[merak]

It was a cursed quest not for oil or gold or any other tangible resource, but for a brief glimpse -- through a window measured in billionths of a second -- at the creation of the universe.

That involves a gigantic assumption, i.e. that the universe was "created" and hasn't simply always been there.

[Physicist]

That involves a gigantic assumption, i.e. that the universe was "created" and hasn't simply always been there.

That's not an assumption, but an observation. The universe (meaning all the space we can in principle geometrically travel to) is of finite age. We can observe the development of the universe from an extremely primordial state (we can see directly that it was a radically different place) and measure accurately (by several methods) how long ago that was.