Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles Seife
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  132 reviews
Sales Rank: 6119
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0140296476
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780140296471
ASIN: 0140296476
Publication Date: September 1, 2000
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Condition: Softcover. Some wear to the cover and pages. Brown stain inside front cover and on first few pages. Some page corners are folded. Ships the next business day, with tracking and delivery confirmation sent to your email.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
The seemingly impossible Zen task--writing a book about nothing--has a loophole: people have been chatting, learning, and even fighting about nothing for millennia. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by noted science writer Charles Seife, starts with the story of a modern battleship stopped dead in the water by a loose zero, then rewinds back to several hundred years BCE. Some empty-headed genius improved the traditional Eastern counting methods immeasurably by adding zero as a placeholder, which allowed the genesis of our still-used decimal system. It's all been uphill from there, but Seife is enthusiastic about his subject; his synthesis of math, history, and anthropology seduces the reader into a new fascination with the most troubling number. Why did the Church reject the use of zero? How did mystics of all stripes get bent out of shape over it? Is it true that science as we know it depends on this mysterious round digit? Zero opens up these questions and lets us explore the answers and their ramifications for our oh-so-modern lives. Seife has fun with his format, too, starting with chapter 0 and finishing with an appendix titled "Make Your Own Wormhole Time Machine." (Warning: don't get your hopes up too much.) There are enough graphs and equations to scare off serious numerophobes, but the real story is in the interactions between artists, scientists, mathematicians, religious and political leaders, and the rest of us--it seems we really do have nothing in common. --Rob Lightner
Product Description
A concise and appealing look at the strangest number in the universe and its continuing role as one of the great paradoxes of human thought
The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now, as Y2K fever rages, it threatens a technological apocalypse. 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.
Readers of Fermat's Enigma, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Seeing and Believing, and Longitudewill find the revealingly illustrated Zero freshly informative, easy to understand, and--infinitely--fascinating.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 127 more reviews...
 Starts Great, Doesn't Finish Well October 6, 2008
In Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Seife first gives the history of the zero, in mathematics and social history, as well as it's non-history (why it was rejected in some cultures). He explains the resistance of the Greeks to the idea of the zero, why the Catholic Church rejected the zero and also how it was used in much earlier societies. These first chapters are well worth reading, blending history, math and mathematical history in a fascinating tale.
From there, the author begins to blend the idea of zero with other "dangerous" mathematical ideas (including "infinity"), and with his intermingling of ideas he looses the persuasiveness of his argument. It's hard to follow and/or believe that "zero" did this or that, when the zero he is talking about isn't actually "zero". Confused? So was I. He seemed to loose his focus and clarity from around chapter 6 to the end.
There are some rather high mathematical principals and examples throughout the book, which were difficult for me (not the world's best mathematician) to follow, and Seife often assumes that if one is reading Zero, then one is a mathematician, not a layman. This occurred more often in the later chapters which were troublesome in other ways, so I might just not have been as willing to try to understand the math, as I was having a hard time understanding the author's arguments.
On the whole, Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea felt like a thesis that was expounded out to be a full-length book. It would have been much better, in my opinion, if Seife had stopped at around chapter 5, the first chapters being where his knowledge, insight and humor shone through.
Where Music, Art, Science, Logic, Infinity, Notingness and Religion Become One October 5, 2008
This book can be read on two levels: 1) History, insight, personality and amusement or 2) technical terms and formula. Most of us will want to forget the second part and concentrate on the first part. Do that and this is a really good book.
Read for the first reason, this is a fascinating, enjoyable, intriguing, informative, even useful read. Read how some of the great names in mathmatics, history, logic, even religion, lived and died, how the church killed people because they believed in zero, the void, the nothingness and the infinity.
Read for the second reason--logic, high math and calculus--it is above most, if not all, casual readers.
The key is knowing how to read the book, knowing when to read, laugh, learn and be amused and when to skip over the technical "stuff."
This book is highly recommended--you will find it fascinating, amusing, sometimes amazing and educational--if you read it right!!
 Nothing... Something to get excited about September 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'll admit, writing a book about nothing and making it exciting is probably a challenging thing to do. This is going to be a rather odd thing to bring up at the start of the review, but I have to ask did people read a different book than I did? Seriously, I read through just about every negative review and the points made against the book are barely in the book I read. If anything, they focus in on a minor detail, interpret it wrong, and then give the book a one star. I digress, let me get to the review and then I may go over some points to refute.
This book focuses on the history of Zero for the most part. In there it touches upon historical moments in mathematics and later in physics as it gets to the modern scientific era. I personally found the research on the early history quite on point and very fun to read (there's a lengthy bibliography at the end if you feel the need to see his words backed up). The sensational writing didn't bother me at all, because I realize the relationship between the title and the style. Seife is trying to make nothing exciting! If you didn't get that point or got annoyed with that style then you missed out on a really fun read. The author tried to include fairly random historical anecdotes about the people discussed to lighten the mood in the book. I thought these were fun additions and interesting to read as well.
Overall the book is written in decently easy to understand language. I have a fairly decent mathematical background and I didn't feel I really needed to know everything to read the first half of the book. However, when Seife starts delving into concepts like Calculus and Set Theory I think knowing how to do calculus was definitely a help in understanding this section. If you're more of a lay reader and more interested in the history than the math then this book really might be a bad choice. The first part is absolutely fascinating, but it does get confusing towards the end, especially when he starts delving into Quantum Theory and Particle Physics.
One aspect on the section of early history that I found particularly fascinating was the relation of zero to philosophy. The ancients were heavily influenced by beliefs and philosophy so it's not much of a stretch to think this influence stretched beyond just those subjects and into math and science. So when Pythagoras and Aristotle reject notions of the void philosophically it's reasonable to assume they would find such notions nonsense mathematically. For a long time, and still today, Math is merely a representation of the world we see and observe. They didn't observe voids or vacuum's during Aristotle's time so naturally they wouldn't exactly latch onto it as a real possibility. One thing that really fascinated me was the possible hindrance philosophy and belief (or religion) had in holding back mankind's ability to progress mathematically. The main reason that zero didn't make it into the western world probably had more to do with the stranglehold the Romans put on the people than with their unwilling to believe in the void or infinity, which is also why it was trade that finally used zero. However, there were intellectuals alive and breathing during the Dark Ages and a lot of their hindrance to accept concepts like zero was philosophical. The Church had adopted Aristotle's model of the universe and it was blatantly wrong. (This book does not say Aristotle is at fault for holding back people philosophically, it merely says his view/model, that the Earth is the center of the universe, is wrong. Which it is.) However, the rising power of the Catholic Church adopted his explanation and said it was a fact and back then their word was law. Once mathematics and science came across discrepancies in that proof then Church asserted its power and only tried to tighten its grip on those communities until people revolted against it. I'm not saying zero is the reason we got out of the Dark Ages, but it didn't hurt us any! It probably helped us a lot more in the long run. My point in bringing this up is that things like belief and philosophy can hinder progress in fields like the sciences. (These are not beliefs, as in making assumptions about testable criteria by the way.) It seems to make more sense, that if you must derive some divine notion, you would interpret the data, not try to fit the data into a preconceived belief. Thus belief would interpret the math and math would not interpret the belief. The ancients had this backwards for a long time, which I think that's a major factor and this book touches upon that.
As I mentioned above the book can change gears into something very complicated. I think this is kind of the downfall of this book for some people because the confusing explanations at the end leave them on a low note. As the book progressed and got beyond my mathematical understanding I found the explanations a lot more confusing. When it finally got out of the confusing areas I think it picked up again during the sections on the expansion of the universe. I enjoyed the parts of Zero Point energy, but I'm not entirely sure it's written in a fashion that is easily understood. Seife makes comments in a very historical manner and I think that really confuses people at times. Such as one reviewer complained that the books information is outdated on Vacuums and concepts like limitless energy. However, this book does touch on that subject during its discussion of Zero Point energy, maybe it was merely presented in a way that confused readers? I'm not entirely sure; I didn't personally feel confused until he started talking about Set Theory, which I clearly need to brush up on.
In the end I simply loved this book. I tore through it in a mere three days and I'm a pretty slow reader. I personally didn't mind the sensationalizing of zero to fairly emphatic levels. This is a book about nothing after all and you might as well make it sound really exciting! Maybe there should've been more exclamation points so we can see how impressive the author's thoughts really are! Anyway I had fun with this book, but I wouldn't recommend it to people that haven't made it beyond calculus or else the second half might get a little confusing. Previously understanding Einstein's work would be a bonus to getting through this book as well. Other than that the first half is absolutely fascinating and I feel I walked away with more knowledge than I went in even if the book repeated a lot of things I already knew.
Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Not a math lover but I still enjoyed the book! September 4, 2008
The thing I liked most about Zero was the humor & sarcasm thrown in by the author. It breaks up the seriousness & complexity of some of the topics he covers & relates to zero (i.e. Calculus, Quantum Physics). Seife gave plenty of examples & metaphors to help the average joe understand the overall concepts. He also goes deeper for those readers that are math buffs.
While the entire concept of zero/infinity is constantly repeated throughout the book, I like the way the book was organized: chonologically. Zero begins with a history/religion lesson as it discusses zero's origin. Then, the book moves into philosophy/mathematics & zero's role. Last, the book covers topics on a much bigger scale such as astrology/physics/Big Bang theory, and how zero will affect the future.
Zero kept me entertained, challenged me to think abstractly regarding religion/philosophy/our universe, and kept the tone very light. I have always struggled with math & hated the subject, but this book is more than a math lesson! Try it!
Interesting, but a bit stretched August 26, 2008
The book was something like 200 pages, but it read like it was a little more than that.
The good points:
1. An interesting demonstration of how things that are only of moment to intellectuals at one point in time become things of great significance later.
2. An interesting demonstration of how ugly the fight for influence can be. (It is interesting to speculate that people now are no different to what they have been for the last 250,000 years, and that the motives of people who seek to "educate" others about environmentalism/ military-industrial complexes/ etc.) may not be as pure as what they seem.
3. The perspective on the dynamics of the Catholic Church's suppression of contrary ideas was also very interesting. Many people (preferring to spout anti-religious screed) do not treat this fact as one set of intellectuals fighting to impose their vision to the detriment of some other set of intellectuals' vision-- which it in fact seems to be.
4. It was interesting to note how slow the development of ideas was. Can a person really believe that it took nearly a thousand years to popularize the number "0" until he reads this book?
Bad points:
1. The treatment of differential calculus was diminished by the use of strange notation. It might have been easier to show how this would come up in the context of trying to solve a real problem rather than just presenting the idea the way that it was presented.
2. The treatment of integral calculus is simply poor. He could have spent a few more pages on it without diminishing the book.
3. The treatment of the Riemann plane was not good, either. I understood the calculus before reading the book, and so I could see what he was trying to get at. However, I didn't understand much of anything after that. So the weakness of the explanations became more evident when delving into new topics.
4. The book could have used some additional appendices to flush out explanations that the author didn't want to put in the text of the book.
5. The topic of the book seems to become a bit stretched at the end. It goes from explaining the intellectual history of zero to its uses in physics, and the transition is not smooth. One gets the feeling that the author was stretching to find a connection to finish the book.
All in all, worth the purchase price of a secondhand book.
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