Further to my 'great thoughts' ('great thunks'?) on information and the Big Bang I would tentatively like to express my very, very, very limited understanding of the work of Stephen Hawking. Through considering the phenomena of black holes (gravitationally collapsed stars) Hawking explored the link between entropy (the thermodynamic measure of the amount of disorder in a system) and information. A completely disordered sytem has infinite entropy and no information can be extracted from it. If no light can escape from within the event horizon of a black hole then no information can escape either and we can't possibly know anything about whatever it is that lurks beyond the event horizon. Therefore a black hole (or rather the singularity within it) is identical to a system with infinite entropy. The region within an event horizon is like a piece of text in which all the letters which make it up have been completely scrambled and the meaning of the text can never be recovered.

What's that noise? Oh dear, it's lots of physicists rolling around on the floor making strange noises ... I can't make out whether they're laughing or crying ... ?

Anyway, if a singularity existed before the Big Bang it was probably a completely disordered system and we can't possibly know anything about it - there is just no information left.