Zero
The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
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Zero
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Narrated by:
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Bob Souer
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By:
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Charles Seife
About this listen
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 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
Brilliant
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Joyous Surprise
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Very clever
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Enjoyed the interlinked stories of zero '0'
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, and very listenable and entertaining
beauty of zero
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Enamouring
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A fantastic tale about nothing. Literally.
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Easy way to understand everything. Outstanding book!!!
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But as other reviewers have pointed out, there's little consistency in levels of assumed knowledge, making the explanations harder or easier to follow depending on your own prior knowledge.
For me, this meant the sections on philosophy and religion - and to a lesser extent quantum physics, particle physics and astronomy - were pretty easy to grasp, but told me little I didn't already know. (Although the explanation of string theory here is one of the best/simplest I've encountered.)
The sections on maths, though - a good chunk of the middle section of the book - I found near impossible to follow. I'm*terrible* at maths, and struggle with the simplest concepts, so this is to an extent on me - but for a book obviously designed for a mass audience I can't help feeling that the explanations could have been made easier to grasp somehow. Was this due to listening rather than reading, and missing diagrams / equations? Possibly. If these exist, they should have been provided as a PDF.
In many ways I'd like to give it the benefit of the doubt, because it's reminded me that I've been meaning to read more on science and get my basic knowledge of maths a bit better, and this book has at least inspired me to give some others in the popular science genre a go. Time to learn some new things.
Narrator was passable. Have heard better, have heard worse.
Short, but still very variable
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