What is meant by "Nothing" in Physics/Quantum Physics? I am not a phycisist, so please forgive my ignorance. This is related to my posts and this.
I am trying to understand what is meant by the term "Nothing" in physics or Quantum Field Theory (QFT) since it seems to me that this term is not used in the way we understand it in everyday language.
So QFT seems to suggest (in a nutshell) that "things pop out of nothing".
But from wiki I see the following quote:  

"According to quantum theory, the vacuum contains neither matter nor
  energy, but it does contain fluctuations, transitions between
  something and nothing in which potential existence can be transformed
  into real existence by the addition of energy.(Energy and matter are
  equivalent, since all matter ultimately consists of packets of
  energy.) Thus, the vacuum's totally empty space is actually a seething
  turmoil of creation and annihilation, which to the ordinary world
  appears calm because the scale of fluctuations in the vacuum is tiny
  and the fluctuations tend to cancel each other out.

So what is "Nothing" in QFT? If this quote is correct, I can interpret it only as follows:
The "Nothing" is not in the way used in everyday speech but is composed of "transitions" i.e. something that is "about to become"
Is this correct? If yes, why is this defined as "Nothing"? Something that is "about to become" is not nothing but there is something prerequisite.
In very lame terms: Einstein was born a non-physicist but became a physicist, so if this is a correct analogy, then there   


*

*there is something underlying that was non-something that became
something

*A non-something came into something because something else (not
nothing) permitted it to become. E.g. Einstein's talent (or
Mozart's) would have been lost had he been born in Africa or in a
country with no educational facilities. So he would not become a physicist (but the required talent would be present but not come into reality)


Could someone please help me understand this (perhaps trivial to you) concept? 
 A: At an even more abstract level (and inspired by the John Rennie's TV analogy): you seem to think of "Nothing" as the equivalent of a black TV screen. In modern physics, "Nothing" is similar to the noise between TV channels. 
A: If we take "nothing" to be the same as "zero", "something" to be the same as "not-zero", the vacuum state is both "nothing" and "something".
The "nothing" part of the vacuum state as a theoretical object is that the average value of a series of measurements of the field will be zero. The "something" part of the vacuum state is that the value of any single measurement will in general not be zero. When we can't predict single measurement results and how they will vary over time, we often find that we can predict average values and how the average values will vary over time.
There will most likely be technical aspects to any Physicist's answer here. In the above, "measurements of the field" must be understood to have quite theoretical connotations. John Rennie has labored heroically, but ultimately you have to work at being an intimate friend of the Math and its relationship to experiment.
You seem to be trying to make "nothing" be something vaguely different from any mathematical idea.
A: In Physics "nothing" is generally taken to be the lowest energy state of a theory. We wouldn't normally use the word "nothing" but instead describe the lowest energy state as the "vacuum". I can't think of an intuitive way to describe the QM vacuum because all the obvious analogies have "something" instead of nothing "nothing", so I'll do my best but you may still find the idea hard to grasp. That's not just you - everybody finds it hard to grasp.
Start with the classical description of an electric field (Maxwell's equations). It's not too hard to image an electric field as a field filling space. You can even feel the field: for example if you put your hand near an old style TV screen you can feel the static electricity. You can imagine turning down the electric field until it disappears completely, in which case you are left with the vacuum i.e. nothing.
Now imagine the same field, but this time we're using the quantum description of the field (Quantum Electrodynamics instead of Maxell's equations). At the classical level the field is approximately the same as the description Maxwell's equations give, but now we have fluctuations in the field due to the energy-time uncertainty principle. Just as before, imagine turning down the electric field until it disappears. Unlike the classical description, the (average) electric field may disappear but the fluctuations do not. This means the quantum vacuum is different from the classical vacuum because it contains the fluctuations even after you've turned the field down to zero.
The key point is that when I say "turn the field down" I mean reduce the energy to the lowest it will go i.e. you can't make the energy of the electric field any lower. By definition this is what we call the "vacuum" even though it isn't empty (i.e. it contains the fluctuations). It isn't possible to make the vacuum any emptier because the fluctuations are always present and you can't remove them.
A: Simple answer to the simple question Yes this is definately a mis-nomer.  
Nothing has come to mean in physics the base state. I will try not to use the word "nothing" in my description.  
Soft Answer:
In the simplest terms if I start with zero apples and add one apple then eat that apple before you see it(and continuously add and subtract just as fast as they are added) that is what the word is being used for there was something but when you checked you got the answer of zero whichh is just what I started with(the base state) it is just a almost accurate description of a QED Vacuum 
The necessary physics part is:
    “The quantum theory asserts that a vacuum, even the most perfect vacuum devoid of any matter, is not really empty. Rather the quantum vacuum can be depicted as a sea of continuously appearing and disappearing [pairs of] particles that manifest themselves in the apparent jostling of particles that is quite distinct from their thermal motions. These particles are ‘virtual’, as opposed to real, particles. ...At any given instant, the vacuum is full of such virtual pairs, which leave their signature behind, by affecting the energy levels of atoms.”  
A: I'm not  a physicist  but based on studies I did : all types of elementary particles and forcrs also have  fields in the whole universe. and fields always are there so even if we don't see any particle in a place it does't mean that there is "nothing" in that place because fields are always there. based on the uncertainty principle Since we can't  accurately calculate the energy of a specific  system in a specified time , the conclusion is that the energy of system can not be absolutely zero.so changes happens in the fields even in places we think that is empty. in this case virtual particles and  virtual antiparticles borrow energy from system to come in existence  and then after a short time they collide togheter and give back this energy to system. So actually "nothing" does not exist. Forgive me for my poor english.
