Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000)

     Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000) It looks like I read this last year, but I can’t remember. Re-reading it, it’s not hard to see why. While Seife provides lots of interesting information, and explains a good deal, his writing is at best workmanlike, and often sloppy. I suspect the sloppiness may be the effect of trying to “explain complex ideas in simple language,” but the result is often conceptual blurriness and even error. I found myself mentally rephrasing many of his statements. For example. He says that Cantor compared the size of rational and irrational numbers. He of course means the size of the sets of those numbers. Since he already explained what a set is, and uses a very clear metaphor to illustrate how one compares sets without actually counting, there’s no excuse for such sloppy language. He does have a knack for the illustrative metaphor: comparing sets is like asking everyone in a stadium to sit down, he says. If some seats are empty, then there are fewer people than seats. If there some people left standing, then vice versa. If there are no empty seats and no people standing, then the two sets match: they are the same size. Well, that’s very well done; so why the sloppy language a page or so later?
     Seife also occasionally uses a technical term without explaining it. For example, towards the end he talks of the heat death of the universe as the ultimate result of its continuing expansion. But in the next sentence he refers to this as death by ice (in contrast to the fiery death of the big crunch). How these two terminologies can be reconciled may be a mystery to him; it certainly will be a mystery to many readers.
     Seife’s understanding of history consists of conventional wisdom, which also occasionally misleads the reader. Overall, however, his philosophical points are well made, and the power of Zero to confound metaphysics and theology is clearly conveyed. The appendices illustrating several mathematical and logical arguments in detail are concise and clear. I like the one that uses the a=b, ab=a^2 etc proof that 1=0 (or 2=1) to show that Winston Churchill is a carrot.
     In short, this is an adequate introduction to a number of mathematical, physical, and philosophical problems and their solutions, with a good deal of pleasantly conveyed history along the way, and will do for a high school library. ** (2002)