>Response: I must be misreading it because I don't see him
>saying that something comes from nothing. Kind of hard to
>make out some of his vocabulary.(maybe that is my
>difficulty). Looks like those particles that go in and out
>of existance come from energy that lies within a vacuum.

No, he specifically says "there is nothing in the vacuum (no matter or radiation at all)", but that "uncertainty allows a nonzero energy to exist for short intervals of time" - i.e. something (nonzero energy) comes from nothing (vacuum with no matter or radiation at all). The particles are coming from energy, but that energy itself is coming from nothing. I can see where the wording gets a little tricky to follow though, and this stuff is pretty hard to comprehend anyway... it still confuses the hell out of me.

>Response: Now is he guessing that there is nothing inside of
>a vacuum or does he know for sure?

There is actually nothing inside of the vaccuum, but because of the uncertainty principle you can never actually observe that there is exactly zero energy at an exact time, all you can say is that the average energy over a discrete time is zero; however you can know for sure that there is nothing inside of the vacuum, otherwise the average energy would not be zero.

>Response: He seems to be saying that energy within a vacuum
>can exist for a long time. ( I am not quite sure what he
>means by uncertainties of energy however.) But I can
>recognize that he is saying that energy fluctuates and
>produces particles. If I am reading this correctly then
>these particles are not coming from nothing, rather they are
>coming from energy within a vacuum.

No, the particles are coming from energy fluctuations within a vacuum that come from nothing. The "uncertainties of energy" that he is talking about are energy fluctuations that arise out of the uncertainties in energy defined by the uncertainty principle: "there is always a slight uncertainty in the energy, dE. This small uncertainty allows a nonzero energy to exist for short intervals of time (energy fluctuation) defined by dT = (h/2pi) / dE". But this nonzero energy fluctuation is arising out of a vacuum with no matter or radiation, therefore the particles created from it are coming from nothing.

>Response: the virtual pairs become real particles when there
>is a large supply of energy within the vacuum then they come
>into existance, or they run into each other and disappear.
>
>So it does not appear to me that he is saying that something
>comes out of nothing. Unless I am reading it wrong.

Well, you are reading it wrong, but it's not really your fault because the terminology is kind of misleading: the "virtual" particles are in fact real, they actually exist for a very short time and then disappear before they can be directly observed, and so are called "virtual". The "real" particles are created when an outside source of high energy photons adds enough energy to the virtual particles that they can stay in existence long enough to be directly observed, and so are called "real". This doesn't mean that the virtual particles don't actually exist, just that they disappear back into the vacuum before they can be directly observed. So the wording is kind of tricky, but he is indeed saying that something comes from nothing.