Description
Book SynopsisA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKThe Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Christian Church used it to fend off heretics. Today it's a timebomb ticking in the heart of astrophysics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything.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. Within the concept of zero lies a philosophical and scientific history of humanity.Charles Seife's elegant and witty account takes us from Aristotle to superstring theory by way of Egyptian geometry, Kabbalism, Einstein, the Chandrasekhar limit and Stephen Hawking. Covering centuries of thought, it is a concise tour of a world of ideas, bound up in the simple notion of nothing.
Trade ReviewThis is one of the best-written popular science books to have come this way for quite a while. -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian *
A witty but lucid account... A must for armchair logicians. * Focus *
A breathless tour of the 'dangerous idea' of zero. * New Scientist *
Seife is a gifted explicator of hard science. * Spectator *
Moves from Pythagoras to Hawking, accompanying his arguments with well laid-out graphs. A painless way to acquire complex knowledge. * Catholic Herald *
