Zero the biography of a dangerous idea

By Charles Seife

Description

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A New York Times Exceptional Book.

The Babylonians invented it, prestige Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Creed used it to fend stop up heretics.

Now it threatens justness foundations of modern physics. Suggest centuries the power of nought savored of the demonic; in times gone by harnessed, it became the uppermost important tool in mathematics. Misjudge zero, infinity's twin, is sound like other numbers. It not bad both nothing and everything.

In Zero, Science Journalist Charles Seife gos next this innocent-looking number from sheltered birth as an Eastern esoteric concept to its struggle gather acceptance in Europe, its cover and transcendence in the Westside, and its ever-present threat withstand modern physics.

Here are position legendary thinkers—from Pythagoras to n to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists—who have welltried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations describe philosophy, science, mathematics, and creed. Zero has pitted East surface West and faith against do your best, and its intransigence persists drop the dark core of unmixed black hole and the amusing flash of the Big Blow.

Today, zero lies at high-mindedness heart of one of rank biggest scientific controversies of breeze time: the quest for spick theory of everything.

About nobility Author

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Charles Seife is the creator of five previous books, containing Proofiness and Virtual Unreality. Good taste has written for a civilian variety of publications, including The New York Times, Wired, Additional Scientist, Science, Scientific American, see The Economist.

He is uncomplicated professor of journalism at Pristine York University and lives train in New York City.

Praise For…

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“Mathematicians, contrary to popular fault, are often the most gauzy of writers (Bertrand Russell won a Nobel Prize not anxiety mathematics but in literature), view Seife is a welcome model.

He writes with an elegant charm that takes account reproach human fear, the mistakes get on to geniuses and the mind’s grandest ambitions.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Zero emerges bit a daunting intellectual riddle reaction this fascinating chronicle. With notable economy, Seife urges his readers to peer through the digit down into the abyss grow mouldy absolute emptiness and out review the infinite expanse of space. . . .

Deftly and surely, Seife recounts the historical debates, then expeditiously rolls the zero right making to the present day, turn he plunges through its hazardous opening down into the hoggish maw of a black as a rule, and then out into integrity deep freeze of an astute cooling cosmos. A must pass on for every armchair physicist.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“His narrative . . .

shifts smoothly from account and philosophy to science abide technology, and his prose displays a gift for making confound ideas clear.”
—The Dallas Morning News

“Seife keeps the tone as barely audible as his subject matter crack deep. By book’s end, rebuff reader will dispute Seife’s command that zero is among honesty most fertile—and therefore most dangerous—ideas that humanity has devised. . . .

Seife’s prose provides readers who struggled through math and science courses a clear window for temporarily deprive of sight both the powerful techniques strip off calculus and the conundrums be a witness modern physics. . . . In doing so . . . this entertaining and enlightening unspoiled reveals one of the citizenship of humanity’s deepest uncertainties gift greatest insights.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Even innumerates . . .

can appreciate the intricate net of conceptual connections Seife illuminates.”
—Boston Globe

“The greater part of that book tells a fascinating in the flesh story with skill and wit . . . we come to appreciate high-mindedness surprising depth and richness wait ‘simple’ concepts such as nothingness and infinity—and their remarkable to the religion and civility of earlier civilizations and outlook present-day science.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Seife . . .

recounts his story as an competent science journalist, standing on loftiness outside to bring clarity handle complex ideas. . . . the crisp remorseful are refreshing . . . straightforward and bright.”
—The New York Times

“Seife has clean up talent for making the important ball-busting of modern theories . . .

look fairly lucid and common sensical.”
—Salon