[neutralino]

Originally Posted by JamesANicholson Welcome, KiGs, That is a wonderful question-- And a Very difficult or at least open ended one at that. I would also like to add to it, "What direction should we point our new look back device?" (telescope or whatever) I don't personally buy into the Big Bang, though, so I am more comfortable with the notion of not ever being able to know the "beginning" point or even if that concept can be applied to the Universe. We see things go through cycles and so we have come to assign a beginning to an arbitrary, if somehow significant, point of the cycle and believe that we have proclaimed a truism. I think that this way of thinking is merely myopic (short sighted--being too close to it). If there were a single big bang, we should be able to determine in which direction is was oriented and then be able to look both back to it and out away from it. Don't you think? Regards, Aaron (My middle name)

I don't blame you for not buying the "big bang" as you describe it, but that's simply because you have a rather confused idea as to what the actual theory is.

Firstly, the big bang model, or if you want to be more precise the standard LCDM model of cosmology, states that the universe is both isotropic and homogeneous; that is, that there is no preferred place, and no preferred direction in the universe. Thus, the big bang theory did not say that there is one point in space from which the universe exploded, nor that there is one direction from which the bang was oriented. A concise definition of the big bang model would be something like "the universe was, at one time in the past, a lot smaller, and more dense than it is today."

So, back to the original question. Yes, it is indeed true that as we look further into the distance, we also look further back in time. However, I'm not exactly sure what your question is. Do you mean what would we see if we were able to look back far enough to a region in time when a certain galaxy has not formed, or do you seem to think that we could look back to when our own galaxy has not yet been formed? It sound like you are asking the latter, which cannot be true, since in looking into the sky we are not doing anything magical to our local region of spacetime.