re: Open this thread and have your mind blown.

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Some scientists insist that if we had a telescope powerful enough, we could see the Big Bang.

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Seeing and observing are two different things in this case.

From Wikipedia:

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In practice, we can see light only from as far back as the time of photon decoupling in the recombination epoch. That is when particles were first able to emit photons that were not quickly re-absorbed by other particles. Before then, the Universe was filled with a plasma that was opaque to photons.

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Sometimes astrophysicists distinguish between the visible universe, which includes only signals emitted since recombination—and the observable universe, which includes signals since the beginning of the cosmological expansion (the Big Bang in traditional cosmology, the end of the inflationary epoch in modern cosmology).

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Current efforts to look back that far include the search for Gravity waves, which should travel at the speed of light.