[ a few years ago Brian Rotman also wrote a great book on the role of zero with regards to the institution of money and accounting: "Signifying Nothing." Given all the zeros manipulated by Govs. and the likes of Enron.......]
Explaining nothing, brilliantly Nicholas Lezard finds Charles Seife's plethora of equations and graphs more of a help than a hindrance in Zero Saturday March 22, 2003 The Guardian It is said that Stephen Hawking, while writing A Brief History of Time , was persuaded by his publisher that every equation he included, apart from that famous one, would reduce his sales by half. (Or some such impressive figure.) Which is perhaps why Seife's book about the figure 0 is being published in this country by a small independent and not some huge conglomerate with a massive publicity budget: it is full of equations, and it has to be if the author is going to do his job at all well. You also get graphs, Riemann spheres, and those depictions of the space-time continuum which represent it as an elastic sheet. That, you could say, is the bad news - although what's so bad about helpful illustrations of complex concepts is beyond me. The much better news, if you are worried about such things, is that this is one of the best-written popular science books to have come this way for quite a while, and it is not as if the competition is lacking. Seife has a neat turn of phrase, an easy yet respectful familiarity with his subject that helps the maths slip down easily. In fact, the hardest thing to come to terms with, its biggest stumbling block, is the American use of the word "math" - which isn't much of a stumbling block at all. (Although it is so obviously wrong that one wonders why they persist.) It does help that the story of the number zero is itself so interesting. One might have thought there wasn't much to say on the subject. It is, after all, nothing. But that is the whole point. For a very, very long time, no one bothered to think of it as a number at all. One does not, after all, start counting on one's fingers "0, 1, 2, 3 . . ." But the notion of a blank cipher was proving useful to the Babylonians, and other civilisations with place-value digit systems (as opposed to the surprisingly primitive system of the Romans). And the first day of Mayan months was, in effect, a zero; their solar calendar was one of the most accurate in the ancient world. Which is why the Mayans, Seife explains, had they survived, would never have argued bitterly in the correspondence columns of their newspapers about whether the new millennium began in 2000 or 2001. It gets better. As Seife sets it out for us: "Zero conflicted with the fundamental philosophical beliefs of the west, for contained within zero are two ideas that were poisonous to western doctrine. Indeed, these concepts would eventually destroy Aristotelian philosophy after its long reign. These dangerous ideas were the void and the infinite." This might strike you as far-fetched, but Seife makes the case not only entirely plausibly, but in steps which even those a little scared of mathematics should find easy to take on board. For those who are not scared of mathematics, and always liked the notion of such things as imaginary numbers (square roots of negative numbers) or the proposal that there are different kinds of infinity, but balked at the notion that anything useful could be done with them, this book is something of a treat. I expect that I will never have any reason to do anything with a Riemann sphere, but I am grateful to this book for lucidly explaining what one is, and what you can do with it if you are so minded. >From all this, Seife then goes for the big stuff: how concepts of zero help us navigate both the incredibly tiny quantum world and the world of massive, cosmological events: from the very beginning of the universe to its end, taking in along the way such phenomena as black holes, which could be said to be points in the universe where something is being divided by zero. At which point he reminds us that our own tinkering with fundamental particles has caused periodic concern among the more fretful physicists: high-energy laboratories like Fermilab have been picketed by scientists (and also fruitcakes, it is true) worried that playing around with energy levels in a vacuum "would release a huge bubble of energy that expands at the speed of light, leaving a vast trail of destruction in its wake. It might be so bad that every one of our atoms would be torn apart during the apocalypse." You see? Dull it isn't.
