I've always thought of space-time as a convenience for modern thought about how the world works. We can think about the fact that while we look at a distant ga

I've always thought of space-time as a convenience for modern thought about how the world works. We can think about the fact that while we look at a distant galaxy 2 million light years away, that galaxy is in fact at this current moment, doing its own thing and we won't know about it until that light arrives here. Since we can't observe that galaxy's current state until another 2 million years, it's not very useful to think about it in those terms. Similarly, we can imagine a time when there was absolutely nothing. It doesn't make sense, but we can imagine it. We can then imagine what it would take to go from that state into a state where there is matter and other laws of physics and wonder how we went from one state to another. Then you might suppose that there was never a state of nothingness, and then you might wonder how that could be. I feel that the author fails to address these basic points of the question "why is there something rather than nothing", so it's hard to move on from that, personally.