Chapter 3, The Universe in a Nutshell Summary and Analysis

Hawking believes that we should try to understand the universe, particularly given how much progress we have made. There are billions and billions of galaxies with uncounted billions of stars, many of which have planets. They are distributed roughly uniformly through space. However, the universe is certainly changing in time. For evidence, it is important that the sky is dark because it shows that light hasn't reached every point in the universe.

But why did the stars light up? The story begins with Edward Hubble, who found that collections of stars are sometimes "red-shifted" and "blue-shifted," meaning that the light they emit is either shifted towards the red end of the light spectrum or the blue end. It was later discovered that this meant stars were either moving further away from...