Zero
Ratings14
Average rating3.6
15
Ratings14
Average rating3.6
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Whoa. This book appealed to the science/math geek in me. Less than 200 pages long, I found Zero to be mostly interesting. I read it quickly after all. For the most part, this book was fairly easy to understand but I may have gotten lost in a few places (like string theory and set theory for example – and I'm pretty sure I understood the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). For the record, it's the ancient Babylonians who are credited with inventing zero, although the Mayans used it too. Sort of. This book touches on many different zero-related subjects such as: Pythagoras (a bit of a tyrant), the golden ratio, Zeno's paradox, the kabbalah, God, calculus, infinity (zero's “twin”), absolute zero, quantum mechanics, the elusive M-theory (a.k.a. the Theory of Everything), gravity potentials, black holes, worm holes, time travel, the Big Bang, and how to prove that Winston Churchill is a carrot. To name a few. Basically, as I understand it, the whole universe started with zero. (I can picture Pinto from Animal House discussing this book with a doobie in hand.) I also have a pretty good idea of how the universe will end. (I'll give you a hint: we're all either going to burn or freeze. Care to guess?)
