Book: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Author: Charles Seife
Pages: 272
This is my 121st read for the year
What Amazon Says:
The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything. In Zero, Science Journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to moder physics. Here are the legendary thinkers - from Pythagoras to Newton to HEisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists - who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persits in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time: the quest for a theory of everything.
I read this book for an Alphabet challenge, and ended up really liking it. Math - not my favorite subject - makes for a tricky read, but the author does a good job laying it out for lay people like myself. This book starts quiet a ways back in history and I actually learned quite a bit. Interesting read.
Stars: 4
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