Seeing the early Universe

Mr McAfee:

Ok, I'll take a crack at this one.
Think of it this way: we're standing INSIDE what is actually an ONGOING explosion. When we look far away, we're trying to see the inside rim of that explosion, like trying to see the inside of a giant beachball from inside the beachball.

But, the beachball is still inflating. And since the speed of light is finite, it takes time for the light coming from that far away to reach us. Since the edge of the Big Bang is heading outward at the speed of light, we can almost, but not quite, see it. Also, it's about 14 billion light-years away from us, and that leaves room for a whole bunch of stuff to get in the way.

We can see extremely bright, distant objects like quasars, which appear to be snapshots (from our point of view in Time) of early galaxies forming from the remains of the
Big Bang.

Unless of course, you're a creationist, in which case all you see is smudges on the lens of your telescope.

Incidentally, Einstein's observation that space itself is curved means that, whichever direction you look, it APPEARS (sorry, no italics) that we are smack dab in the exact center of the universe, cuz the universe appears to be expanding uniformly away from us. Please don't tell the creationists.