As astronomers have the ability to see further and further back in time, will it ever be possible to see any light from the Big Bang?
It was detected in 1964 (or at least, that’s closest thing it’s possible to see). It’s not visible light, but in the form of microwaves. IIRC, and if I’m understanding correctly, the early universe was opaque to light, as photons would interact with the very hot medium. As the universe cooled, it became possible for atoms to form. The CMB is the light emitted by these first atoms, about 379,000 years after the big bang itself.
Yup, we’ve been doing it since the 1960s. Or rather, we’ve been detecting it for several decades longer than that, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that we realized what it was. Light from that era is highly redshifted, so by now it’s all shifted down into the microwave range, and forms what’s called the cosmic microwave background.
That’s light that dates from a few hundred thousand years after the Beginning (though still coming from the general fireball conditions of the Big Bang). There’s no chance that we’ll ever be able to see light from before that time, since before that time, the Universe was opaque. We could, however (in principle, at least) detect gravitational waves from much earlier, possibly to as early as 10[sup]-32[/sup] seconds or so. This presents significant technological challenges: We’ve yet to detect any gravitational waves (though the Advanced LIGO instrument should do so in the next couple of years), and it would take an instrument a few generations more advanced than Advanced LIGO to detect the sort of gravitational waves we expect to have been produced that long ago. But it’s possible in principle.