 Many discussions of origins pursue a more ambitious target: they aim to explain the creation of the universe “from  nothing”.[39]  The target is the true initial state, not just the boundary of applicability of the SM. The origins are supposedly then explained without positing an earlier phase of evolution; supposedly this can be achieved, for example, by treating the origin of the universe as a fluctuation away from a vacuum state. Yet obviously a vacuum state is not nothing: it exists in a spacetime, and has a variety of non-trivial properties. It is a mistake to take this explanation as somehow directly addressing the metaphysical question of why there is something rather than  nothing.[40] 