Looks like the furor over Dr Lerner’s article has died down and the mainstream is back to just ignoring him and plasma cosmology. It was a valiant effort on Lerner's part but basically unsuccessful in forcing a debate. Well waiting for something more, I have discovered another *science communicator* who published a video (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR3WRPNTWho) back in September that I missed … by *professor*/astrophysicist Salman Hameed. It’s titled … “Did James Webb Refute the Big Bang? How to Think Critically about Science Stories”
Oh this should be good. A Big Bang believer telling us to “think critically”. LOL! Why that is almost an oxymoron, don’t you think?
It’s in Urdu/Hindi so I’ll have to trust the subtitles as to what he said.
The video starts out with him telling us that “Humans want excitement”. Well, sure … isn’t that really what Big Bang, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Black Holes, Gravity Waves, Biggest Explosions In The Universe, etc, etc, etc, offer? Why else would the public pay the expense of so many telescopes, space missions, incomprehensible scientific papers and the salaries of thousands of astrophysicists working on computer models of things that are otherwise totally irrelevant to their lives? The public certainly isn’t benefiting from any of those things other than the entertainment (excitement) value they provide in their otherwise dull lies (or so the elite think). Right?
The professor tells us that “science normally moves at a slow pace. The changes in it have to be verified and verified again to find out if it is correct or not.” Now that’s odd … because ideas like dark matter and inflation, integral to the Big Bang model, have not been verified and verified again. In fact, observations have consistently put their existance in doubt ... over and over. My understanding of science is that when that happens, scientists are supposed to rethink their assumptions and hypothesis. Seems to me that is NOT what astrophysicists have done the … what? … last 50 years? Instead, they seem to be clinging to these gnome as if they are a life preserver and they are adrift in an immense ocean filled with sharks.
Next the professor talks about “expansion and dark energy,” the latter a gnome used to explain the former. He says “it is still not known what is dark energy but its confirmation did not come just like that.” Gee … either the subtitles are wrong or I must have missed whatever it is that confirmed dark energy when it did ”come”? Any of you know what he’s talking about? He says they awarded a Nobel prize for Dark Energy … as if THAT confirms it. Let’s see … didn’t Obama get one for helping world free of nuclear weapons and better relations with the Muslim world? Like we have now? Hmmm?
Then Professor Hameed tells us with great authority that “science is a conservative process”. Really? Seems to me astrophysicists just jumped on the idea of dark matter without a second thought ... without much real thought or understanding. The only conservative part is that they’ve ignored any discovery that seems to put it doubt. Over 50 years of such discoveries … all them ignored.
Professor Hameed next talks about the nature of the Internet and YouTube medium … saying that it wants to say the most sensational things .. implying that's what Lerner did. I guess that’s going to be his first attempt to dismiss Lerner’s video. It's funny that Hameed and the other *science communicators* only raised this concern when Lerner questioned the mainstream’s theory using JWST. There were no complaints about all the thousands (or was it millions) of times that the mainstream USED YouTube to spread their belief in their latest *gnome* … to keep the funding coming.
Then Hameed says “the more sensational the news the more the reward you will get.” He says that’s done to get “more people to click you which is called clickbait.” Is this *professor* really so foolish as to believe Dr Lerner published his article about the JWST results expecting an Internet “reward” of “clicks”? Seriously? He implies clicks mean more money. Did the website that published his article pay him for the article? Did it pay him by the number of clicks on the article? Maybe the professor should confirm this before slandering Lerner in this way.
And surely the professor is aware that Dr Lerner’s article wasn’t published on YouTube. No, it was his detractors who first published about it on YouTube and in their blogs …
and I suspect most of them they DO get paid by the click. Maybe they were the ones looking for sensationalism to make a profit. In fact, let’s compare the professor’s video clicks so far on his video to the number of clicks Lerner got on his first video (which has been on YouTube longer than Hameed's). Guess what? The professors video has 14,129 views (clicks). Lerner’s August 29th video (the first one) has just 7308 views. So who is the one who has really benefited … the one really trying to cash in on clicks? The Professor.
Sorry, but I don't think Lerner's response to his detractors sought clicks. No, he said he sought to start a debate on the subject of his article. He challenged his detractors to address some specific questions related to the facts and ideas in his published paper … and all but one them FLED from that challenge. The one detractor who did respond ended up spending most of his time NOT addressing Lerner’s specific challenge ... this professor's tactic. And yes, that detractor posted what he did on his blog and encouraged viewers to subscribe to it … which probably will make him more money. So again, who are the ones really hoping to cash in on clicks?
Furthermore, I don’t see much upside to Lerner publishing his article or videos in the first place. Doing that risked his reputation and his business ventures, because the mainstream is nothing if not vindictive. Sure, if he can convince people that his view of the cosmos is right, investors might want to fund his fusion venture. But that wouldn’t come from the number of “clicks”. That would come from the outcome of the debate. What he did was offer to debate the topic … something that the Big Bangers have refused to do for years and years … and the other side refused. Plain and simple.
No, the REAL reward on the Internet and YouTube actually seems to come when to those who toe the line with the consensus … whopublish what the mainstream and those brainwashed by them wants to hear. Like the *science communicators* do. Do the opposite and one may even get banned from YouTube and fromthe mainstream publications and journals that report astrophysics discoveries to the masses.
So, after after all that, the professor finally gets down to the addressing where the story that the Big Bang did not happen came from. Or at least he asks that question … before going off on another tangent ... how “cool” and “cutting edge” the James Webb telescope is, directing his audience to be sure and click on his “Gup Shup” video, “Understanding First Images From James Webb Telescope” at his website (
https://www.kainaatstudios.com/videos). That website's first pages indicates there are 46,000 viewers, 1000+ testimonials, 180+ videos and 2.4 million views. Obviously the owner is very focused on how any clicks he gets from it. And how much money it generates?
Eventually, the professor directs his audience’s attention to the JWST image that started this controversy … the one of SMACS galaxy cluster that he says (or at least the subtitles say he said) “was awesome because that included some galaxies which were formed after
a few million years of the beginning of our universe.” I assume (hope!) this is a translation problem. Because I've no-one in the mainstream say that. But in his next statement he says “The previous idea was that the first galaxies of our universe would take more than 300-400 million years to form.” While technically correct, I can show that NASA and others are still saying it took 300-400 million years for the FIRST STARS to form. So is he the problem or the translator?
He then tells us that Hubble and James Webb are showing the first galaxies were already formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang. True. He calls this a “interesting challenge for astronomers” since “how did i[they?] form so quickly?” He says “where is it in this that the Big Bang never happened?” And then says “it’s connection is actually with an article written by a popular science writer.” So Lerner is just a popular science writer?
Then he shows the beginning of the iai news article that Lerner wrote “the Big Bang didn’t happen - What do the James Webb images really show" and quotes the article stating the JWST results “contradict” the Big Bang theory. He says “you can imagine that this paragraph was picked up by different news outlets and many others who make videos”. Later on in the video he admits he got of lot of emails about it. But to be honest, very little attention was paid the article by “new outlets” and most of those who make videos are *science communicators*, like the professor, who support the Big Bang. Actually, I'm surprised that so many found out about Lerner's article in iai. I honestly never even heard of it before.
Next he says “I would like to mention a broader point that whenever you hear such a big statement about science you should immediately be skeptical.” LOL! So far we are almost 9 minutes into his 20 minute pontification and he hasn’t even mentioned Lerner’s name or a single one of the specific facts, charts, equations, and logic that caused Dr Lerner to question the Big Bang given the JWST results. Hameed is beating around the bush. Why? Well, if he could easily refute Lerner, don’t you think he’d have done it by now? Instead, all he has done in those 9 minutes is, first, dishonestly attack Dr Lerner’s motives, second, dismiss his paper as “click bait”, and third, call JWST “cool” and “cutting edge”. But he is giving good advice … you should be skeptical about anyone making big statements about science … like “the science is settled” and “dark matter exists”.
And let's just say that the next 10 minutes of this blowhard’s video is NOT spent refuting the specifics of what Dr Lerner said in his article. No, instead the *learned* professor leads off with the statement that “ the Big Bang model is a widely accepted model in the scientific community and there are many reasons for it.” That’s right, he’s does the same thing all the other *science communicators* did … regurgitate the Big Bang meme and assure viewers that it's right. He pontificates about expansion and CMB, as if it’s all *settled science* with no challengers. He says nothing we haven’t heard it a thousand times before from the *science communicators*. He completely ignores Lerner’s specific arguments in his latest paper AND what Lerner has noted in other papers and venues about the “reasons” the professor lists as “evidence” for the Big Bang.
The professor then admits there are still problems with Big Bang but assures us that scientists just need to “refine” the model … tweak it, in the popular vernacular. He says “can this Big Bang model be wholly wrong?” and replies “possible, the chances are slim but it is possible.” But then he dismisses that possibility saying that "up till now the alternatives models of the Big Bang have not been able to explain all these things.” But that's not accurate or the whole story. The electric/plasma universe theorists do have explanations for the observations he mentions … CMB, apparent expansion, observed abundances of materials. Explanations where the science isn't settled. The professor just ignores what the alternative cosmologists say.
Second, it’s a fact that the Big Bang community has tried for decades to starve research funding and consideration of alternative theories … research which might have explained all those "things" he mentioned even more fully and credibly than Big Bang has ... without the need for gnomes ... without ignoring inconvenient facts (some of which Lerner in his many other rebuttals has mentioned). Truth is, Big Bang proponents, who control the funding and journals, have not allowed a fair fight. Third, if they can dismiss the alternatives because they don't fully explain some observations, we have the right to dismiss Big Bang because there are observations that it's best model can't explain … like giant, helically wound, rotating plasma filaments that have been found between galaxies and galaxy clusters ... which the alternative plasma cosmology can explain quite easily.
Hameed returns to admitting the “Big Bang has it’s challenges”. He glosses over the problem of galaxies forming too quickly and mentions another challenge .. the “cosmological crisis of the standard model”. He describes that by vaguely admitting that “different types of results are not matching up.” I assume he's referring to the fact that they don’t know if the universe if round or flat, because they have two independent, seemingly correct but and quite different measurements for the Hubble constant, a parameter that is very important in the expansion model.
At this point he against offers his viewers some clickbait … telling them to go check out his video “The Evidence for Big Bang”. Then he pontificates some more, asking his audience “Can the scientists not disagree with one another?” Apparently not, since he's trying to shut down Dr Lerner by impugning his motives and dismissing his peer reviewed scientific work as “clickbait”, rather than dealing with the specific facts, logic and equations in Lerner's paper.
He continues, saying “these disagreements are very crucial for advancement of science, have much importance because for this very reason different things are tested and gradually the ideas which are not correct according to observations or other reasons are removed.” I find that a VERY ironic statement for two reasons. First, Dr Lerner is challenging the Big Bang on the basis of observations ... not "wishes" (which Hameed implies later in his video) … and Big Bang scientists and *science communicators* are not responding to those specifics. Instead, like this professor, they seem desperate to ignore those specific and engage in adhominems and other spurious, irrelevant attacks. They are simply dismissing Lerner’s concerns out of hand.
Second, the idea of dark matter, which is now essential to the Big Bang model of the universe, has been tested for over and over and over. Billions of taxpayer dollars has been spent by the Big Bang community over the last 50 years and it is no closer to proving dark matter actually exists than when the idea was first proposed. So I ask … when is the professor going to “remove” the idea of dark matter from the BB model? And that’s not the only thing apparently untestable in the Big Bang Kluge, which incorporates many other still (after years and years and years ) unproven gnomes. The hypocrisy of the professor's words is astounding. With a straight, but dramatic, face he assures us that “the correct ideas which keep on being confirmed by observations keep on being included.” If that were true, the BB models would not include many of the gnomes it still does.
He say “In fact, if you overturn an established idea scientists give you a Nobel prize.” Well, a Nobel prize winner, Hannes Alfven, declared that the concept of frozen-in magnetic field, that you Big Bangers use to explain many observations that would contradict the Big Bang model, is nothing but “pseudo-science”, and Alfven should know since he got his Nobel prize for pioneering the field of Magnetohydrodynamics and invented the term “frozen-in” magnetic fields in the first place. Why doesn't the professor do a video on THAT.
Next, Hameed tells us that “these type of ideas” are published in scientific journals” and goes off on another multi-minute tangent (about the variable speed of light) that has nothing to do with Lerner and his specific arguments against the Big Bang. Apparently, he’s trying to imply that Lerner’s theory is just as much an “outlier” as that theory ... a dishonest tactic at best. Then finally he says, “Now this Big Bang story. There is some other complication in it. This claim ‘Big Bang didn’t happen’ is a theory of a popular science writer Eric Learner.” Yes, the captioning misspelled Lerner’s name. Unbelievable and insulting. I’ll give the professor the benefit of the doubt on that but if this professor were at all courteous, he would acknowledge that Lerner isn’t just a science writer, but has a degree in physics and has done considerable research in the area of plasma physics for decades.
Next he attacks Lerner’s 1991 book because it wasn’t published in any scientific journal. Irrelevant to the issue at hand. Then he says “There are other problems also in this article”. Hate to tell you, *professor*, but the article about JWST that Lerner wrote causing all this controversy is based in large part on recent work that was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. We can only hope that Hameed is simply unaware of this, because the alternative says something really bad about this *science communicator*.
And what are those “other” problems with the article? One, says Hameed is “the tone used in it, like cosmologists (people who study and research on the universe and understand it) are panicked”. Seriously? This *professor* complains about Lerner’s “tone” when some of the people calling themselves *science communicators* that I’ve mentioned in this thread (like Ethan Siegel, Karthik Vinod, Sean Carroll) have literally labeled Dr Lerner a “crackpot” or, like the professor, impugned his reputation by suggesting his article was nothing but clickbait designed to ... what ... make him money? It is the Big Bang side’s tone is this exchange that is the problem here and they don’t even realize it, which says a lot about their community and themselves.
Why blame Lerner for remarking on the fact that an astrophysicist used the expression “PANIC! AT THE DISKS” in the title of an article that said JWST results appear to contradict the mainstream’s expectations regarding galaxies in the 200 million year time frame? The article admitted that the mainstream did not expect formed galaxies (especially disk shaped spirals) to be found at that age. And the author (Ferrerria) wrote “We found more disks than we anticipated … <Panic>” in the body of the articl, not just the title. The title may have been an attempt at dark humor but I think that’s exactly how the author was feeling at the time.
And “panic” is indeed what a number of other comments from astrophysics about the JWST observations suggest they were feeling. For example, as Lerner correctly pointed out in his article, one astrophysicist (Alison Kirkpatrick), who supposedly specializes in black holes … which are now an essential part of the Big Bang model, told Nature magazine that “we are able to see that galaxies have disks way earlier than we thought they did. And Nature then indicates, without quotes, that “she said that’s a problem because it contradicts earlier theories of galaxy evolution” … which as I’ve pointed out ARE part of the Big Bang model. She told Nature that she was so troubled by the JWST results that “I find myself lying awake at three in the morning” “wondering if everything I’ve ever done is wrong.” I’d say that shows a high degree of anxiety …
if not “panic”.
And how about the statement by astronomer Michael Merrifield who in an interview,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7lxzS6K9PU, admitted that JWST is finding galaxies that are not what they expected … that they are finding about 50% of early galaxies are spirals … which is TEN TIMES what they expected. He admitted “it was a very unexpected result …
HENCE THE PANIC”. There was enough panic that astronomer Joe Burchett said the discovery of “galaxies with a mass of 100 billion suns only 400 million years after the Big Bang” “left theorists considering alternative cosmologies”. Not just *tweeks* in their theories but “alternative cosmologies”.
And certainly the *science communicators* are panicked. There is no other explanation for so many of them coming out to attack Lerner after ignoring him for years. Something made them nervous enough to respond in mass. Something struck a nerve and lit a fire under them.
Professor Hameed also whines that the Panic! article “had not been printed yet (it was in preprint)”. I say, so what? Was Lerner not supposed to respond to a preprint that was available on the internet (mainstream clickbait if you will)? Why complain about this case but not complain about the thousands of other times that Big Bang believing mainstream media outlets and *science communicators* have reported on preprint papers that said something positive about the Big Bang or its newest gnomes? Again, the hypocrisy of Big Bang supporters is evident.
Then the professor announces that “If you want a scientific critique of it, if you want to read more about this [Lerner’s] article, I have provided some links of some articles which dissect in detail what are the problems in the position of Eric Learner.” In other words, rather than even attempting to prove the actual substance of Lerner’s latest article is wrong, himself, he delegates it to links that he claims are supposed refutations. Two of his links are the article by Ethan Siegal and the video by Brian Keaton … which I already rebutted earlier in this thread. His third and last link is an article he mentions in his video by *science communicator* Jackson Ryan. But Ryan’s article doesn’t do any more than Hameed’s video or the other links. It doesn’t address the specific points Lerner raised in his lastest article. It just regurgitate the Big Bang meme and attacks Lerner's 1991 positions. See for yourself that I’m absolutely right:
https://www.cnet.com/science/space/no-j ... -big-bang/ . In short, Professor Hameed is dishonest. He did not provide ANY links that refute the argument, facts and logic in Lerner latest article.
Finally, the video comes to an end with *professor* Hameed trying one last dishonest tactic to attack Lerner. He tries to equate Dr Lerner’s theories with those who wish there were intelligent life on Mars, stories that an asteroid is about to collide with earth, believers in UFOs, and those claiming neutrinos exceed the speed of light. He says “in all of these your skepticism should awaken immediately and you should investigate a little more whether this was published in some scientific journal or not and what is it’s context.” That’s as dishonest an argument as one can make with regards to Lerner work, much of which has been published in peer reviewed scientific journals. It’s like trying to debunk the theory that Ron Brown was murdered back in the 90s (yes, there is much evidence to suggest that) by connecting that theory with UFOologists … which the mainstream media actually did back then.
Now you see why I wasted a hour or so of my time looking at this *professor’s* … no, charlatan’s ... clickbait? It’s time to stop handing astrophysicists money to investigate something that won’t affect us one iota. Money spent investigating a plasma/electric universe might. So let's give the money to them instead. Just saying …