Yea, that is where I began, with the article just titled "Universe". Then I googled universe creation and started to read other articles on the energy source for the cause to the Bang. Basically I am trying to help a friend here who is trying to wrap his brain around the idea of what existed the month before the bang and how it happened.
That helps a lot to have questions more specific, because cosmology is a huge subject. The questions you have are related to two specific areas of cosmology - "big bang" theory, and M-theory (an extension of string theory). Big bang theory is familiar to just about everybody. We live in an expanding universe. As we look out at neighboring galaxies, we see that they are generally moving away from us, and the further they are away from us, the faster they are moving away from us. We can measure this velocity by measuring the red-shift of the light that reaches us. That velocity corresponds to a distance in the universe. The Hubble Space telescope's primary purpose was to nail down the calibration of Hubble's law by measuring Hubble's constant, which it successfully did. That means for a given red-shift of light, we can calculate the distance to the object that emitted it, because we understand how space-time is expanding. Space-time is a term used to describe the three dimensions of space, and the one dimension of time. All this is probably at least a little familiar to you.
The big bang is an analogy for what happened. We use a metaphor of an explosion to describe the expansion of the universe, to try to understand what it was. The term itself was devised by Fred Hoyle, who did not believe in a big bang, and wanted to mock the expanding universe theories. It is important to understand that the big bang wasn't an explosion, but it was an expansion. The implication of an expanding universe is that at one time in the distant past, everything we see was contained in a single point of unimaginable density and temperature. That's the singularity from which the universe erupted.
The singularity isn't like a stick of dynamite which exists somewhere before it explodes. A stick of dynamite explodes inside the universe. The hot gasses rush out and push other objects away from the explosion. A stick of dynamite explodes into the universe, so it's natural to ask what is the universe exploding into? That's where the analogy falls apart. The big bang wasn't an explosion of the universe into something else, it was an expansion of the entirety of the universe itself. All of space-time was contained inside the singularity, which itself has no defined boundary to separate inside from outside. So, you can see, it's a problem even to describe space-time as being inside a singularity!
I can use another analogy to describe the kind of problem that this is. On our planet, we have the cardinal directions, NSEW. We can go a mile in any direction from where we are standing. We can decide to go North, but eventually we'll have to solve a big problem: what's North of the North Pole? In fact, the question is a nonsense question, it has no meaning because there is nothing North of the North Pole. Now consider that in order to understand what objects are inside or outside, you have to be able to reference a point in space. Points in space are inside or outside, and we can only know that if we have basic space-time to work with. If all of space-time is contained inside of a singularity, then there is no space-time outside the singularity. Therefore, the question of what is outside the universe is meaningless, and so is the question of what happened before the universe existed is meaningless too. These questions literally have no answers, and don't even make any sense.
Another analogy. In geometry, we have an ideal surface called a plane. A plane is two dimensions exactly, with no thickness at all. Asking where on a plane would the third dimension appear is similar to asking what comes before the big bang. A plane has only two dimensions, so it makes to sense to ask what the third dimension on a plane be. As soon as a plane has three dimensions, it's no longer a plane. Before the big bang, the dimensions of spacetime did not exist, which means there is no way to understand what's inside or outside, or what's before and after.
Now, that's half the story. You've probably heard about string theory. In physics, there is a really interesting problem with Einstein's relatavistic spacetime and Quantum mechanics. Both are true, in the scientific sense that they describe experiment and observation very well, but neither of them are compatible with the other. Relativity describes big things and fast motions. Quantum mechanics describes very small particles that act probabilistically. This bothers physicists greatly, because there's no reason why we should have two theories, we should have one theory which can replace both. That's why string theory was invented. It's a mathematical reconciliation of relativity and QM, which reaches way down underneath what we know about the basic structure of matter, underneath the smallest level of physical matter, quarks.
String theory is a complicated, beautiful system of differential equations which have many solutions, as many solutions as there are possible universes that exist. Stephen Hawking believes that string theory is a step forward in the understanding of the true nature of the universe, but critics have a very hard time with the fact that testing string theory is exceptionally difficult. In many cases, the energies required to provide meaningful tests would require particle accelerators far beyond our ability to construct. Nevertheless, string theory provides the best promise of a theory which can unify both relativity and quantum mechanics that we have right now.
To wrap your head around what string theory is, it's necessary to resort to analogies once again. String theory is a set of differential equations that describe not only our universe, but all possible universes. What does that mean? Thinking back to algebra, you'll probably remember that we used to graph lines, and that there is a formula that describes lines using the slope and the intercept: y=mx+b. The coefficient 'm' is the slope of the line, and is a real number. The intercept 'b' is the value at which the line crosses the y axis. When we provide specific numbers for this slope/intercept formula for a line, then we get a mathematical description of a single line on a graph. But, when we leave all the coefficients of the formula unspecified, then the formula effectively describes every possible line on a graph.
String theory is exactly analogous to our slope/intercept formula, except that instead of describing lines, string theory describes universes. By plugging in different numbers, we get different kinds of universes. String theorists have discovered combinations of numbers which result in low mass universes, high mass universes, universes with flat, convex or concave shapes of space-time universes with high or low cosmological constants, universes with various numbers of dimensions, and so on. Endless permutations of these universes have been investigated, but the exact formulation which describes a universe with various constants that match our own universe eludes discovery so far. Not all of those theories are consistent though, only five theories have been discovered which are consistent, and all of those have ten spatial dimensions.
These five consistent different string theories are related to each other, and the latest development called M-theory unifies all of them into a single theory which describes an 11-dimensional universe. At this point, any further description of string theory would quickly go off the deep end. String theory is inherently mathematical in nature, and can only be properly understood through the language of mathematics. The important thing to get out of this description of string theory is that the nature of the universe certainly isn't three or four dimensional. Time and space are not all that exist. There is a higher order organization to the natural universe which is almost certainly multidimensional. In that higher order organization, concepts such as "before" or "after" or "left" or "right" don't have any more meaning than asking what's North of the North pole.
It's certainly not intuitive. Our brains can't understand these concepts easily, and even physicists have trouble describing exactly what an 11-dimensional object would look like. However, it's clear that higher order dimensions do exist, and events in 11-dimensional space offers explanations for possible causes of the big bang. Objects in 11-dimensional space are difficult to imagine, but physicists describe them as membranes, or "branes" for short. This area of study is extremely new and full of speculation, but collisions between branes would unleash enormous energies, which could have been a cause and source of the energy for the expansion of our universe. How accurate this picture is, or how often this happens is not well understood right now.
One last thought about this. It is tempting for humans to ascribe supernatural causes to certain events. I'm not just talking about Christians, but everybody. Looking for agency behind events is something that we humans do naturally. Ascribing agency is a powerful survival tactic, and it's very natural to look at an event such as the big bang and to think "the hand of God did that." We should resist that temptation though, because if we were content to look at something and be satisfied with that explanation, then we would not have bothered to investigate as far as we have. We would have simply accepted the cosmology of the Babylonians, or the Sumerians, or the Israelites, or the Chinese (in which the empire of China is so old that it already exists even in the very first stories!). Science is a study of the natural universe, and can never reach a point where a supernatural (not natural) cause is assumed and the end of investigation is declared. Science is never going to be happy with answering a mystery with another mystery.
It is also instructive to consider that we can still easily find many people who are not scientists claiming that God was the force behind the Big Bang. It is is true that current science can only accurately describe and test the conditions of the universe up to a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang (actually, it's 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 second after the big bang where science picks up events accurately). But, as you can see, science does not stop investigating, and where some one saw the hand of God there are now string theorists glimpsing something much much different - 11-dimensional objects colliding in a higher order space!
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