Isn't that what "ex nihilo" means?
The four different meanings of 'nothing'
1.) A condition where the raw ingredients to create your "something" didn't exist. You can't have galaxies, stars, planets, or humans without the particles necessary to build them out of. Everything we know of and interact with is made of subatomic matter particles; those are the raw ingredients that our Universe as we know it is built out of.
If you start with a matter-filled Universe, we understand how it can expand, cool, and gravitate to lead to the Universe as we know it today. We know how stars live-and-die, leading to the heavy elements that enable the creation of low-mass stars, rocky planets, organic molecules, and eventually, the possibility of life. But how did we wind up with a matter-filled Universe, instead of one with equal amounts of matter and antimatter? That's the first scientific meaning of getting something from nothing …
2.) Nothingness is the void of empty space. Perhaps you prefer a definition of nothing that contains literally "no things" in it at all. If you follow that line of thinking, then the first definition is inadequate: it clearly contains "something." In order to achieve nothingness, you'll have to get rid of every fundamental constituent of matter. Every quantum of radiation has to go. Every particle and antiparticle, from the ghostly neutrino to whatever dark matter is, must be removed.
If you could somehow remove them all — each and every one — you could ensure that the only thing that was left behind was empty space itself. With no particles or antiparticles, no matter or radiation, no identifiable quanta of any type in your Universe, all you'd have left is the void of empty space itself. To some, that's the true scientific definition of "nothingness."
But certain physical entities still remain, even under that highly restrictive and imaginative scenario. The laws of physics are still there, which means that quantum fields still permeate the Universe. That includes the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field, the Higgs field, and the fields arising from the nuclear forces. Spacetime is still there, governed by General Relativity. The fundamental constants are all still in place, all with the same values we observe them to have …
3.) Nothingness as the ideal lowest-energy state possible for spacetime. Right now, our Universe has a zero-point energy, or an energy inherent to space itself, that's at a positive, non-zero value. We do not know whether this is the true "ground state" of the Universe, i.e., the lowest energy state possible, or whether we can still go lower. It's still possible that we're in a false vacuum state, and that the true vacuum, or the true lowest-energy state, will either be closer to zero or may actually go all the way to zero (or below) …
You'd at least still have a stage for the Universe to play out on, but there would be no players. There would be no cast, no script, and no scene to your play, but the vast abyss of physical nothingness still provides you with a stage. The cosmic vacuum would be at its absolute minimum, and there would be no way to extract work, energy, or any real particles (or antiparticles) from it. And yet, to some, this still has the flavor of "something," because space, time, and rules are still in place …
4.) Nothingness only occurs when you remove the entire Universe and the laws that govern it. This is the most extreme case of all: a case that steps out of reality — out of space, time, and physics itself — to imagine a Platonic ideal of nothingness. We can conceive of removing everything we can imagine: space, time, and the governing rules of reality. Physicists have no definition for anything here; this is pure philosophical nothingness.
In the context of physics, this creates a problem: we cannot make any sense of this sort of nothingness. We'd be compelled to assume that there is such a thing as a state that can exist outside of space and time, and that spacetime itself, as well as the rules that govern all of the physical entities we know of, can then emerge from this hypothesized, idealized state …
