As I understand, the main hypothesis for how the big bang does not violate energy conservation is the zero-energy universe hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/w

As I understand, the main hypothesis for how the big bang does not violate energy conservation is the zero-energy universe hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe The general idea is that negative energy due to gravity (this is hard to wrap one's head around) perfectly cancels out all of the energy in the universe (including energy in the form of mass).