A "biography" of the most vexing and troublesome number in human history reveals how the Babylonians invented it, why the Greeks were afraid of it and the Hindus worshipped, the role it played in hunting down heretics in the Middle Ages, and its current place in the Y2K issue. Original. Bookswagon.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 From Booklist A cipher signifying only defeat and failure for the scorekeeper or the accountant, zero emerges as a daunting intellectual riddle in this fascinating chronicle. With remarkable economy, Seife urges his readers to peer through the zero down into the abyss of absolute emptiness and out into the infinite expanse of space. For only then can readers begin to fathom the horror of the Western philosophers who recoiled from the threat of this symbolic invention--even as Hindus and then Moslems embraced it. Arabic numbers finally won acceptance in the West as business tools, but Seife shows how hard it was to keep the zero confined to the ledger book: soon it was showing up in Pascal's wager of faith and in Newton's calculus. Deftly and surely, Seife recounts the historical debates, then swiftly rolls the zero right up to the present day, where he plunges through its perilous opening down into the voracious maw of a black hole, and then out into the deep freeze of an ever cooling cosmos. A must read for every armchair physicist.Bryce Christensen Review "'The universe begins and ends with zero.' So does Seife's book, but his readers, after finishing, will feel they've experienced a considerable something." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt"Mr. Seife is the United States correspondent for New Scientist and recounts his story as an accomplished science journalist, standing on the outside bringing clarity to complex ideas.... Mr. Seife also gracefully surveys the weirdness of modern physics, where vacuums exert pressure and notions of 'zero-point energy' inspire fantasies of space travel." --Edward Rothstein, The New York Times, 25 December 1999"Seife tells stories of mathematicians involved in the denial or promotion of zero that are as incredible as the plot of Pi.... If the popularizers of mathematics continue to churn out such bizarre stories, math has a secure place in mass culture, able to compete with the wildest fare served up by Jerry Springer and the tabloids." --Paul Hoffman, Time magazine, 6 December 1999Charles Seife has made a marvelously entertaining somethin