he was now fairly confident that gravitational waves would allow to look back to the point a few milliseconds after the big bang as detectors are improved.

There’s still a limit, because they travel through the universe at the speed of light, but the universe was transparent to them so we should be able to see beyond the CMBR. But, I don’t know that there will have been anything massive enough to ‘make’ detectable waves?

So something finally clicked in my understanding and I’m a little embarrassed as it is, as I suspected it was, a really basic failure to grasp fundamental principles on my part.

The ‘look back’ time and position/direction are not contradictory. The way I see it in my head is as if our position is on the outside edge of a three dimensional sphere and our perspective in terms of both direction and time is like a cone looking towards to the singularity, which we will never see because of the opacity of the early universe.

There could be any order of other ‘stuff’ that came into existence and evolved over time that lie within the planes of different cones, i.e. diametrically in the opposite direction from our position. These planes would be moving away from us infinitely fast. Our view is just one thin slice, that cone shape slice, of what could be something inordinately larger. We just don’t know nor can we know.

Reconciling my confusion was actually very simple even if my explanation of it is incredibly facile.