Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Written by Charles Seife

Narrated by Bob Souer

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 modern 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 persists 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Oct 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705270400

Charles Seife

Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been writing about physics and mathematics for two decades. He is the author of six books, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, which won a PEN/Martha Albrand Award; Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe; Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes; Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, which won the 2009 Davis Prize from the History of Science Society; Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception; and Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It's True? Seife holds an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Meridith, and his children, Eliza and Daniel.

Reviews for Zero

[Alex Parkovich · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I understand that it is a book about math but oh my God, if narrator repaeats "parenthesis " one more time I will make a zero out of a rope and hang myself

[Dillon Walton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pretty good. I wouldn’t read it twice but I don’t regret reading it once. Talks about the history of zero as well as it’s currently implications in physics.