Misconceptions about the Big Bang

[CurtC]

The Scientific American site has a fairly long article intending to clear up people's misconceptions about the Big Bang: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?ch...23-1213-852383414B7F0147&pageNumber=1&catID=2

It's written for the layman in a very understandable style. My favorite tidbit was this:

Cosmologists sometimes state that the universe used to be the size of a grapefruit, but what they mean is that the part of the universe we can now see--our observable universe--used to be the size of a grapefruit.

Observers living in the Andromeda galaxy and beyond have their own observable universes that are different from but overlap with ours. Andromedans can see galaxies we cannot, simply by virtue of being slightly closer to them, and vice versa. Their observable universe also used to be the size of a grapefruit. Thus, we can conceive of the early universe as a pile of overlapping grapefruits that stretches infinitely in all directions. Correspondingly, the idea that the big bang was "small" is misleading. The totality of space could be infinite. Shrink an infinite space by an arbitrary amount, and it is still infinite.

 

[KingMerv00]

Cool link....my brain hurts.

 

[DangerousBeliefs]

Very nice