For information, here is an actual quote from
The Grand Design.
In the early universe—when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory—there were
effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the “beginning” of the universe, we are skirting
the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our
usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or
our mathematics. If in the early universe all four dimensions behave like space, what happens to the beginning of time?
The realization that time can behave like another direction of space means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in a
similar way in which we got rid of the edge of the world. Suppose the beginning of the universe was like the South Pole of the earth, with
degrees of latitude playing the role of time. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe,
would expand. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole, but the South Pole is much like any other point. To ask what
happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South
Pole. In this picture space-time has no boundary—the same laws of nature hold at the South Pole as in other places. In an analogous
manner, when one combines the general theory of relativity with quantum theory, the question of what happened before the beginning
of the universe is rendered meaningless. This idea that histories should be closed surfaces without boundary is called the no-boundary
condition.