Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

(The words calculate, calculus, and calcium all come from the Latin word for pebble: calculus.)

the axiom of Archimedes, which says that if you add something to itself enough times, it will exceed any other number in magnitude.

Where there is the Infinite there is joy. There is no joy in the finite.

The Indian name for zero was sunya, meaning “empty,” which the Arabs turned into sifr. When some Western scholars described the new number to their colleagues, they turned sifr into a Latin-sounding word, yielding zephirus, which is the root of our word zero. Other Western mathematicians didn’t change the word so heavily and called zero cifra, which became cipher. Zero was so important to the new set of numbers that people started calling all numbers ciphers, which gave the French their term chiffre, digit.

Pascal argued that it was best to believe in God, because it was a good bet. Literally. Just as he analyzed the value—or expectation—of a gamble, Pascal analyzed the value of accepting Christ as savior. Thanks to the mathematics of zero and infinity, Pascal concluded that one should assume that God exists.

the definition of the infinite: it is something that can stay the same size even when you subtract from it.

Every object is influenced by the environment it’s in, so it’s impossible to cool anything in the universe—a banana, an ice cube, a dollop of liquid helium—to absolute zero. It is an unbreakable barrier.

nuclear fusion. As a cloud of gas collapses, it gets hotter and denser, and hydrogen atoms slam into one another with increasing force.

In the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, at the very center of our galaxy, sits a supermassive black hole that weighs as much as two-and-a-half million suns.

This cosmic background radiation was the afterglow of the big bang. It would give physicists the first direct evidence that the big bang was correct and that steady state was wrong. The Princeton scientists did not have long to wait before their prediction was confirmed. At Bell Labs in nearby Murray Hill, New Jersey, two engineers had been testing out sensitive microwave-detecting equipment. For all their tinkering, they could not get the equipment to work just right. There was a background hiss of microwave noise—like static on a radio program—that they could not get rid of. At first they thought that pigeons defecating in their antenna were to blame, but after chasing away the birds and cleaning out the droppings, the hiss remained. They tried everything they could think of to get rid of the noise, but nothing worked. Then when the engineers heard of the Princeton group’s work, they realized that they had found the cosmic background radiation. The noise wasn’t pigeon droppings. It was the scream of light from the big bang, stretched and distorted into a whisper’s hiss. (For their discovery the engineers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, got the Nobel Prize.

Zero is so powerful because it unhinges the laws of physics. It is at the zero hour of the big bang and the ground zero of the black hole that the mathematical equations that describe our world stop making sense. However, zero cannot be ignored. Not only does zero hold the secret to our existence, it will also be responsible for the end of the universe.

The fate of our universe will not be a big crunch but an eternal expansion, cooling, and heat death, thanks to the zero-point energy, a zero in the equations of quantum mechanics that imbues the vacuum with an infinity of particles.