Astronomy: Picture of the Day and caption

Explanation: The Universe is expanding gradually now. But its initial expansion was almost impossibly rapid as it likely grew from quantum scale fluctuations in a trillionth of a second. In fact, this cosmological scenario, known as Inflation, is now reported to be further quantified by an analysis of three years of data from the WMAP spacecraft. WMAP's instruments detect the cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow light from the early Universe. WMAP's amazing success in exploring the first trillionth of a second and favoring specific inflationary scenarios lies in its ability to make unprecedented, precise measurements of the properties of the microwave background. The subtle properties are distilled from conditions in the early Universe and related to its first moments of existence. Schematically, this diagram traces the 13.7 billion year (plus a trillionth of a second ...) history of the Universe from the quantum scale to the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, and WMAP.

I got this link today from Andy Ilachinski, who has a blog on photography that I recommend. Here's what Andy, a physicist, had to say:

It's that *last* part that's interesting to me. I've always been mistyfied by assertions regarding cosmic events using "human-scaled macroscopic" (intuitive) variables/labels such as "time". In this case, since it is the expansion of the entire *universe*, i.e., the entire space-time edifice! exactly what is the reference frame in which this
"trillionth of a second" has any meaning? If its the "conventional" one,

(a) there is *no* universal frame (that's the essence of Einstein's
great insight: no GLOBAL time), and

(b) even if there *were* a global reference frame, the only thing that could be is a component of the rapidly expanding space-tiome continuum...a parameter that is doing the expanding is being used to qualify the expansion?

So, exactly how can we understand in our own minds the idea of the entire universe at this microscopic (whatever that means?) scales. I don't understand it one bit. If you do, please help me out.