Laws of Conservation?

I see a lot of certainty in people's views that time began with the universe - but what is the evidence for that? Don't say GR because it breaks down at singularities.

Yes - as I understand it, singularities are events where, according to classical physics, the energy density and hence spacetime curvature become infinite. GR doesn't work in these circumstances. The expectation is that quantum gravity will help us resolve this.Can I show you a time when there was no universe? No, but I see the following logical possibilities.- The universe may have begun without time, which emerged 'subsequently'.
- Time may have come into existence before the big bang, in some kind of precursor to our universe.These are a bit mischievous - but my point really is that we don't understand how time arises and therefore it's not a foregone conclusion that it began with the universe.

.That's a good challenge - and I think it's probable that time did arise with the universe - but I'm wary of using logic to say that such a thing is necessarily the case. Something would have to exist for time to exist, but it might not be the universe as we mean it today. Likewise it is possible that time was not an initial property of the universe but appeared at some point. yes, I agree

OniYes, it's very hard to talk about things happening without time - so any statement of that kind looks nonsensical. But I'd like to challenge you on saying time, length and width do not arise - I think they do. The number of dimensions of the universe is a property that it has - that theoretically could be different from what we observe. The concept of length can only arise from the existence of a such a space dimension. I think time is a similar concept.

BTW, I was being a smartypants when I used the word event - an event is the name for a point in space time. I may have misused it.