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)?
