>I just watched a TV show (1 of 3) called "Mysteries of Deep Space". In it they repeated the current belief that the big bang happened 15 billion years ago.
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>They then described the Hubble 'deep field' study and related that they figured that they found galaxies around the age of 14 billion years old. They describe this as 'this light that we are seeing now was emitted 14 billion years ago'.
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>Here's what I don't 'get'...
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>If the big bang happened 15 billion years ago and they are seeing light that is 14 billion years ago, shouldn't they expect to see MORE things there (rather than less) simply because 14 billion years ago things were far more compressed than they are now (compressed in the sense that 14 billion years ago is far far CLOSER to the CENTRE of the big bang and so things were all much closer together).
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>Also, based on the trajectories of some of these expanding bodies, shouldn't they be able to zero in directly on the big bang itself?
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>I think I must be missing something in this logic. What is it?

OK, you forced me to think about it, so I'll take a stab, but I'm no expert. The fact that we're seeing something that happened 14 billion years ago does not imply that it was spacially closer to the center of the big bang. These things are moving so fast that they were already further from the center 14 billion years ago than we are now. One isn't necessarily looking inward when viewing these ancient objects. We're slow-pokes, lingering around somewhere comparatively near the point of origin, so far from the edge that we can't measure the anisotropy. Things that are moving near the speed of light had a serious head start on us. The instantaneous flash of first light can not be what astronomers are seeing, because that is only detectable at the outermost edge.

Mike