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Re: [Phys-L] critical thinking exercise : DC circuits



Well Feynman couldn't get textbooks to be accurate, so how can you? He was
on the California textbook committee and even with a Nobel and the committee
authority he couldn't get publisers to change the texts. One publiser even
submitted a textbook with a nice cover but blank pages inside as a sample of
the new edition. But textbooks may be preferable to the web as the web
contains more wrong information that right. The Wikipedia is actually very
accurate, as are most university sites.

There was the school web site that had some outrageous misconceptions being
promulgated, so I wrote them, and the reply was that the text was for
students, not experts. I think the same attitude is taken by publishers.
Fortunately the whole website is gone, and is replaced by one with no
science info. But it happened due to reorganization and not my efforts.

Then I was a mentor to another teacher. When I pointed out that the book
had some very bad errors, he didn't listen, and continued to use the bad
info. So teachers are just as guilty as publishers. They have very rigid
paradigms that are difficult to challenge and change.

Also errors not only propagate to later editions, the publishers are cheap
so they lift erroneous pictures and graphs from one textbook and put them in
others. So the error propagate to other texts supposedly by other authors.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX



What fascinates me is how so many bugs can persist for so long.
How can there be a thousand errors in a thousand pages ...
in the THIRD
EDITION?

Only the third? I started using the 7th edition of a
first-year chemistry textbook. There is a picture of a simple
electric-sector mass spectrometer with + and - flipped.
Actually, a student brought it to my attention. I informed
the publisher and one of the authors.
Tenth edition: still wrong.

A colleague and I picked apart a first-edition "Engineering
for Chemists" textbook much like you did a few years ago. We
had about one notable error every two pages. One major error
I remember is that the author occasionally used Co as the
symbol for copper. (Co is cobalt; Cu is copper.) Sent all the
errors to the author and publisher. The publisher responded,
"stylistic preferences." I just looked up the book. Still in
the first edition. 580 pages. 20 cm × 25 cm (8 in × 10 in).
Sells for 200 $.

And you wonder why I avoid publishers.