New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) EverythingIntroduction by Professor Stephen Hawking. When Edwin Hubble looked into his telescope in the 1920s, he was shocked to find that nearly all of the galaxies he could see were flying away from one another. If these galaxies had always been travelling, he reasoned, then they must, at some point, have been on top of one another. This discovery transformed the debate about one of the most fundamental questions of human existence how did the universe begin?