Eric J. Lerner (born May 31, 1947) is an American popular science writer, and independent plasma researcher. He wrote the 1991 book The Big Bang Never Happened, which advocates Hannes Alfvén's plasma cosmology instead of the Big Bang theory. He is founder, president, and chief scientist of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc. In January 2020, Eric Lerner proposed the "Galactic Origin of Light Elements" (GOLE) hypothesis to help explain the beginnings of the universe, and is an alternative model to the Big Bang theory.