It was Hawking and another Physicist who ‘proved’ there was a big bang. It was the Big Bang which brought Time and Space into existence. So far I haven’t seen where Stephen has shown how it was that these two dimensions were brought into existence or intertwined, so I’ll pass on trusting Stephen’s latest assertions.
BTW, the ‘laws of physics’ did not exist before time and space expressed. Without time events cannot occur, without space things/objects do not exist, regardless of how many expressions or variables of either dimension are postulated.
Georges Lemaître was the guy who formulated what would later be known the Big Bang Theory, and it was Fred Hoyle who coined the term. That was in 1949, and Hawking was only 7 years old in 1949.
Hawking did Quantum Gravity and Black Holes, which of course have been proven to exist.