bang model. So when he says “the papers don’t actually say” how images are inspiring panic, it’s
because they aren’t. He just doesn’t understand wordplay. He then goes right into a blatant quote
mine of researcher Allison Kirkpatrick, implying that she is disparaging big bang cosmology,
rather than referencing certain minutia regarding galactic structure and growth. She even had to
take to changing her name on Twitter to “Allison the Big Bang Happened Kirkpatrick” because of this
bad press from Lerner. Two paragraphs in and you can already see what a creep this guy is.
Anyway, he then gets into his main thesis. Galaxies imaged by JWST are too small,
too smooth, too old, and too numerous. And everyone is freaking out about it. In the
interest of keeping things brief, let’s read what the lead author of this paper, Leonardo Ferreira,
has to say about Lerner’s claims, which he left as a comment on another video debunking Lerner,
from cosmology professor Brian Keating. “The paper is concerned with the rest-frame
optical of galaxies at z>3, which Hubble could not observe. A lot of what we are seeing is that,
those galaxies that were observed more to the UV, can now be observed spatially in the optical,
so Dr. Brian Keating is correct to show that for galaxies well resolved in Hubble, nothing changes.
And we still see lots of mergers though, it's not like they are absent. And some of the disks can be
undergoing mergers as well. One particular point that is interesting for follow up studies is that,
for example, galaxies could reform disks after mergers more easily than we thought previously.
The paper has nothing to do with the Big Bang. We don't even go that far back, about 1 billion years
after the BB. I think Lerner’s case is that he is not even wrong. He needs to get more things right
to be even wrong. Lead author of the paper here.” He was challenged on this by some Lerner acolyte,
and he responded once. I won’t read this in full as it’s full of technical details, but it clearly
shows the lead author of the paper addressing and refuting the ignorant claims that Lerner makes.
So how does Lerner get all of this wrong, and why? What is it he’s been clinging to all of these
years? Plasma cosmology. This is a steady-state model of the universe that was discredited
decades ago, largely due to observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation that
are incompatible with plasma cosmology, while specifically predicted by big bang cosmology,
and to quantifiable precision. And a bunch of other reasons. That’s right, there is no
conspiracy against plasma cosmology, it’s just wrong. It’s like when we disproved the aether,
or phlogiston, or geocentrism. It’s wrong. Because he’s wrong but won’t admit it, he
has to make up bullshit. Enter the pseudoscience. Electromagnetism being responsible for galactic
structure and activity, and all the other bad science that electric universe peddlers hijacked
in order to cobble together their grift. In fact, because of how vocal and irritating
Lerner is in spewing his nonsense all over the internet, several astrophysicists have taken to
dismantling his script as well. Rather than taking that tangent myself, as it’s highly technical,
I’ll just link to relevant resources in the comments if you’re interested in getting
into the nitty-gritty details. To give you the short and shallow version, very distant galaxies
appear more fully-formed than we would have expected, which merely suggests that galaxies
form more rapidly than we thought. And then he spews a bunch of nonsense about galactic size,
claiming that distant galaxies ought to look larger because in the early universe they were
much closer. As Leonardo Ferreira said, they are young galaxies so we should expect them to be
intrinsically smaller. That’s pretty much it. In science, a singular observation does not
overturn a successful model. That sort of claim is exclusively made by charlatans who are targeting
an audience of laypeople who don’t know anything about the model in question. Laypeople don’t
have the ability to cite all the successful predictions of the big bang cosmological model,
so someone like Lerner telling them about one result that could be twisted to seem superficially
in contradiction with the model is enough to get some people to reject it. In actuality,
observations by JWST are perfectly aligned with big bang cosmology,
they just require some refinement of certain details, which is exactly what one would expect
from a new instrument bringing in new data. The model will inevitably be refined. For example,
it was refined in the late 90s due to data showing that the expansion of the universe
is accelerating. That’s how science works. Because of this simple fact,
Lerner is reduced to discarding well-understood and well-substantiated science, only to replace
it with made up nonsense which falls apart under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. Here’s a taste.
These things have to create a hierarchical filament of very dense magnetic vortex filaments.
The electrons trapped in these filaments which survive for billions or tens of billions of years,
scatter light at microwave and radio frequency radiation. Not at shorter radiations,
uh… wavelengths. So these filaments created by quasars, AGN, and other phenomena,
create a radio fog which thermalizes and smooths the CMB to the situation that we’re now observing.
So yeah, first of all if you caught my debunk of Wal Thornhill, you’re familiar with this
plasmoid rubbish. But more importantly, since Lerner wants the big bang to not be real,
he needs to explain away the CMB. That’s what this nonsense is about filaments producing
microwave fog. It’s a total nonstarter. Nothing he could be describing produces the near-perfect
blackbody spectrum we see. It’s false at face value. And beyond that there are the
myriad phenomena such as the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect and the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect,
things I described in great detail in my debunk of Sky Scholar, which again, are totally ignored
and unexplained by any of these clowns. In the end, Lerner is nothing more than
a crackpot. He’s a delusional narcissist who wants so badly to be a real scientist that he has
conjured up an alternate reality where science is wrong just so he can play the iconoclastic hero.
Any slightly anomalous or unexpected data must signal a “crisis in cosmology”, instead of routine
advancement of the field. Anyone who debunks him must be a gatekeeper, instead of him just being
objectively wrong and generally clueless about the field. Once again, big bang cosmology is supported
by a wide variety of observations, such as relative abundance of light elements, properties
of the CMB, all stuff relating to the first half million years or so after the initial singularity,
whereas early galaxy formation is already a half billion years after the initial singularity. That
we are learning more about galaxy formation does not negate what already works about the model,
and any challenge to the model must explain these observations just as well or better,
and Lerner does not do that. He just makes up nonsense that falls apart instantly.
What everyone should strive to understand that will render them less susceptible to this kind
of rubbish is that science doesn’t progress with baseless accusations. Lerner will never be taken
seriously because he does not even accurately describe or portray big bang cosmology. He doesn’t
talk about the enormous success of the model, either because he genuinely doesn’t understand it,
or because he needs to downplay its validity to ensare the gullible viewer. In science,
successful models are not discarded on a whim, only to be replaced by weaker models with no
predictive or explanatory power. Plasma cosmology does not explain the things that big bang
cosmology explains. In fact, it explains precisely nothing. That’s why it was discarded decades ago,
and anyone pushing it is ignored. Because they are wrong. That’s all there is to it. There is
no conspiracy. There are no politics. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to elevate their
fake science above real science. And if someone peddles a narrative that an entire field of
science is wrong because this one guy says so, you know they’re full of it. When someone talks about
a crisis in some scientific field, you can more or less discount them on the spot. It’s just a
back door into the mind of the suggestible viewer with an anti-establishment bias. Nothing more.
So that’s all I wanted to say about this. Of course we could go through hours of Lerner
talking and perform a highly technical debunk, but it seemed like overkill. I just wanted to
address the genuine questions I’ve been receiving as to whether there is any validity to this rumor,
and respond with a resounding “no”. Ignore Eric Lerner just as you would
any of the nuts I’ve debunked in the realm of astrophysics. I’ll see you next time.