Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists.
Stephen HawkingObservations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesnโt have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.
Stephen Hawking