Nothing is a metaphysical concept with no reality we can possibly comprehend. If we speak about "Nothing", we make it into a concept, so it becomes something. Nothing is the absence of something, & so becomes a thing, so the term is self contradictory.

If you look in an "empty" room, you might see total darkness, but that is something. The room, if it is on this planet, has air in it, especially when you open the door. We can't see that, but it is something. The room has space, which is something, & so on

I've just read your post and felt nothing, does that help?

Just the mathematical concept of zero took quite a while to catch on - once it did things really began to happen.
Wonder if the same will be true if people ever understand nothing?

This is a misunderstanding . . .
"Scientists claim our universe came out of "nothing" "
NO they do not.
We can observe the universe expanding. Logic dictates if you follow such expansion back it becomes one thing because of the nature of the observed expansion.
We named that the singularity.
We do not have a clue what is before that, we have ideas and as we learn more those ideas grow as new models replace old ones. always striving to make better ones.
But no one knows, evidentially.

The most likely culprit responsible is an unknown in Quantum, but science does not know or claim something came from nothing.

THAT is the Bible.

scientists do not claim the universe came out of nothing; they are always trying to figure out what came before the singularity and the big bang.

i am only human and thus cannot imagine nothing. that is a failure of my/our imagination, though, not a failure of science. that explains why we fear death, too.

g

It is perhaps beyond our comprehension.

Think about when before you were born that is a very good concept of nothing

Scientists do not claim that the Big Bang came out of nothing. What we don't know is what came before because the actual Big Bang event destroyed the evidence of what existed prior. That doesn't mean it came out of nothing.

As I understand it, in order to have something (as opposed to nothing) one must have both time and matter. One doesn't have time until you have matter moving through space to obviate time.

If the Universe is expanding as hypothesized by science, then the Universe must have a edge. If it has an edge and is expanding, then there must be a point in which it has not reached. Without having reached beyond the edge, then matter is missing. Therefore, without matter no time exists yet. Therefore it doesn't exist yet. Therefore, beyond the edge of the Universe is nothing.

The only exception I can think of, is if black matter is totally ubiquitous and exists regardless of the expanse of the Universe.

The inability to percieve does not negate the premise.

Nothing
A long time ago my then gf was having her place renovated by the council landlords. She could have moved out but preferred to stay even without a full bathroom or kitchen. She also let someone use her address for bail. He went missing and the cops came round to try and find him.
They came in and I could not resist saying "Dont look in the kitchen"
"Why what's in there?"
"Nothing"
"What do you mean nothing?"
"Nothing. There is nothing in there"
He opened the kitchen door to find ... nothing. No cupboards, sink, washing machine, pots, pans, dishes. tiles plaster.... nothing

There never has been nor ever will be nothing. 'i can see no beginning nor end to anything' Hutton. The universe is infinite in both time and space.

I find nothing quite easy to conceptualize (though this is an odd term as you will soon see). So I have aphantasia, which is the lack of a mind's eye (or any other sense in my particular case). I can't force myself to hallucinate (how I view mental visualizers as they can see something that is not there). It's not blackness, it is just not anything, no thing in a literal sense. This, it seems, translates over very well to conceptualizing nothing.

As far as I know, no scientist (excluding Christian scientists) claim the universe came out of "nothing". In fact the first law of dynamics tells us that energy can NEVER be created nor destroyed.

Then Einstein tells us matter and energy are the same thing in different forms.

The combination suggests to me the energy of the total universe is eternal, it didn't have to come from anywhere or nowhere, it simply is and always has been .... though not in the form we now know it, but it wasn't "nothing".

It’s just too abstract a concept, we can only imagine what we have already experienced, and that has only ever been something material.

That's how I understood Lawrence Krauss' book A Universe From Nothing. He seemed to be saying nothing is possibly a backdrop on which to 'hang' things, for want of a better word.

I think of nothing as an absence of matter.

I know of no cosmological model that even implies that the universe came from nothing. *Your citation needed.
Between every thought, nothing. between every atom, nothing.
It is of little surprise that our brains evolved in an environment where the experience of no thing was not an important factor.

No astrophysicist or cosmologist that I am aware of has ever asserted that "our universe came out of nothing". The concept of "nothing" is an abstract human construct that has no existence in reality. Indeed, if it did, it would not be "nothing".

Well, the scientific theory is that, " In the beginning there was a Singularity so compressed was the matter it contained that it eventually exploded and, VOILA, the universe came into being in a HUGE Bang, i.e. the Big Bang Theory was postulated.
However, ask any Faithfool and they will ardently tell that " In the beginning there was nothing, only god, and from that 'nothing' god created EVERYTHING."
What makes me curious about the Creation Myth is this, How can something that is, according to Theist reasoning (???), for arguments sake, a shapeless, ethereal Entity, A) suddenly realize that it it exists in the first place, B) suddenly realize that IT must create ANYTHING at all simply to prove (???) that it exists AND IS Omnipotent, Omnipresent, etc, etc, WITHOUT there being ANYTHING around it, and, last but DEFINITELY, by no means LEAST of ALL, C) actually CREATE everything and ANYTHING from ABSOLUTELY nothing simply by the uttered word?
I mean, that IS about as logical as saying " If Elephants had wings then they'd be birds or bees," is it not?
I suppose that, technically speaking, NOTHING is the absence of Something, ergo the vice versa applies as well.

The best nothing I can think of is Seinfeld......

I can only point you to read "A Universe from nothing" by Lawrence Krauss, a physicist from a top university i. Arizona.

I have not read the book yet, but it is next on my reading list after Peter Woit's "Not even Wrong".

There is also an audio book for it.

Supposed it explains the physics of "nothing" and how the universe can come from it.

I always say that the nothing they refer to is something, it's just something we can't directly observe yet.

Much like how we called it the dark side of the moon when we couldn't observe it. It was never literally dark, it was simply unobservable.

The nothing really is something, just something we can't observe yet.

That's my typical go-to for explaining "nothing" to a believer. I mean, it doesn't help though. As long as there is something unknown to us, there will always be room for belief in believers.. and there will always be something unknown to us. It'll be impossible to combat religious belief with something that is physically unobservable with the current limit to our technology.

This may have nothing to do with the line of thought you’re after, but there are 3 ways I think of “nothingness.” Visually it’s usually represented as a pure white field if someone finds themselves in an empty dimension in movies or TV. Standing on one big endless blank page, with no walls or ceiling. I’d picture it more as pure darkness. Close your eyes and cover them to eliminate any light. That’s nothing to me.

Mathematically the digit zero is fascinating. It has no value but you still must use it when counting, as a placeholder and to emphasize the fact that 1 isn’t where counting begins. It’s why the 19th century was the 1800s, because the first century was years 0-99. Its significance is huge in binary, being only one of 2 digits that can program an electrical circuit. Off and on is all you’ve got. A computer can only count to 1 basically and we put a bunch of those gates side by side until we could do astronomical calculations. Each place value of counting to 1 makes the possible number go up exponentially, doubling for every place value.

The third way is the Buddhist concept of nothingness. It doesn’t mean nothing, it means no thingness. Meaning separate countable things do not exist. It’s all interconnected, made of the same stuff, occupying the same timeline and constantly interacting such that it must be considered one system. We chop nouns and events up out of their context in history class and then have trouble reverse engineering the surrounding timeline to understand precipitating factors and consequences. In reality it all flowed into one another like an inseparable river. Everything that’s ever been done by everything that’s ever existed was one long chain of cause and effect. Nothingness is the state of being in the river, going with the flow, not standing on shore dipping cups out trying to organize them back in order.

We are using our own definitions, obtained from our limited knowledge, to describe the indescribable. We are "personifying" our lack of knowledge, that is how religions start. Science will eventually define what our minds can conceptualize, maybe we will know all, more, or find we can only know bits and pieces. What we can do is refrain from narrowing our view.

Do you have faith of eternity with god? Is it not equally unimaginable? People refer to the concepts 0 and infinity often. Helpful explanatory concepts. Real? Not that I know. To my knowledge noone in science says we come from nothing (quantum fluctuations, etc...) is not nothing. Scientist are still working at that. The inquiry continues...