The following is not a question: Can something come from nothing?

[John V]

Oh crap - written - I'll have to hunt but are you looking for science papers, news-stories or books. There's always "A universe from nothing" from Krauss himself which is a great place to start. That does cover his definitions of nothing but not in great details. Its the furore since that has brought it up. There are some letters I saw somewhere (emails in reality) between Krauss and various other physicists but I can't remember where they were and they were only extracts.

There's a report on one of the debates at http://www.livescience.com/28132-what-is...ebate.html

And an explanation of how difficult it is to get to nothing at http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/...g-the-phi/

Any good?

Good for me. From the first one"

The first, most basic idea of nothing — empty space with nothing in it — was quickly agreed not to benothing. In our universe, even a dark, empty void of space, absent of all particles, is still something.

Which is something I've been saying. Also:

But there is a deeper kind of nothing, argued theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, which consists of no space at all, and no time, no particles, no fields, no laws of nature. "That to me is as close to nothing as you can get," Krauss said.

Which is of course something we can't study.

The second one says the same:

And so we try to answer it scientifically. In order to do that, we want to start with a scientific definition of nothing. In our nearby Universe, nothing is hard to come by. We are surrounded by matter, radiation, and energy everywhere we look. Even if we blocked it all out — creating a perfect, cold, isolated vacuum — we still wouldn’t have nothing.

We would still exist in curved spacetime. The very presence of nearby objects with mass or energy distorts the very fabric of the Universe, meaning that if we want to truly achieve a state of physical nothingness, we cannot have anything in our Universe at all.