Yes, but does a non existence make sense (what logicians/mathematicians/philosophers would call the empty set)? This I believe is why Physicists use it in a different manner. Physics is only concerned when there is *something*. Nothing would include the absence of physics otherwise!
I remember when David Albert slammed Krauss and his book. Krauss replied by calling Albert a "moronic philosopher" and Neil Tyson then invited Albert to speak with Krauss at his event. They then randomly disinvited Albert and no formal reason was given. If my memory serves correctly, Sean Carroll also stated that the disinvitation was weird. It might've been because they discovered that Albert isn't just a highly respected philosopher but he's also a PhD theoretical physicist.
Anyways, here's an excerpt from Albert's response:
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
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The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
Topic: Ask a Physicist!