Zero. A landmark discovery, the dreadful void, and the ultimate mind (Q2790393)

At the beginning of the book the authors state that zero and the wheel are the two most outstanding discoveries in the history of mankind. The book is an attempt to show why zero is in this shortlist. One gets the impression that in order to make their case the authors listed everything more or less interesting that they succeeded in associating with zero. Zero is everywhere. Without zero there would be, for example, no calculus. By working with numbers as they approach zero, the calculus was born, the authors write on page 71. Particularly striking are the numerous spiritual associations. Swami Vivekananda attained Nirvikalpa Samadhi, that is a no-thought state, at the age of 22. The authors suggest to define this state as the spiritual equivalent of the Bose-Einstein condensate of the neuronal system in the physical plane. The idea of zero suggests nothingness, the dreadful void, but at the same time infinity, its opposite. Ramanujan saw ties between God, zero and infinity, we read on page 74.NEWLINENEWLINE From the reviewer's point of view, the book is quite unsatisfactory. In a an arbitrary order too many subjects are mentioned and often in too superficial a way.