'The Man from the Future' Errata

For the Penguin hardback edition only

There were some errors in the first hardback edition of the book, some of which occurred during the typesetting process and were missed, while others were due to my own carelessness. Apologies to those who were kind enough to buy the first edition. Below are the errors, which were corrected for the Penguin paperback, both US editions and all translations (I believe). Errors in bold.

p31: ‘vaporising’ is misspelt as ‘vaporizing’ (US).

p91: Ditto ‘vaporizes’ and Page 100: ‘vaporize’

p34: Currently this reads, ‘The overall wave function for the atom, ψ_n, is an infinite sum or ‘superposition’ of them all.¹⁵’

And note 15 on p.294 reads,

ψ_n= a₁ψ₁+a₂ψ₂+a₃ψ₃+a₄ψ₄+ . . . where a_n is the fraction each wave function makes up of the total. 

In both cases ψ_n should be replaced with ψ ---with no subscript.

The overall wave function for the atom, ψ, is an infinite sum or ‘superposition’ of them all.¹⁵

and the note should be

ψ= a₁ψ₁+a₂ψ₂+a₃ψ₃+a₄ψ₄+ . . . where a_n is the fraction each wave function 

p138: The SSEM (Manchester Baby) found the largest factor of 262,144 (2^18) to be 131,072 and not 132,072 as stated in the text.

p164: In the normal form game of matching pennies, the cells in the right-hand column are reversed. That is,

Tails

1 penny

-1 penny

should be:

Tails

-1 penny

1 penny

Page 165: In Moriarty’s payoff table, the upper left-hand cell should be 100 instead of 50.

p206: We refer to Player A and Player W in the text-Alchian and Williams. But the table shows Player A and Player B. Player B should be Player W.

p8  ‘somewhat more practical then the’

should be

‘somewhat more practical than the’

p13: ‘Their lives were temporarily disrupted by a coup and the establishment in 1918 of Europe’s first communist government (after Russia),’

The government was established in March 1919

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Communist_Party

p14: ‘Max had meanwhile left Budapest for Vienna to contact Admiral Miklós Horthy,’

This is extremely unlikely to be true. The source (Macrae’s biography of von Neumann) says: ‘contact forces under Horthy’. So we should change this to: ‘Max had meanwhile left Budapest for Vienna to contact supporters of Admiral Miklós Horthy,’

p67: Istvan Hargittai (pers. comm.) writes:

The person you identify as Amelia Frank (Wigner’s first wife) in the photograph is Mary Wheeler (Wigner’s second wife). Edward Teller is not in this picture, but this is not a problem because the person you refer to as him is quite hidden.

The photograph and caption details were lifted from Dyson’s book, ‘Turing’s Cathedral’. Istvan has also written to him to tell him of the error.

I found a photo of Amelia Frank (she’s the one in the centre with the white blouse)

https://repository.aip.org/islandora/object/nbla%3A310883/datastream/OBJ/view

I found one of Mary Wheeler

https://repository.aip.org/islandora/object/nbla%3A314803

I agree from what I can tell this is Wheeler.

The caption should be changed to the following:

Princeton in the 1930s. Left to right: Angela (Turinsky) Robertson, Mariette (Kövesi) von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Mary Wheeler, John von Neumann, and, on the floor, Howard Percy (‘Bob’) Robertson. Courtesy of Marina von Neumann Whitman.

p87: There were 32 lenses in all, 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal blocks of high explosive carefully fitted together to form a truncated icosahedron. It resembled nothing more closely than an over-sized soccer ball.

While this is true, the footballs of the time were not shaped like this (it’s a relatively new innovation—c. 1970s). I was aware of this but now think it might be worth adding a note.

After, ‘over-sized soccer ball’ add superscript ‘34’. All the following notes (on p302-303) would have to be +1.

Note 34. The soccer balls of the time did not, however, resemble truncated icosahedrons. Most were made of up to 18 leather panels stitched together.

p88: if the bomb did actually produce an explosion a fraction of the expected size

add ‘even’

if the bomb did actually produce an explosion even a fraction of the expected size

p326: in note 84 of chapter 8.

Salma Kassem et al., ‘ Steroedivergent Synthesis with a Programmable

Molecular Machine’, Nature, 549(7672) (2017), pp. 374–8.

Steroedivergent should of be Stereodivergent

p49: Towards the end of October 1930, Wigner had received, out of the blue, an offer of a one-term lectureship from Princeton University

This is actually the date Wigner gives in his memoirs but he is mistaken, as he was already in the US by this date. He received the telegram a year earlier October 1929.

As he notes, von Neumann arrived in the USA about a day later in January 1930. So the telegram must have arrived before he shipped out to the US!

p137: top of the page

‘for this second Monet Carlo run’

should be Monte Carlo