It's Official: We Were WRONG About the Big Bang

Imagine your garden shed is five metres away from your house, and your fence is ten metres away.  If you move your shed further away, that is "dispersal", and it will eventually be restricted by the fence.  However, if you move the fence outwards, that is "acquisition" of other land, and permits further dispersal.
Now, imagine that you wake up one morning, and instead of you moving the shed, it has moved two metres by itself. The fence has also moved outwards by four metres.  But the shed is also larger, and the fence is higher.  You don't even notice, because your house is larger, you are taller, your eyes are bigger in proportion, and your tape measure is longer with proportionately longer markings.  That is "expansion".
If space itself is expanding (that is, "stretching"), it would make sense that everything in it is also expanding, including all the atoms, and the individual particles that make up matter.  Light itself would also be expanding, maintaining its aspect ratio, therefore not producing red-shift, and a light year would become longer.  The result is that we would not be able to detect the stretching. What we are actually witnessing is dispersal. Take this backwards in time, and even if the entire universe were compressed into a tiny space, light would still take the same time to cross it as it does now. That has serious implications for the idea of "inflation".