In conversations with people about this meaning of the deepest silence they’ve ever known, we spoke, for example, to Tyson Yunkaporta, who’s an academic and also a member of an Aboriginal clan in Queensland, Australia. He told us that in his Indigenous language, there’s no such thing as silence. There’s no word for silence because nature abhors a vacuum. There’s no such thing as the absolute absence of sound and stimulus, probably anywhere in the universe, but he said that you could describe the meaning of what we’re talking about as silence, as the ability to perceive a signal. - from Author Talks: Quiet! via McKinsey