Insofar as looking back to Planck time, we can only do that indirectly. For one thing, photons of light could not travel freely through space until the primordial plasma deionized and formed stable atoms, so visual information from before that era is preserved only in the CBR. And from that time until the formation of the first galaxies (or the first quasars) there is nothing bright enough to see at the immense distances involved (single stars may have formed as early as half a billion years after the BB, I think, but we could not observe single stars at 10 or 15 billion lightyears' distance). So the upshot is, excepting the cosmic background radiation the farthest we can expect to look back toward the beginning of the Universe is the time of the formation of the first quasars--possibly a billion years or so after the Planck era.

--Don

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DStahl on 2001-12-19 02:40 ]</font>