Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe (1991) is a book by Lerner which rejects mainstream Big Bang cosmology, and instead advances a non-standard plasma cosmology originally proposed in the 1960s by Hannes Alfvén, the 1970 Nobel Prize recipient in Physics. The book appeared at a time when results from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite were of some concern to astrophysicists who expected to see cosmic microwave background anisotropies but instead measured a blackbody spectrum with little variation across the sky. Lerner referred to this as evidence that the Big Bang was a failed paradigm. He also denigrated the observational evidence for dark matter and recounted a well known cosmological feature that superclusters are larger than the largest structures that could have formed through gravitational collapse in the age of the universe. As an alternative to the Big Bang, Lerner adopted Alfvén's model of plasma cosmology that relied on plasma physics to explain most, if not all, cosmological observations by appealing to electromagnetic forces. Adopting an eternal universe, Lerner's explanation of cosmological evolution relied on a model of thermodynamics based on the work of the Nobel Chemistry prize winner Ilya Prigogine under which order emerges from chaos. This is in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. As a way of partially acknowledging this, Lerner asserts that away from equilibrium order can spontaneously form by taking advantage of energy flows, as argued more recently by American astrophysicist Eric Chaisson. Lerner's ideas have been rejected by mainstream physicists and cosmologists. In these critiques, critics have explained that, contrary to Lerner's assertions, the size of superclusters is a feature limited by subsequent observations to the end of greatness and is consistent with having arisen from a power spectrum of density fluctuations growing from the quantum fluctuations predicted in inflationary models. Anisotropies were discovered in subsequent analysis of both the COBE and BOOMERanG experiments and were more fully characterized by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck. Physical cosmologists who have commented on the book have generally dismissed it. In particular, American astrophysicist and cosmologist Edward L. Wright criticized Lerner for making errors of fact and interpretation, arguing that: Lerner's alternative model for Hubble's Law is dynamically unstable the number density of distant radio sources falsifies Lerner's explanation for the cosmic microwave background Lerner's explanation that the helium abundance is due to stellar nucleosynthesis fails because of the