LPPFusion’s Chief Scientist Eric Lerner keynoted the “Beyond the Big Bang, Demysticon 2025” conference June 12-16th in Sesimbra, Portugal. The conference was the first in-person meeting bringing together critics (and some supporters) of the expanding-universe/Big Bang hypothesis since the flood of new discoveries from the JWST space telescope greatly increased the evidence against the Big Bang. It was also the first such conference since the Second Crisis in Cosmology conference back in 2008. It has already led to valuable collaborations that will accelerate research both in cosmology and in fusion energy research.
Lerner’s dozen big failures of the Big Bang hypothesis are summarized in slides from his keynote speech at the “Beyond the Big Bang” conference.
Lerner’s keynote, “Time to abandon the Big Bang/Expansion Hypothesis” kicked off the conference by describing six key predictions of the expanding-universe hypothesis and six key predictions of the related Big Bang hypothesis that are decisively contradicted by observations. The same observations confirm the contrary hypothesis, that the universe is not expanding and there was no hot-dense epoch in cosmic evolution. Only the abundance of deuterium and (possibly) supernovae durations are compatible with predictions of both expansion and non-expansion.
Among many other important contributions to the cosmological debate at the conference, Dr. André Koch Torres Assis of the University of Campinas outlined how Big Bang supporters have had a consistent history being widely wrong in their predictions – for example of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation – from the very start. However, they have “adjusted” or “tweaked” the predictions AFTER contradictory observations to fit the observations already made. Dr. Martín López Correidoira of the Astrophysical Institute of the Canary Islands described, in his presentation “The snowball effect as a sociological factor in the creation of alternative cosmologies” the sociological, non-scientific obstacles to redirecting cosmological research out of the Big Bang dead-end.
Supporters of the Big Bang, both young (Dr. Indranil Banik of the University of Portsmouth) and senior (C. S. Unnikrishnan, Defense Institute of Advanced Technology) also presented their approaches to saving the existing paradigm by modifying it. Since open debate is critical to advancing science, there was plenty of time for panel discussions and Q and A from the audience.
A number of possibilities for research and publication collaborations arose from discussions at the conference. Lerner met with one of the conference’s sponsors, Jim Keller, a leading Silicon Valley engineer and investor, who has long followed Lerner’s research. These discussions led to a visit by Keller to LPPFusion’s lab a week later. We’ll be reporting on further developments with these potential collaborations as they occur.
Jim Keller poses in front of FF-2B with LPPfusion’s CIO Ivy Karamitsos, Chief Scientst Eric Lerner and Research Scientist Syed Hassan during Keller’s June visit to our lab