curiouschris said:
Originally when I posed this question, it was my belief that the universe was expanding at the speed of light, this bought about my question. because if it was, any light emitted soon after the big bang would be far gone and we could never see it therefore we could not "look back in time" I am now starting to understand that we are in fact not looking at the big bang but the residual 'glow' left behind by the big bang, the CMBr.
As usual it raises more questions than it resolves :(
CC
Maybe your problem comes from imagining expansion the wrong way.
Have a look at the Lineweaver article about Misconceptions people often have about the big bang. I keep the link in my sig.
One common misconception is that it was an explosion of matter out into empty space. Lineweaver and Davis explain why that's the wrong picture. The article has helped a lot of people. It is clearly written and well illustrated (like many Scientific American articles).
Your question is about the standard model that cosmologists use. According to that model, the early universe had no empty space. It was uniformly filled with glowing hot ionized gas. Or if you go back even further, a hot soup of subnuclear particles. My point is that it was uniformly filled.
And it wasn't transparent. Like the surface of a star it was glowing too brightly to be transparent, glowing gas scatters any light that tries to get through it.
It didn't get cool enough to turn transparent until an estimated 380 thousand years from the start of expansion. So the oldest light we see is from then.
If it had turned transparent earlier, then we would be seeing even older light.
There never was a problem of light somehow "getting away" from us, or "outracing" expansion. Matter and space are coextensive. With matter (and light) more or less uniformly distributed throughout. The whole picture expands together.
So each part is always getting ancient light from some other part.
I think the best way to imagine it is to start with a simplified 2D analogy.
Google "wright balloon model" and watch the computer animation. In that analogy all existence is concentrated on the surface of an expanding sphere. The CMB photons of light are shown as little wigglers always traveling at a fixed speed across the 2D surface. The galaxies don't change their position in terms of longitude and latitude, but they get further apart. If you watch it a few times you will get some intuition for the standard model.
Of course space and matter could be coextensive and both infinite! That's a possibility. We don't know yet which case we are looking at. Infinite space with matter uniformly distributed throughout, or a finite version analogous to the 2D surface of a sphere. For a lot of purposes it doesn't matter how that turns out, though.
The Lineweaver Davis article was originally published in the Scientific American but it is so good that it has been used in Princeton astronomy courses. So they have a nice online version at princeton.edu
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~aes/AST105/Readings/misconceptionsBigBang.pdf
