What you know may be wrong

This month's Scientifi American magazine (http://www.sciam.com) has a wonderful article on misconceptions about cosmology. The authors do a wonderful job of telling why the theory of the expanding universe is often misrepresented and what the true theory really says. For example, they address the idea of the Hubble distance and why some things can travel faster than the speed of light.

Frankly, I didn't understand all of it, but I was most intrigued to learn that what I thought I understood about the Big Bang was dead wrong. The big bang was not some point in space where all matter condensed (if that's the correct word), and then exploded so that matter was propelled out in space. Rather the big bang was the contraction of all of space itself, and then space itself expanded.

Read the article, it's worth your time.