  How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as
long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my
grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a
degree I find truly remarkable. In this brief essay, I describe some of my own
past and ongoing work on this topic, centering on cosmological inflation. I
focus on
  (1) observationally testing whether this picture is correct and
  (2) working out implications for the nature of physical reality (e.g., the
global structure of spacetime, dark energy and our cosmic future, parallel
universes and fundamental versus environmental physical laws).
  (2) clearly requires (1) to determine whether to believe the conclusions. I
argue that (1) also requires (2), since it affects the probability calculations
for inflation's observational predictions.
