Nothingness means just that. Nothing, no existence, oblivion.
You had no existence for billions of years of the universe’s comming into existence. Nothingness is just that. Nothing.
Remember, during your gestation, before you reached senrtience? Or before you were conceived. You don’t remember because there is nothing to remember. That was nothingness. Prior to your conception and infinitely into posterity, that was nothingness.
You can’t have anything in nothingness, you have no thing.
It’s a non sentence or a double negative. An invented condition of the imagination.
Before the big bang there was something, it just wasn’t electro magnetic.
Things in our universe are defined as being detectable objects. All detectable objects are elecromagnetic. So by our understanding of a “thing” there was “no thing” at the beginning of the universe, however there was something there, because that something started the universe, just not by our definition of a thing.
no thing, is the lack of presence of an object we define as a thing.
a lack of knowledge and understanding of a situation in case of the big bang, and for everything else, a lack of the particular object in question.