When someone says "something cannot come from nothing", often our first impulse is to agree. But what are we agreeing to exactly?

If I told you a donkey cannot give birth to a crow, you would agree. And that's because you know what a donkey is and what a crow is. You have seen both elements of this equation before and you know how they come into being.

But when it comes to the elements of this claim - "something" and "nothing", we don't have a frame of reference for both. We know what something means but we have no examples to help us understand what nothing means.

Even our languages have no way to express this concept effectively. We can't ask "does nothing exist" because the word "exist" is used to refer to things that are "something".