Audiobooks by Amir D. Aczel

Finding Zero: A Mathemetician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers

The story of how we got our numbers—told through one mathematician’s journey to find zero The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure-filled saga of Amir Aczel’s lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with the early Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by the later Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks the key question: where do the numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals, come from? It is this search that leads him to explore uncharted territory, to go on a grand quest into India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and ultimately into the wilds of Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest zero—the keystone of our entire system of numbers—on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters: academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless smugglers, and treacherous archaeological thieves—who finally reveal where our numbers come from. “Prolific mathematics writer Aczel leads a historical adventure that doubles as a surprisingly engaging math lesson…The story brims with local color, as well as insights into the history of mathematics and philosophy. Readers may find themselves questioning Aczel’s sanity, as his obsession with zero’s origins drives him from one dead end to the next, but it’s difficult to avoid being drawn into his quest with these rip-roaring exploits and escapades.”—Publishers Weekly

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

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Present at the Creation

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing protons at record energy levels never created by scientists before, and it will reach even higher levels by 2013. Its superconducting magnets guide two beams of protons in opposite directions around the track. After accelerating the beams to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, it collides the protons head-on, annihilating them in a flash of energy sufficient-in accordance with Einstein's elegant statement of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2-to coalesce into a shower of particles and phenomena that have not existed since the first moments of creation. Within the LHC's detectors, scientists hope to see empirical confirmation of key theories in physics and cosmology. In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated experiment in the history of science, Amir D. Aczel takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC-and with the same clarity and depth of knowledge he demonstrated in the bestselling Fermat's Last Theorem-Aczel enriches all of us with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will need to appreciate the discoveries that will almost certainly spring forth when the full power of this great machine is finally unleashed. Will the Higgs boson make its breathlessly awaited appearance, confirming at last the Standard Model of particles and their interactions that is among the great theoretical achievements of twentieth-century physics? Will the hidden dimensions posited by string theory be revealed? Will we at last identify the nature of the dark matter that makes up more than 90 percent of the cosmos? With Present at the Creation, written by one of today's finest popular interpreters of basic science, we can all follow the progress of an experiment that promises to greatly satisfy the curiosity of anyone who ever concurred with Einstein when he said, "I want to know God's thoughts-the rest is details."

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Byron Wagner (Narrator)

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The Jesuit & the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man

In The Jesuit and the Skull, bestselling author Amir D. Aczel vividly recounts how the discovery of Peking Man by, among others, a young Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin helped to open the eyes of the world to new theories of humanity's origins that alarmed the traditionalists within the Church. A deft mix of narrative history and a poignant personal story, The Jesuit and the Skull brings fresh insight to a debate that still rages today.

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Barrett Whitener (Narrator)

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Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics

Can two particles become inextricably linked, so that a change in one is instantly reflected in its counterpart, even if a universe separates them? Albert Einstein's work suggested it was possible, but it was too bizarre, and too contrary to how we then understood space and time, for him to prove.No one could.Until now. Entanglementtells the astounding story of the scientists who set out to complete Einstein's work.With accesible language and a highly entertaining tone, Amir Aczel shows us a world where the improbable-from unbreakable codes to teleportation-becomes possible.

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Henry Levya, Henry Leyva (Narrator)

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Riddle of the Compass

The story of the compass is shrouded in mystery and myth, yet most will agree it begins around the time of the birth of Christ in ancient China. A mysterious lodestone whose powers affected metal was known to the Chinese emperor. When this piece of metal was suspended in water, it always pointed north. This unexplainable occurrence led to the stone's use in feng shui, the Chinese art of finding the right location. However, it was the Italians, more than a thousand years later, who discovered the ultimate destiny of the lodestone and unleashed its formidable powers. In Amalfi sometime in the twelfth century, the compass was born, crowning the Italians as the new rulers of the seas and heralding the onset of the modern world. Retracing the roots of the compass and sharing the fascinating story of navigation through the ages,The Riddle of the Compassis Aczel at his most entertaining and insightful.

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Henry Levya, Henry Leyva (Narrator)

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Mystery of the Aleph

From the end of the 19th century until his death, one of history's most brilliant mathematicians languished in an asylum. The Mystery of the Aleph tells the story of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), a Russian-born German who created set theory, the concept of infinite numbers, and the "continuum hypothesis," which challenged the very foundations of mathematics. His ideas brought expected denunciation from established corners - he was called a "corruptor of youth" not only for his work in mathematics, but for his larger attempts to meld spirituality and science.

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Henry Levya, Henry Leyva (Narrator)

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God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe

Are we on the verge of solving the riddle of creation using Einstein's "greatest blunder"? In a work that is at once lucid, exhilarating and profound, renowned mathematician Dr. Amir Aczel, critically acclaimed author of Fermat's Last Theorem, takes us into the heart of science's greatest mystery. In January 1998, astronomers found evidence that the cosmos is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. The way we perceive the universe was changed forever. The most compelling theory cosmologists could find to explain this phenomenon was Einstein's cosmological constant, a theory he conceived--and rejected---over eighty years ago. Drawing on newly discovered letters of Einstein--many translated here for the first time--years of research, and interviews with prominent mathematicians, cosmologists, physicists, and astronomers, Aczel takes us on a fascinating journey into "the strange geometry of space-time," and into the mind of a genius. Here the unthinkable becomes real: an infinite, ever-expanding, ever-accelerating universe whose only absolute is the speed of light. Awesome in scope, thrilling in detail, God's Equation is storytelling at its finest.

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Kent Broadhurst (Narrator)

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