Don't feel bad for not getting this right away. Some of the smartest people in history spent their whole lives on questions like this. The fact that you're curious enough to ask puts you ahead of most people. Keep asking why.

There's a great explanation of this on the HowStuffWorks website, and the NASA site has good material too if it's space-related. Both are written for normal people, not scientists, so you won't get lost in jargon.

I'd recommend the book 'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking, or for the math side, 'The Joy of x.' Your library has them. They're written for curious regular people. You don't need a degree to understand the big ideas.

This is actually a much deeper question than it appears on the surface. The simple answer most textbooks give is technically correct but misses a lot of nuance. Let me try to explain it in a way that captures the full picture.

I'm a physics grad student and this is one of my favorite questions to explain. The key insight is that our everyday intuition doesn't always apply at extreme scales — very small (quantum), very large (cosmological), or very fast (relativistic).

The math looks scary but it's mostly just a precise way of saying something you can understand in plain English. Once you get the concept, the equations are just bookkeeping. Focus on the idea first, the symbols second.