From Eternity to Here:
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It happens to the best of us. Here are known mistakes in the hardcover edition of the book; hopefully they will be fixed in time for the paperback.
- In Figure 3, on page 17, the label on the pendulum is wrong; it should read "86,400 oscillations".
- On page 39, the very first sentence, the Sun is half a degree across, not one degree across.
- There is a big mistake in the last paragraph of page 85, continuing on to page 86. The orbiting clock in this example will actually experience less time, not more, even though it is freely-falling. The basic idea is that the longest-time path between two events is definitely a free-fall path, but the converse doesn't hold; not every free-fall path experiences the longest time. In the updated version I'm using a different example, comparing a clock that stays stationary on Earth to one that is thrown directly upwards and comes back down; in that case the clock that is thrown really would experience more time.
- On page 338, first sentence of the last paragraph, the word "our" should be removed in "not what our the physical system".
- On page 389, there was an arithmetic mistake in the calculation of the dark energy in the volume of Lake Michigan. The correct answer is that there is about one food calorie's worth of energy in the dark energy contained in that volume, not one calorie per cubic centimeter.
- On page 391, in footnote 67, the last sentence, replace "we have make an arbitrary choice" with "we have made an arbitrary choice".
- On page 395, in footnote 110, von Neumann actually investigated cellular automata in the 1940's, not the 1960's. He died in 1957, but his major work in the field was published posthumously.
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