“During the initial explosion of the Big Bang that we were a part of–or at least that our corner of the universe was a part of–the light that originated in our vicinity left us and is gone, and it won’t come back. That’s why no matter how far we look with our telescopes, we’re never going to see the first moment of the cosmos. It’s gone, Jack. It ain’t comin’ back.”
From what I read. We can’t see it because the universe was opaque about 300,000 years after the big bang since it was so hot that all the matter was ionized (link). Once we look this far back into the past, we reach an opaque barrier that we can’t look threw. But… a telescope that detect neutrinos instead of light should be able to see the big bang (link). Neutrinos are just about as fast as light, and they haven’t left our vicinity and neither has the light. It’s just that the light never made it to us in the first place.
It depends on what you mean by “seeing the Big Bang”. One can argue that when we look at the microwave background radiation (the earliest photons which didn’t get caught in that opacity you mention), we are seeing the Big Bang, since what we’re seeing there is expanding gas which is still hot from the initial explosion. If you want to see the moment t=0 itself, then you’re out of luck. Anything coming from that exact moment would be infinitely redshifted by now, and therefore have no energy, so there’s no conceivable way to detect it.
But if we just want to look closer to that time, then yes, we can do better than light. Neutrinos will get us earlier than the cosmic microwave background, but they’re still limited to about 200,000 years after the beginning. Gravitational waves, though, should still be detectable from the first second or so of the Universe.
I think that what Cecil is referring to in that column, is that we can’t see any light (or neutrinos, or gravitational waves, for that matter) from this location, early in the Universe. The light and other radiation we detect now originated far away, and the radiation which was here then, indeed, “ain’t comin’ back”.
Pssst, the column in question is a staff report - it’s so old, it’s called a “mailbag” article. (Actually it refers to “Cecil’s mailbag”.)
What Ian and UnDeadDude are saying is that the light from where we are now when the Big Bang happened has already passed us by and is gone. Except that’s also the light from way far away, because they were the same place (the singularity from which everything emerged). However, we can see objects/light/neutrinos from close to then because shortly afterwards there was spatial separation, and that spatial separation coupled with the expansion of the universe is what drives the time to reach us to take so long that we can just now see it passing us.
This is a different topic than opacity caused by redshift and the need to look at other forms of radiation to see further back.