HOLY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS!

Certain corrections made by the author to the galley proofs of THE PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES did not find their way to the printed page, no doubt due to the nefarious Forces of Chaos that bedevil all book publishing. Gotham Books apologizes for any confusion and denies that these mistakes were introduced deliberately to make the first printing of THE PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES a collector's item that will appreciate in value over time, though the prudent reader may want to buy several copies of this printing just to be safe.

Please note:

On page 263: The correct units for a surface area are meter 2 and centimeter 2 , while on page 221 the units for Planck's constant should read kg-meter 2 /sec.

In Chapter 24 (page 297), a sentence fragment from an earlier draft's discussion of neutron star formation should have been removed. White dwarf stars do not go through a supernova phase, as the line suggests. The sentence should read: “ The large force at the center of the star leads to a massive compression, until its density is three million grams per cubic centimeter, in which case we call the remnant a white dwarf.”

Schrodinger's equation in the thought balloon on page 237 should have an "i" on the right hand side of the equals sign. (The “i” represents the square root of minus one, which in mathematics is termed an “imaginary number.”)

Yes, we know that “athletes,” “identity,” “Rogue,” and “Charlton” are mis-spelled on pages 124, 141, 173, and 316, respectively. In the Index Ampere's Law and van der Waals are spelled incorrectly. To quote George Kaufman: “I'm not very good at it myself, but the first rule about spelling is that there is only one z in is .”

In the Notes section at the back of the book, Larry Lieber's name is mis-spelled, and Steve Dtiko and Gil Kane are not properly credited as the artists of Tales of Suspense # 40 and Amazing Spider-Man # 121 (which was published in June 1973), respectively. We apologize to Mr. Lieber, Mr. Ditko, and Mr. Kane's family for this error. In addition, Giant-Sized X-Men # 1 was published in 1975, Atom # 4 in 1962 and The Dark Knight Strikes Again # 1 in 2001. On page 344: "Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization" belongs with the citation above it, for Niels Bohr, not the "Army Soldier Rolls Closer to Battlefield."

The copyright date (1938) is inadvertently omitted from fig. 4 on page 29, while on page 366 the listing of characters that are copyrighted Marvel comics should include Sebastian Shaw, and Ultimate Bruce Banner, Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne.