Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Seife’s first words in Zero recount how a single overlooked zero in a missile cruiser’s code caused the ship’s engines to fail. This sets the tone for the rest of the book, throughout which Seife attempts to impress upon readers the perilous nature of zero. “No other number can do such damage” (2), he asserts, and its dangers come in many forms.

Zero is dangerous to mathematicians: “When you have infinity in an expression, or when you divide by zero, all the mathematical operations—even those as simple as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—go out the window. Nothing makes sense any longer” (129). Seife guides readers through the math to demonstrate this, and in Appendix A he emphasizes the illogical results of division by zero with a comical proof that Winston Churchill is a carrot, probably anticipating that many readers will not otherwise appreciate why “1/0” is dangerous.

Zero is dangerous to physicists. Zero baffled their attempts to understand elementary particles by confronting them with zero-point energy and confounded their inquiries into space-time and gravity with the enigma of the black hole. However, Seife explains that zero did even worse damage than this.