A question:
The universe we live in is roughly 14 billion years old, give or take a billion. This device looks back to when the universe was 370,000 years old, and does so by looking way, way out to the outer reaches of the universe.
But if the universe expanded out from a single point at the moment of the big bang, and as I have been told, nothing can move faster than the speed of light, then when the universe was 370,000 years old it wasn’t way, way out there where they are looking now, it was a much smaller universe at that time having not yet expanded for 14 billion extra years.
The question is: if we look farther and farther out to see farther and farther back in time, at what point to do we see everything condensed into the tiny space before the big bang? How is it even possible to consider that the farthest things away from us are the earliest in time when the earliest in time was one singular infinitesimally small point?
Given the gobs of new information that is flowing in, it seem premature to be looking for some grand theory. But scientists need rewards as much as others, including grant money.
We can't look out into space without looking back into time. So the dimension of time, if it is actually a bona fide dimension like the others, is definitely confounding my understanding of the situation. So I tried to reduce it to a two-dimensional analog (two of space and one of time), but the analogy seemed to break down rather quickly. Reduce it to one dimension of space and one dimension of time and things begin to make a little more sense because it then becomes apparent that the time dimension is not orthogonal to the space dimension, but coincident with it -- so that lineman, existing on an expanding line, looks back in time and says to himself, "How can the early linear universe, which I know was a very short line segment indeed, seem to be even longer than the present-day linear universe?" But it's not. It only seems that way to him because information about it is brought to him through time along an expanding historical timeline. If he could see his universe as it exists today, he could see that it is much longer than anything he could see before and he would no longer think the ancient universe dwarfed the universe he's living in.
Is that a valid interpretation? My teensy brain doesn't know. But until a real physicist comes along and explains how things really are to me, that's my story and I'm sticking to it! :-)
But if the universe expanded out from a single point at the moment of the big bang, and as I have been told, nothing can move faster than the speed of light,
Today nothing can move faster than lightspeed. But way back then in the first seconds/moments after the Big Bang, they believe the rate of expansion was far, far faster than lightspeed.