There's a new theory being talked about that suggests that instead of a big bang, the beginning of the universe may have been something more like water freezing into ice. The ice in this case would be spacetime. So there may have been some kind of phase change from something fluid and superhot before that cooled and crystalized into a universe with spacetime. They also say that like matter, space is also made up of extremely small building blocks and is quantized. I think this is pretty intriguing. They have some work to do on it though, including showing that the properties of general relativity arise from their initial principles. The article also talks about other observations that can be made to prove their theory.
http://www.science20.com/news_articl...ig_chill-93154