What came first, energy or matter… or space?

The question of if matter or energy came first is an interesting philosophical question that has been pondered for centuries. It is known that matter and energy are inextricably bound, mass is a form of energy – the reason things have mass is because they have internal stored energy. I like to imagine mass as like a dial of how much energy is stored in an object. Einstein’s energy-mass equivalence E = mc2, tells you exactly how much energy is stored; however, it evokes that mass is energy, but energy is not mass… Matter is a kind of energy so it can’t be first, there can’t be a universe with matter and no energy. For this reason, it is pretty clear that energy must have come first.
When thinking about if (matter/energy) or space came first, things get a bit more complicated. The short answer is that we don’t know as there is currently no observational evidence which can really tell us. As far as we know, both have always existed in some form but when we go all the way back to the Big Bang, our models become unable to make predictions about this topic. According to the uncertainty principle the generation of matter is not allowed. It certainly doesn’t seem to allow violation of baryon and lepton quantum numbers which is required for matter generation. Anyway, since space is also very homogenous and isotropic, matter must have been evenly distributed before the expansion of space happened, so that the expansion can smooth everything out and enlarge the gravitational artifacts allowing for matter to collapse into our galaxies. This is actually our best-known model which can answer the question of why everywhere looks the same on the largest scales, known as the theory of cosmic inflation.
This leads us to our conclusion that (1) Matter must have existed before space began expanding significantly, because of how uniform it is today, and (2) Unless the law of energy conservation is violated somehow, the energy must also have existed at this time.