A01=Charles Seife
abacus
Al-Ghazali
algebra
alogrithms
Ancient Greece
Arabic
Aristotle
Author_Charles Seife
Babylon
banking
base-
Bayesian
binary
black holes
calculus
Casimir
Category=PDZM
Christianity
Churchill
Convergence
Copernicus
Danzig
Descartes
Einstein
energy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
Euler
exponential
finance
Gauss
geometry
God
golden ratio
Guy
Halley
Heisenberg
Hinduism
History
imaginary numbers
India
Islam
Judaism
Laplace
Leonardo da Vinci
Light
linear
Maimonides
Martin Luther
Mathematics
Mayan
Mesopotamia
NASA
Newton
Pascal
Philosophy
physics
polynomials
Ptolemy
Pythagoras
quadratic
Reformation
Religion
Renaissance
Schrodinger
space
string theory
Theory of Everything
thermodynamics
Thomas Aquinas
Zero
zero-dimensional
zero-point energy
Product details
- ISBN 9780285635944
- Weight: 177g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 12 Oct 2000
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
The 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.
Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been writing about physics and mathematics for two decades. He is the author of six books, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, which won a PEN/Martha Albrand Award; Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe; Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes; Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, which won the 2009 Davis Prize from the History of Science Society; Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception; and Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It's True? Seife holds an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Meridith, and his children, Eliza and Daniel.
