Firstly, I do not see this as a proper question for physics. Physics is about “stuff” including space and time. Absolute “nothingness” is about the absence of everything including the thought “absence of everything”. It is the null set realized.

I hate the “quantum fluctuations” explanation. I think it’s duplicitous. What laws allow the fluctuations, and as soon as you answer that I’m going to point out that if there are “laws” then you are NOT starting from nothingness.

Thus humans have struggled with the questions of “first cause” and “first moment” since the historical dawn of thought. QM has offered us a way out of “first cause” by saying “there are no causes of any kind anywhere”. Ah, you didn’t realize it says that, did you? QM basically says EVERYTHING is statistical, everything is absolute quantum random. When the cue ball hits the rack the cue ball could be said to be “encouraging” the other balls to move, BUT they might not. Newton simply isn’t king, and the billiard ball world, as I call the “classical” world, doesn’t exist, never has, and never will. All of existence is fuzzy, probabilistic, uncertain, and uncaused.

But, while I find the following helpful I deny it as any sort of “solution” to anything. It’s just the way I currently like to think about the problem of “first moment” and it can be extended to many other questions.

I will claim “there was no first moment”. Instead the universe emerged from absolute nothingness (I have no idea “why” it did; I don’t think there IS a why). Think of a line segment from 0 to 1. What is the “first” member? Why zero of course. Now remove zero from the set. Now what is the “first” point? Uh, stuck for an answer right? You can’t write it down, you can’t fetch it with an algorithm. I’m thinking “it just doesn’t exist; there is no “first point” and then extend that to say “there is no first moment”. The big bang didn’t ‘jump’ from nothingness into somethingness; rather it emerged. How? I have nary an idea about that.

But I like the idea of unbounded explanations and emergence to solve some of these Zeno-like conundrums.

Regards, Greg