Heidegger and Carnap famously argued over whether metaphysics has any real content or is meaningless nonsense. Carnap called metaphysicians “musicians without musical ability” and thought science could give us the answers to all meaningful questions. But Heidegger insisted that metaphysics is needed to answer some of our deepest questions, like why there is something rather than nothing and what silence can teach us about the nature of ‘nothing’, writes Roy Sorensen.