EricL, you come across is being super-intelligent, and really knowing your stuff re plasma physics. Myself, I think this has led you to be blind to the collective wisdom of people who know their stuff re sales, marketing, advertising, brand-awareness, etc, etc, etc.
An example of how ignoring this collective wisdom just shoots yourself in the foot, so to speak: on the home page of LPPFusion is a panel with five images+text; one can move from one to the other by clicking on the arrows. One of the five is entitled "New Evidence that the Universe is NOT Expanding". Yes, you seem quite passionate about this; but no, it has NO direct bearing on your Focus Fusion project.
Including this in your project website will surely lead many a visitor, with sufficient knowledge of astronomy and cosmology, to conclude that you are a crackpot ... and that your Focus Fusion project is equally cranky.
One thing the collective wisdom of those whose life's work lies in the fields of advertising, sales, marketing, brand awareness/defense, etc, etc will tell you is extremely important is "know your audience".
Glad you visited our site.
I can’t help paywalls! Complain to the journals. Skepticism is fine, but why in the world would we put anything other than the real paper up on our website, when anyone at a library could compare the two and call us on it? As to the peer-review section, I can’t provide copies of articles that are not mine without violating the journals’ copyrights. This is what libraries are for.
To this, the ISF members, audience, you come across as whining. How might you have done a better job, on your website, for this particular audience? I'll leave you to think about it; it's not hard to come up with half a dozen better ways.
This is name-calling again, Jean! First, yes my work in fusion comes out of the same plasma physics work I have done in astrophysics and lots of people have come to learn about focus fusion because of their interests in my book, The Big Bang Never Happened.
Does doing research that is unpopular in some quarters make me or anyone else a crack-pot? Let’s look at that. If you read my book (available from Kindle, Barnes and Noble, etc.—adv.) you’ll learn that the critique of the Big Bang that I and my colleagues have elaborated originated in the work of Hannes Alfven. Does that make Alfven a crack-pot? He won the Nobel Prize in physics –and not in an unrelated field. He won for his work in plasma physics, and it was this work that led him to criticize both the Big Bang theory and the distortions of scientific method of its supporters. So I don’t think you can call one of the outstanding physicists of the 20th century, who pretty much created the modern field of plasma physics, a crack-pot.
This particular chain of logic has been used, directly or indirectly, by dozens of ISF members, pushing many a crackpot notion. Here are some examples (threads only; some threads are extremely long), in no particular order (and to stress, this list is far from comprehensive):
Continuation The Electric Comet Theory Boogaloo (Part 2)
Haig and his Sun caused earthquakes
SAFIRE - Electric Sun test?
Wallace Thornhill: The Long Path to Understanding Gravity | EU2015
Electric Universe: has there ever been a scientific research program?
Halton Arp Replacing Big Bang Creationism - maybe not this thread?
Critical review of an EM theory?
Electric Sun Theory (Split from: CME's, active regions and high energy flares)
Lambda-CDM theory - Woo or not?
I'm sure you do not subscribe to some of the ideas so many "Electric Universe" (EU) fans promote (e.g. that a giant lightning bolt caused Valles Marineris on Mars); but quite a few overlap with your ideas. Rightly or wrongly, the high visibility of EU crackpot ideas throughout the internet all but guarantees that few people will grasp the difference between the obvious nonsense and your ideas.
True, the great majority of cosmologists believe that the Big Bang hypothesis is valid. But it is also true that a majority of physicists in the rest of physics think cosmology is a big joke. No, I can’t prove that with a scientific survey, but the point I am trying to make is that physics is not a popularity contest.
Many an ISF member would note that cherry-picking is a popular tactic of crackpots. How so? Well, I think the vast majority of HEP physicists regard cosmology (and astrophysics in general) as anything but a joke. It may well be that, once the LHC winds down (and assuming no 100 TeV collider, etc), cosmology is the only big realm of experimental testing left for HEP (OK, IceCube and various dark matter searches will live on, but these are pretty small beer).
Why is this relevant, and how does it show you seem to be cherry-picking (or a red herring, perhaps)? Outside HEP, astrophysics, and perhaps space physics, very few physicists have anything to do with cosmology, in their work. So why is their opinion worth considering?
If you want to say my physics is bad or wrong, you need to point out mistakes—either in fusion or astrophysics.
Again, if you had taken the time to know your audience, you'd have come across threads such as these (searching this sub-forum, for "Lerner", is also, um, instructive):
Anthony Peratt's Plasma Model of Galaxy Formation
Plasma Cosmology - Woo or not
So, it seems that at least some ISF members have spent quite a bit of time ripping your published astrophysics ideas apart.
But let’s discuss physics, not name-calling.
Can we also discuss your apparent bent to keep shooting yourself in the foot?
One last 'shoot yourself in the foot' instance.
Odd that, in defense of your astrophysics ideas, you chose to cite your
book, and not your
papers! If you had done your research, on your audience, you'd know what a great many ISF members know ... that citing a book, and not published papers, is a common crackpot debate tactic.
Now, about your published papers ... I used
ADS to find them. A search in "Lerner, E." turns up 86 hits. Many have "Lerner, Edan" as author, and many which seem to have you as the/an author are conference presentations (not peer-reviewed), popsci articles (not peer-reviewed), and your book (and its reviews, also not peer-reviewed).
Leaving aside your recent "UV Tolman test" paper (that's my shorthand), the most recent of your astrophysics papers seems to be
Scarpa+ (2007), which seems to be pretty much irrelevant to your "the Universe is NOT Expanding" ideas. Perhaps I missed at least one, published after this and before 2014?
Your main body of astrophysics work - per peer-reviewed articles - seems to focus on radio (microwave) astronomy, in particular the CMB. As far as I can tell, all of such work was published before even the first WMAP results were out, let alone the Planck ones. So while that work may be interesting, it is surely of only historical relevance, right? I mean, have you attempted to update your models, using WMAP and Planck (and all the ground-based microwave observations published since 1995) to test them?
