Yes the actual laws of physics can't be broken Conservation laws should be considered more as powerful analysis tools than as foundations of reality. So more N

Yes the actual laws of physics can't be broken Conservation laws should be considered more as powerful analysis tools than as foundations of reality. So more Newtonian gravity than Relativity. In fact, you can regard Newtonian orbital mechanics as elaborations on conservation of energy and momentum. Conservation laws themselves have an underlying principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ERSb06dOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ERSb06dOg Another analogy: Conservation laws are like Euclidian geometry. On the scale of building a cabinet or an office building, Euclidian geometry rules! On intergalactic scales, it simply fails. So too, with the conservation of energy. If someone tries to sell you a perpetual motion or over unity machine, it is pretty rock solid. But if you're going to try to make some kind of cosmological argument using conservation of energy, that's just plain facepalm territory there. (Some HNer actually reported me for using <facepalm> in response to conservation of energy in a cosmological argument.)