Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' explains stuff like this better than any textbook. If you can find the old TV series or the book, watch or read it. He had a gift for making the universe make sense without dumbing it down. Highly recommend.

Scientists love this kind of question because it's how real discoveries start. 'That's funny...' is supposedly how a lot of breakthroughs begin. Keep that curiosity — it's worth more than memorizing facts for a test.

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.

The honest answer is that scientists don't fully understand this yet. We have good models that make accurate predictions, but the 'why' underneath is still an active area of research. Anyone who tells you they have the complete answer is oversimplifying.

This is something I struggled with until a professor explained it using an analogy that finally clicked. The real world is messy and doesn't always fit neatly into the simplified models we learn in textbooks.

Great question! The math behind this is complex but the concept is actually straightforward once you see it the right way. Forget what you learned in school for a moment and think about it from first principles.