- Page xi, line 12: "In order" should be "In order to". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 3, line -8: Delete "per unit mass". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 9, line -4: "pray" should be "prey". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 19, line -3: "This deviation is little more than the apparent diameter of the Moon" should be "This deviation is about 40 times smaller than the apparent diameter of the Moon". (Thanks to Richard Zallen.)
- Page 27 (box): The box contains a nice story about experimental support for theoretical predictions. In fact, the story of these constants is rather different, as explained below.
- Page 29, line -8: The Sun "disappears" because of the rotation of the earth about its axis and not because of its rotation around the Sun. (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 35, line -14: "was" should be "which was". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 35, line -11: "were" should be "was". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 58, line 6: "has be totally" should be "has been totally". (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 63, line -5: Delete "a basic data like". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 71, line 19: "Confrontation" should be "confront". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 90, line 17: "effect" should be "affect". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 90, line -7: "lightening" should be "lightning". (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 92, line 4: "big bang theory" should be "big bang". (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 108, line -13: "catalization" should be "catalyzation". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 108, line -8: "the" should be "they". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 122, line 3: "who need to liberated" should be "who need to be liberated". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 128, line -14: "willing cooperate" should be "willing to cooperate". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 132, line 1: Delete "in either case". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
- Page 162, line 14: The name is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" without the extra "the". (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 183, line -11: "bunch a lemmas" should be "bunch of lemmas". (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 187, line -6: "discovery to the serious error" should be "discovery of the serious error". (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 203, line -5: The "classical electron radius" is 2.8x10^-15, but this is incorrect because it ignores the effects of quantum mechanics. The electron has a wavelength that depends on its momentum. This wavelength is still many orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length of string theory. (Thanks to Robert A. Saunders.)
- Page 179, line 5: "at" should be "as". (Thanks to Chris Handley.)
Page 27 (box). Robert A. Saunders contributed the following passage:
There is an interesting tale here. Of the three constants (epsilon-zero, mu-zero, and the speed of light, which I'll represent by e0, m0, and c respectively), only two are independent since it is easily shown from Maxwell's equations that e0 * m0 * c^2 = 1. In the early part of the 20th century, the centimeter-gram-second system [cgs] of units was used by physicists, and m0 was simply defined to be 1. With the speed of light determined, a value of e0 could easily be obtained (not from a separate measurement, of course). For various reasons, starting roughly after the war, the meter-kilogram-second system [MKS] replaced it, and to keep the values of common units such as volts and amps unchanged, m0 got redefined to 4 * pi * 1E-7. (The four pi cleaned up some messy equations, and the result was called the rational MKS system.) This, of course, resulted in a need to change the defined value of e0. The next step in this tale was the recent decision to define the speed of light as a constant, with value equal to the best measurement that had been made of it up to that time. This, of course, resulted in defining e0 as well (with a slight change in its value). So the bottom line is: m0 was never determined by a measurement, and e0 was determined once upon a time indirectly by a measurement but isn't any more.
Last update 18 August 2010.