Why we should care about how mass and space are created

I would like to open a dialogue in order to tackle the difficult questions of how mass and space are created. It is common knowledge that the beginning of Atomic Theory is attributed to Democritus in Ancient Greece. He proposed that the universe is made of indivisible particles and the void. He stated that these were eternal and understandably made no attempt to explain how they came into existence. Much later, during the scientific revolution, Descartes attempted to explain the existence of space as being created by the expansion of matter. Soon after Descartes, Isaac Newton codified classical physics in his laws. He treated space and mass as mathematical variables to explain the relationship between moving bodies but did not attempt to explain how they came into existence.
In the late 19th century, Hermann Minkowski came up with his theory of four-dimensional space-time. This was considered to be what would be left over if all of the matter and fields in the universe were to disappear and set the stage for Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Four dimensions sufficed until physicists began trying to find a Grand Unified Theory of all forces. In order for the equations to balance, they needed to add at least six more dimensions which could not be directly experienced.
I feel that this has led to a number of difficult problems in physics that will not be solved until we have a better understanding of how mass and space are created. Here is the short list of problems that could be solved by a better understanding of the nature of mass and space:
1. What was the nature of the universe at the moment of its conception?
2. What is the universe expanding into?
3. Is it possible to have more than one universe?
4. How does mass curve space?
5. Does gravity exist as a wave-particle, or is it merely one of the relationships between mass and space?
6. Is there a grand unified theory of all known forces? If we eliminate gravity as a force it would be easier.
7. Is it possible to have more than 3 spacial dimensions as proposed by superstring theory?

Answering the above questions would be a lot easier if we understood how mass and space are created. I would like to suggest a possible starting point for the endeavor. I would like to start with the concept of mass since it can be directly experienced, while space is a more abstract concept. In order to understand how mass is created we need to understand why do some particles have a certain mass while other particles apparently have no mass at all? If we could find two particles that differ by only by mass and one other measurable property then we might find a clue to how mass comes into being.