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Sorry I missed your questions earlier; had longshadow not flagged me tonight I'd have missed it entirely.

My contention however,is what caused the BB, and how did the initiation process start( way before 10E-36 seconds occured)?

In the explanation I linked above, I explained that at the Big Bang, time folds back upon itself, and all directions point to the future. In the context of our time dimension, therefore, the Big Bang is an uncaused event, and that's all we can ever know about it. So your question becomes, why does the universe exist at all?

This gets us back to Heidegger's fundamental question of philosophy, which is, why does anything exist? Why the universe? Why God? Why existence itself? Why not just nothing? I don't think that's answerable. All we can do is note that "existence exists", and take it as an axiom.

The big mystery to me is, why are there more matter than anti matter in the Universe we live in? Should symetry require that there should have been equal amounts? If there were equal amounts, woun't the anti matter, and matter distroy each other, leaving the Universe with nothing but eternal radiation?

That's actually a problem I've worked on. The immediate reason there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter is from an effect called CP-violation. The deeper question of why CP-violation exists is not yet answered, but we're closing in on it.

There are three discrete symmetries obeyed by quantum field theories: "C", or charge conjugation, which is the swapping of matter and anti-matter; "P", or parity, which is the reversal of space; and "T", which is the reversal of time. It was originally thought that the quantum field theories exhibited in nature were invariant under all of these transformations. For example, if an interaction is P-invariant, that means that when you look at the physics in a mirror, it "makes sense". If an interaction is T-invariant, the physics still makes sense if you play the film backwards.

In the 1950's, it was discovered that the weak interaction violates parity. There is a distinct "handedness" to weak decays. C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee got the Nobel Prize for this discovery. However, it was quickly shown that all of the known weak interactions were still invariant under CP: that is to say, if you theoretically replaced all the particles with their antiparticles and watched it in a mirror, the physics would end up the same.

Well, to make a long story short, ultimately some decays were discovered that violate the CP symmetry. If CP were strictly conserved, then particles and antiparticles would always decay at the same rates into "conjugate" states (i.e. the matter and antimatter versions of the same state), but sometimes this isn't true. Matter and antimatter decay differently. The difference is slight, but it's measurable.

CP violation is being studied in exquisite detail right now, particularly using B mesons at the Belle and BaBar experiments. There are several possible known mechanisms for creating CP violation both within and beyond the Standard Model. We don't yet know which mechanism is the right one (none of the above? more than one?), but we'll know in the next few years.

Once you have ansewered these simple minded questions, then we could move on to the next phase of the debate: why this improbable(perhaps only to me in this tread at the moment)Universe exists.

Any possible universe is gigantically improbable, but some universe had to exist. It may seem a miracle that our universe is just right for us, but that's looking at it the wrong way 'round: given a universe, it's inevitable that we would have been just right for it.

Thank you again, and longshadow for trying to answer the questions I posed. These are essentially the same questions I asked a friend( a leading expert in magnetics, but also a young brilliant physicist) of mine years back during lunch(also a bull session time of the day}. To my surprise a year later, he handed me a manuscript, titled "The Anthropic Universe", and asked me to review it before letting an "outsider" see it. He thought , since I asked the questions which inspired him to write the book, that even if I am not a Physicist, he could find out what the reaction of a man on the street might be to his book. On my 1st question, his book talked about the SINGULARITY(S) as the starting point, or the initial conditions for the BB. He talked about that, at S, Space-Time is very tightly convoluted, talked about the quantum foam,... But then I asked, if it was possible for him to formulate this Initial State to a mathematical form sufficient to discribe the dynamics of the BB. His answer was no, not yet. He has to look into the new fad Super String Theory, to see, if he could come up with something. I have not yet heard from him yet to date, and as far as I know the book has not yet been published. Well, so much for simple questions. Your answer to my 2nd questions had a familiar ring to it, very similar to my friends response, but again, the story is not yet fully told. Well, my shadow is also becoming long, and my time maybe up soon, but am still hoping that before I go, the complete story will be told. Years ago, I told my freind that I still believe in Physics, so much so that, I really believe that the laws of Physics, and God Is an IDENTITY, As the Bible said: " In the beginning there was the WORD, and ...... Again, thank you, and have a good evening.

Interesting CP link for me, but most likely pretty basic for you. :)

http://home.fnal.gov/~prebys/talks/rochester_20010926.pdf