Explosion picture: most common mistake

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The common misconception about the Big Bang is that it represents an explosion from a central point into empty space, a view popularized by media and terminology. This misunderstanding hinders the public's grasp of cosmology. A recommended resource for clarifying these misconceptions is the Scientific American article "Misconceptions about the Big Bang." The balloon analogy is often cited as a helpful illustration of the universe's expansion. Overall, the discussion emphasizes the importance of accurate representations of cosmological concepts to enhance understanding.
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The single most common obstacle to understanding cosmology is probably the picture of expansion as an explosion outwards into empty space from some central point.
It's a mistaken picture instilled in the public mind by popular media channels and reinforced by time-honored slang: the misleading epithet "big bang".

The Scientific American magazine has a great article "Misconceptions about the Big Bang" that gets regularly recommended. A lot of us have found it helpful.
http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDavisSciAm.pdf

Here's a sample illustration.
 

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That was the point I made yesterday in the balloon analogy thread - that it was helpful to the understanding of the big bang. If time were constant - if Newtonian physics was totally correct - that view of the public would be the correct one, right?
 
Good article and great reference. I saw a youtube video once on this topic where the presenter showed that you could pick any point in space and all other points would be receding from it as if it were the center of the universe. I think it was a one-minute physics video. There was a guy with beard and glasses in it though.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) Was a matter density right after the decoupling low enough to consider the vacuum as the actual vacuum, and not the medium through which the light propagates with the speed lower than ##({\epsilon_0\mu_0})^{-1/2}##? I'm asking this in context of the calculation of the observable universe radius, where the time integral of the inverse of the scale factor is multiplied by the constant speed of light ##c##.
The formal paper is here. The Rutgers University news has published a story about an image being closely examined at their New Brunswick campus. Here is an excerpt: Computer modeling of the gravitational lens by Keeton and Eid showed that the four visible foreground galaxies causing the gravitational bending couldn’t explain the details of the five-image pattern. Only with the addition of a large, invisible mass, in this case, a dark matter halo, could the model match the observations...
Hi, I’m pretty new to cosmology and I’m trying to get my head around the Big Bang and the potential infinite extent of the universe as a whole. There’s lots of misleading info out there but this forum and a few others have helped me and I just wanted to check I have the right idea. The Big Bang was the creation of space and time. At this instant t=0 space was infinite in size but the scale factor was zero. I’m picturing it (hopefully correctly) like an excel spreadsheet with infinite...

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