Thursday 5 March 2009

Relativity Book, Errata


There were a few issues that didn't get sorted (or spotted) before "Relativity in Curved Spacetime" went to press.
  1. The concept of universes spawning other universes via the formation of black holes (pages 241-242, Fig 17.9). I didn't get to find who ought to be credited with the idea in time for publication, so I had to leave the discussion and attribution a bit vague. The idea seems to have been Lee Smolin's. Sorry about that, Lee. :(

  2. I'd really wanted to track down the old textbook reference that I'd had for the electromagnetic analogue of of Mach's Principle, applied to rotation. If you place an electron inside a hollow charged sphere, the field cancels, and the electron doesn't "see" the background field. But if you then spin the charged sphere, the electron is supposed to feel a radial force acting at right angles to the rotation axis, and also a sideways dragging force, analogous to the outward and sideways forces that matter feels when the mass of the outside universe is spun around it (blamed on apparent "centrifugal" and "Corioilis" fields experienced within the rotating frame). Didn't manage to find the reference in time.

  3. Missing reference. The Harwell group produced a controversial paper on centrifuge redshifts in 1960, which caused a bit of a stir. The dispute was documented in a paper by Alfred Schild, which is mentioned at the top of page 158 ("the Schild rebuttal"). Schild should have been listed in the bibliography on page 366, between the 1960 references for Hay, Schiffer et.al., and L.I. Schiff:
    1960 | Alfred Schild " Equivalence Principle and red-shift measurements" Am.J.Phys 28 778-780
    - rebuttal paper
    But the entry was accidentally deleted and the "rebuttal paper" comment ended up attached to the following "Schiff" reference.
    This got corrected in the hardback edition.

  4. There were also a handful of minor typesetting mistakes (typically missing or misplaced "s"-es) in the first half of the book that snuck past the spell-checker, but nothing serious. Those have been corrected for the hardback.
And as far as I know, that's it.

1 comment:

ErkDemon (Eric Baird) said...

I forgot one.

In Chapter 21, "The Perils of Experimentation", the title for section 21.1,

"Evaluating science neutrality"
should have read,

"Evaluating science neutrally"

Eric