Thursday, April 26, 2012

New Edition...



Having just completed a new edition of my book some comments on it seems appropriate.

The original manuscript of my book was actually finished in 2005 (by coincidence the year when all the Einstein centenary books/articles appeared). For various reasons the first edition (paperback) did not come out until 2008 and the electronic edition followed somewhat later. In succeeding years, some minor corrections, including typos, were made, once to the print edition and twice to the electronic edition.

By 2010 I was recasting some of my ideas into short essay form for the web and it gradually became apparent that some sections of my book would benefit from revision: some arguments could be simplified or expressed more clearly and in a few cases some arguments could be cut entirely. So I began a major revision in the fall of 2011 and finished it in April of 2012. The current, and hopefully the last, editions are: 3rd for the print and 4th for the electronic. The two are identical in content.

The new edition is longer by over 10,000 words. Discussion of the Elitzur-Vaidman interferometer is new and I tried to flesh out my explanation of potential mass. Photon nonlocality gets much more attention and I expanded upon my explanation for the constant velocity of light. I also gave more prominence to the concept of pure entities (photon, inertial mass) that extend in one dimension and progress in the other. Working on the revision has strengthened my conviction that physicists have misunderstood the nature of occurring energy by treating it as a quantity and regarding it as a mere annex to the house they built for existing mass.