jjw004 wrote:
"What was there before the Big Bag and what was the source of the Mass for the Big Bang?"
I love how those that have nothing worthwhile to contribute make fun of an obvious typo. What a 'Christian' thing to do.
To answer your "what was there before" is an invalid question. First it assumes that there was SOME THING before: We don't know that that was true. Second it assumes that time existed prior to the event: We don't know that to be true either. We are completely ignorant of anything prior to a very small faction of a second after the event.
Keep in mind that the Big Bang with Inflation is described as an expansion of SPACE-TIME. Both time and space were created. Thus our anthropomorphic need for a before may just be a weakness of human imagination: Not physics.
Now to your question about mass. As we humans have mass and live in an environment in which things seem massive we care about mass a lot. But from a Quantum Mechanical point of view mass may just be, to use a very bad analogy, something like molasses. It causes things to resist acceleration.
It seems to be a consensus that it relates to interactions with Higg's Bosons (look it up with google). But I have increasing doubts given the inability to find any evidence of them yet.
