I think the best way to make progress toward understanding the nature of reality and the physical universe is by trying to answer the question that underlies it all "Why is there something that nothing?" as well as the subsequent question "What is the nature of the most fundamental something?". This is metaphysics. Then, because:

1. Metaphysics is the study of existence and the nature of...

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I think the best way to make progress toward understanding the nature of reality and the physical universe is by trying to answer the question that underlies it all "Why is there something that nothing?" as well as the subsequent question "What is the nature of the most fundamental something?". This is metaphysics. Then, because:

1. Metaphysics is the study of existence and the nature of existent entities.

2. The universe exists and is made of existent entities.

3. Physics is the study of the universe.

4. The laws of physics are theoretically derivable from the principles of

metaphysics and their use in deriving the properties of fundamental

existent entities.

I think this metaphysics-to-physics approach, while difficult to do, is logically undeniable; although, I'm not an academic logician So, using metaphysics-derived properties of the most fundamental existent entities, one can build a model of the early universe, see if that model matches observations and see if it can make testable predictions that also match observations. This is the scientific method and I think it may be a faster approach to getting a deeper understanding the the universe than either physics or philosophy alone. While this is a difficult and time-consuming method, so are physics and philosophy and they don't seem to be making much progress either.

In regard to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", I think that to ever get an intellectually satisfying answer, we're going to have to address the possibility that there could have been "nothing", but now there is "something".   If any of the other existing solution were satisfying, we wouldn't still be asking the question.  An analogous way of saying that you start with "nothing" is by saying you start with a 0 (e.g., "nothing") and end up with a 1 (e.g., "something").  We know you can't change a 0 into a 1 (ex nihilo nihil fit), so the only way you can go from the 0 to the 1 is if somehow the 0 isn't really a 0 but is actually a 1 in disguise, even though it looks like 0 on the surface.  That is, in one way of thinking "nothing" just looks like "nothing".  But, if we think about "nothing" in a different way, we can see through its disguise and see that it's a "something".  That is the situation we previously, and incorrectly, thought of as "nothing" is actually an existent entity, or a "something".  If anyone's interested, a possible mechanism for how this could be is at: https://philpapers.org/rec/GRAPST-4

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