If there is no underlying truth - how then did the Universe begin?

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Although space may have been concentrated into a single point at the Big Bang, it is equally possible that space was infinite at the Big Bang. In both scenarios the space was completely filled with matter which began to expand.

Bohr's "Copenhagen interpretation", which became orthodoxy for most of the century, still has the power to shock. What it states, baldly, is that reality is determined by the experiment the scientist chooses to perform. 

One kind of experiment will cause light to behave like a particle; another kind will make it act as a wave. There is no underlying truth about what light "really" is.

And an electron doesn't have a definite position in space before you choose to measure it: in measuring it, you somehow oblige it to make up its mind as to where it is. 

So reality is a kind of mischievous oracle, answering only when directly questioned.


'Copenhagen theory' says that nothing is definitively so until an act of observation "collapses the wave-function" of the system in question (condensing, so to speak, a cloud of probability into one thing or another).

If that is true, how did the universe itself begin?


What 'monstrous', or if you like 'divine' act of observation could have collapsed the wave-function of the entire universe so as to promote it to physical reality?


Some physicists have subsequently adopted a "many worlds interpretation", which envisions an endlessly branching multiplicity of universes. This view may have shut down the original observation (the monstrous or divine act of observation that brought about 'reality').


And if we follow the trail of what most current phyisicst believe we are left with uncomfortable ontological profligacy (in reality a multiplicty of universes).


Hmm, so that's that. Now what's for tea?