Here's an excerpt from the article's lede followed by a video clip on the topic:
Around 13.7 billion years ago time and space spontaneously sprang from the void. How did that happen? Or to put it another way: why does anything exist at all? It's a big question, perhaps the biggest. The idea that the universe simply appeared out of nothing is difficult enough; trying to conceive of nothingness is perhaps even harder.The question this all raises, I guess, is where did the quantum energy and the force of gravity come from that made the universe possible? If the universe sprung from the quantum flux then how do we explain that?
After all, if there was a preexisting quantum vaccum such that the universe didn't really emerge from nothing, then that vaccum is in fact the embryo of the universe and we're still left with the question of where it came from. Did it always exist? Where did the laws which govern the quantum world come from? Are we to just consider this level of explanation the terminus, and say that the quantum vacuum just is a brute fact with no need of explanation? Is that not a science-stopper?