So the universe is too big and too smooth for it to have come from a Big Bang in which everything simply moved through space starting from a small blob. If we had written this book thirty years ago, this might be one of the great mysteries. Today, there does exist a compelling but totally crazy-sounding explanation. Are you ready? What if, a few moments after the universe was created, there was a period of about 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds in which the fabric of space-time itself expanded by a factor of about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—at a rate faster than the speed of
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