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  • Zero

  • The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
  • Written by: Charles Seife
  • Narrated by: Bob Souer
  • Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (16 ratings)

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Zero cover art

Zero

Written by: Charles Seife
Narrated by: Bob Souer
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Publisher's Summary

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 Kabbalists 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.
©2000 Charles Seife (P)2020 Tantor
Science Mathematics Math History
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Profile Image for Jozef

Very interesting

I think this is a millennial example of how we humans like to lie to ourselves about things that are obvious and necessary in our life’s. Good book but sometimes is hard to picture the math with that much redundancy but still a great book.

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Profile Image for Clay

narrator too fast sometimes

quite hard to understand all the math he says later on, doesn't give a lot of time.

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