We've been in 'nothing' territory in a previous thread, and I'm afraid it's a hobbyhorse of mine.
I wonder what motivates Siegal (among others) to use the word 'nothing' to describe not only the existence of something we call a spacetime continuum but, moreover, one that contains causative energy/information*. Siegel states that he's not discussing a "philosophical nothingness", but a "scientific definition of nothing", although it's a different scientific definition of "nothing" from that of S. Hawkings. As one of the article commentors wrote, "That's a pretty something-y kind of nothing".
* Siegal says that according to his idea, "We started from literally nothing". Literally? Hardly. It doesn't say we started from literally nothing, it says we started from a pre-existing spacetime continuum containing vacuum energy.
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Orac, although it's not very clear, I don't think he's saying that there should be a Big Crunch, but instead that our universe will ultimately expand into a state that would be indistinguishable from that which produced it.
