Astrophysicists respond in the negative. But it will take more than increasingly powerful telescopes to resolve the enigma of our beginnings. The universe was so dense throughout its first 300,000 years that there was no propagation of light. The cosmos was entirely opaque. Our telescopes, such as they are, could never hurdle this natural barrier.
Physicists continue striving toward their goal by turning down different paths.
In the beginning, the universe functioned like an immense particle accelerator, so much so that we may even hope to reproduce its mechanisms. The biggest cyclotrons in use today permit us to attain energies comparable to those that existed when the universe was only a hundredth of a second old. Before 10-43 after the Big Bang, the universe was so dense that gravitation, which is generally negligible at the subatomic level, was as powerful as electromagnetic or nuclear force. Einstein's theory of relativity describes gravity's effect when other forces are negligible. In the same way, quantum mechanics show the action of electromagnetic and nuclear forces when gravitation is insignificant.