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Stephen Hawking giving a lecture describing how the universe would have arisen from his model (developed with James Hartle) or "no boundary" conditions, once said:

Unlike the black hole pair creation, one couldn't say that the de Sitter universe was created out of field energy in a preexisting space. Instead, it would quite literally be created out of nothing: not just out of the vacuum, but out of absolutely nothing at all, because there is nothing outside the universe

Until I found that quote I assumed that when Hawking said that the universe would be "created" out of nothingness, he did not mean true nothingness but a quantum vacuum with quantum fluctuations. But here he seems to indicate that the universe would be born out of literally nothing. So, in the first instants of the origin of the universe, would the quantum fluctuations arise from pure nothingness (according to Hawking)?

vengaq
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  • As a side note, there are no fluctuations in a true vacuum state. Vacuum is an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian and it remains the same. That's the whole point of being an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian. –  May 20 '20 at 23:26
  • Also, more generally, there are no "fluctuations" in quantum mechanics. It's a statistical concept, quantum mechanics is an exact formalism. See this excellent answer by @AccidentalFourierTransform: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/257700/20427. –  May 20 '20 at 23:33
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    You refer to “nothing” as a source, from which the universe was born. This makes no sense, because being the source would make “nothing” a substance and therefore not really nothing. So when you say, “the universe was born”, adding “from nothing” to this phrase creates a logical contradiction. Furthermore, when you say, “the universe was born”, you imply that first there was no universe and then it appeared. This too makes no sense. If the universe was not there, where exactly was this “there”? “Outside”? There is no such place as “outside” the universe. Your question has no physical meaning. – safesphere May 21 '20 at 03:43

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