If there was a 1st moment in time.

[Edwardo Piet]

I think he's trying to make comment abut how "nothing"  - or as most people would consider quantum vacuum fluctautions "nothing", aren't the problem that most people imagine them to be.

Most people would not consider quantum fluctuations to be nothing. Most people would consider quantum fluctuations to be quantum fluctuations.

Krauss hasn't just been rightly criticized by philosophers by calling something "nothing" he's been criticized by other physicists too.

The thing is "A Universe from a Quantum Vacuum Teeming With Quantum Activity" isn't as catchy of a book title.

But to come up with a catchy book title is one thing... but to try and defend such an idea is ridiculous lol.

In the New York Times, philosopher of science and physicist David Albert said the book failed to live up to its title; he claimed Krauss dismissed concerns about what Albert calls his misuse of the term nothing.

Commenting on the philosophical debate sparked by the book, the physicist Sean M. Carroll asked, "Do advances in modern physics and cosmology help us address these underlying questions, of why there is something called the universe at all, and why there are things called 'the laws of physics,' and why those laws seem to take the form of quantum mechanics, and why some particular wave function and Hamiltonian? In a word: no. I don't see how they could."

Sure, there was always "something" but the something that always was is commonly conceived of as "nothing" by laypersons.

No it isn't lol. Everyone knows that anything at all isn't nothing. Krauss just came up with a misleading title to help him sell a book.

He should have called it "A Universe from Almost Nothing".

Even as a child I knew that something wasn't ever nothing lol.

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[...]from the point of view of that photon, no time will have elapsed.... until now.... until whenever.

From that photon's point of view (if such a wording can be used), that first instant of time is the single one that has always existed.

So it looks like maybe Parmenides, my favorite philosopher, was right after all. Time and change is an illusion and everything is ultimately one and undifferentiated

When Popper called Einstein "Parmenides" it was intended as an insult. But I'd take it as a compliment

In "the way of truth" (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as "what-is") is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In "the way of opinion", he explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful. He has been considered to be the founder of metaphysics or ontology.
[...]
Parmenides made the ontological argument against nothingness, essentially denying the possible existence of a void. According to Aristotle, this led Democritus and Leucippus, and many other physicists, to propose the atomic theory, which supposes that everything in the universe is either atoms or voids, specifically to contradict Parmenides' argument. Aristotle himself reasoned, in opposition to atomism, that in a complete vacuum, motion would encounter no resistance, and "no one could say why a thing once set in motion should stop anywhere; for why should it stop here rather than here? So that a thing will either be at rest or must be moved ad infinitum, unless something more powerful get in its way."

Erwin Schrödinger identified Parmenides' monad of the "Way of Truth" as being the conscious self in "Nature and the Greeks". The scientific implications of this view have been discussed by scientist Anthony Hyman.

A shadow of Parmenides' ideas can be seen in the physical concept of Block time, which considers existence to consist of past, present, and future, and the flow of time to be illusory. In his critique of this idea, Karl Popper called Einstein "Parmenides". However, Popper did write:

So what was really new in Parmenides was his axiomatic-deductive method, which Leucippus and Democritus turned into a hypothetical-deductive method, and thus made part of scientific methodology.