Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Math is something we take for granted in our daily lives, we live by it (all of us do accounting in one form or another). Our daily transactions require it, whether we sell or buy. Math is the ground upon which all of our technology and in fact, all of our framing works. Our modern lifestyle and worldview requires it to be as solid as the ground we build on.
And yet, the concepts of infinity and zero, as innocuous as they seem, incorporated into the limits of what makes math math, led us to paradoxes and strange conclusions that most of us ignore in our work, play and abundant use of technology.
Seife’s writing is clear, concise and easy to understand, even if some of his concepts are not. It’s a great credit to his ability as a writer to cut through the intensely diverse field of mathematics to highlight the startling conclusion that zero and infinity touch in the oddest of ways. After a strong foundation, he goes right into the thick of it.
Some of the issues he touches on, such as how irrational numbers are the entire number line, and how our mathematical language reaches an expressive limit that math continually twists around to surpasses through a series of ‘tricks’ is in fact a comment on the tenacity with which we hang onto consistency… after all, consistency of thought in this domain is all we have… and while these concepts of zero and infinity have rocked our world more than once, they continue to define how we orient ourselves. Finding new ways to incorporate zero/infinity is part of what we do; as we defer nothingness and everything to the side, to always try and find where we are and what we are doing, as we both pull stuff out of nothing, which is tantamount to pulling stuff out of the indeterminate everything.
Although Sefie stops short of the philosophical implications of zero, or nothing, (is it real, or a product of our minds? What are the defining limits of where such concepts end, or are they universally ‘out there’?) this great book reaches the heights and depths of infinity and zero to show us not only historically where these concepts originated, but also how their reluctant incorporation into the European worldview led us into the most abstract trappings of theoretical physics… astrophysics and quantum mechanics, giving us a brief glimpse of nothing and everything all at once.
