What came first, the Universe or the Physical laws that govern the Universe? This sounds like the Egg and the Hen question but I am curious about this. If universe came first and created physical laws for itself, then what created the law or the principle as a consequence of which the universe came into existence in the first place?  And if there where pre-existing physical laws that governed the big bang or whatever the origin of the universe was, then where did those laws come from and what were they a part of? If we assume that creation and destruction of universe is cyclic and the same laws are carried onto the next creation and destruction cycle then shouldn't the law which is governing this cycle be a consequence or a part of some bigger something (like a mega-verse). Whichever the case, we again come down to same basic question as in the title.
Thanks.
 A: I believe a great answer to your question is:
We don't know
We still can't resolve the time before electroweak interactions, so how can we even come close to answering this question? 
You might get answers from some theories (or I prefer to call them theorems because they're only math until today) like string theory or loop quantum gravity or M-theory or whatever... but we're not even able to test any of these! So my recommendation is: If someone claims they're giving you an answer with certainty, you have to know they're lying (which is why I'm starting to dislike guys like Michio Kaku, who keeps giving certainties about string theory as facts, probably to get funding). Answers given here are only bound to the mathematical formulation of the theory related to it, which is still not testable.
One more important point you have to be careful about with such questions is drawing conclusions. Don't get to the slippery slope that gets you to draw conclusions from any answer you might get because we really still don't know. I'm saying this because usually such questions fall within the theological framework to make gap to put god in. So be careful, and keep in mind the great saying of Feynman: 
"Not knowing is better than knowing a wrong answer".
A: This is a metaphysical/philosophical question, imo.
There is the platonic ideals school, in this case read for ideals=mathematics, which postulated that ideals existed and nature fell into their form. I have seen a number of theoretically inclined people who are really of that school. One does not have to think of the beginning of the universe to start thinking that the mathematical format is the mold in which nature settles.  
So in this school the answer is that "laws and the subsequent theories existed before the observable universe". It becomes metaphysics because it invites a meta level of:" how did these laws and theories appear out of the vacuum".
As an experimental physicist I am of the school that "nature exists and we experimentally study its behavior and fit the data with mathematical models", so the horizon of our knowledge is limited by our experiments and observations. The answer then is like the other answers: we cannot know because we have no observations for the beginning of the universe, only after the cosmic microwave background time in the BigBang, 380.000 years after the beginning. Before that, we fit models and extrapolate back. For a while we thought that BICEP2 had taken us very near to time 0 with gravitational waves, but it turned out not to be rigorously established.
A: As far as I understand, Physics is not able to awnser this question, because the physical laws we use to describe the Universe are not valid up to the exact event of the Big Bang (the Big Bang is said to be a singularity of spacetime).
Physics attempts to describe the Universe at a moment when it already existed, but does not states causes for its existence itself.
A: Semantics is wrong in more than one way. First of all, there is no "first" without time, and time only exists in the universe, so the question is not well posed. If there was something before the big bang, then both are a part of the same "universe/multiverse" for which common laws must hold (you can't just discretely switch laws all of the sudden - and if you do, the way you switch it follows some rules as well, so you can again put it in a bigger unyfing theory). If the big bang really is the edge of the universe (edge in space-time), then you must still look at it as a whole (time+space), so you just have an object (=universe) that just is. Evolution in time is simply a way of slicing it up and experiencing it, and there's where the notion of "first" and sequence of events comes in.
Secondly... you should understand laws as things that describe the universe, not the thing that governs it. Telling the rules is similar to saying "this apple is delicious". I guess you could ask "what came first: apples or its taste"... in the sense that the concept of taste somehow transcends the existence of an apple, you may argue that the taste can exist even in a world without apples. Two points must be raised here. Firstly, we argue that taste exists because there are other fruits, there's a bigger universe in which an apple exists. This brings us back to the question of just finding the laws that encapsulate the thing bigger than the universe - which begs the question, if we define the universe as everything there is, does it make sense to even talk about "outside the universe"? I'd say no. The second argument is the core of this issue, and probably an answer: the rules of math and logic transcend any reality at all. They are completely abstract concepts that are true in any universe you imagine, or without any universe. Truth is absolute - so in that sense... math comes "before" (not in the sense of physical time, but in the process of philosophical reasoning) everything else. Then, the laws that describe your universe are simply truths (facts) about it.
A: Closely related to your question is that of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. If it is discovered, where does it "live"? 
Also relevant might be the view of Tegmark on the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis Where he posits that everything is "made of mathematics" and that the physical world is just one such instantiation out of a possible infinite set.
A: The "laws" we have found allow to predict how the "universe" manifests itself (including a concrete concept of universe) are nowhere to be found other than our social interactions as agents. 
They are in no way in the same phenomenological level than, well, actual observable phenomena (what you call the universe). You can see this hierarchy in the fact that many "laws" can "fit" a single observation. 
From a time arrow perspective, they came afterwards, because they appeared after formal-language-augmented social interacting mass-based agents (us) appeared. 
