Corrections to An Introduction to Thermal Physics

by Daniel V. Schroeder, Department of Physics, Weber State University

If you find an error in the book that is not listed on this page, please email me at .

Corrections to all printings, including the new Oxford University Press reissue

• Page 89. In Problem 3.2, please change the date 1931 to “the 1930s”. (Thanks to A. Mehrotra.)
• Page 176. In the third line of Problem 5.41, after the word “liquid”, insert the words “with the temperature fixed”. (Thanks to D. Platt.)
• Page 185. In the second line of Problem 5.48, “van der Walls” should be spelled “van der Waals”. (Thanks to J. Napolitano.)
• Pages 204, 213, 217, and 421: The name “van’t Hoff” should be written “van ’t Hoff”, with a space before the apostrophe. (Thanks to M. Janssen.)
• Page 229. On the line just above equation 6.12, “reservior” should be “reservoir”. (Thanks to N. Datta.)

Corrections made with the reissue by Oxford University Press in 2020

The book’s reissue by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2020 has provided an opportunity to make a new round of page corrections, listed below. If you have an earlier copy of the book, published by Addison Wesley Longman (now part of Pearson), then it does not include these corrections. Some of these “corrections” are really just clarifications. Scroll down the page to see corrections made during the early printings of the book, from 2000 through 2003.

Note that the pagination of the book’s front matter has changed slightly in the new OUP version, adding 2 (ii) onto the Roman numerals used in the original version. The page numbers given below are for the original version, because the errors listed below appear only in that version.

• Page viii. In line 13, “accomodate” should be spelled with two m’s.
• Page 15. Just before equation 1.23, put “total thermal energy” in boldface, to indicate that it is a new technical term (meaning the portion of the energy that depends on temperature, as explained in the next paragraph).
• Page 18. In the first line of the paragraph that begins at the middle of the page, change “inside” to “content of”. (This is just a minor clarification.)
• Page 19. The last two sentences of the first full paragraph on this page should be corrected to indicate that the “thermochemical calorie” is actually defined as 4.184 J, not 4.186.
• Page 25. In line 7, remove the word “internal”. (This is one of a few vestigial uses of the term “internal energy” that I should have removed before the book was originally published. Although many authors use this term and I also used it long ago, the U in the first law is the total energy, with no qualifications.)
• Page 28. The initial “definition” of heat capacity, equation 1.41, should be more prominently qualified. In the OUP reissue I have added the words “Loosely speaking” at the beginning of the sentence, and added a parenthetical “(somtimes; see below)” to the right of the equation. The actual definitions are equation 1.44 for C_V and equation 1.45 (or 1.56) for C_P.
• Page 32. At the bottom of the page, for compatibility with the use of the symbol L in Section 5.3, this symbol should be defined to equal the total heat Q to accomplish the phase transformation. A new symbol, lower-case l, should be introduced to represent the specific latent heat, L/m. So the sentence that ends with equation 1.50 should instead read as follows: “This amount is called the latent heat, denoted L. If we divide it by the mass of the substance we get the specific latent heat, which I'll denote l: l = L/m = Q/m to accomplish the transformation.”
• Page 33. In each of the first two complete sentences on the page, change “latent heat” to “specific latent heat”.
• Page 35. In Problem 1.49, delete the word “internal” and change “produced” to “expelled”.
• Page 36. In the parenthetical sentence at the end of Problem 1.54(c), change “latent heat” to “specific latent heat”.
• Page 53. Three lines below equation 2.7, “would have add energy” should read “would have to add energy”. (Thanks to R. Downey.)
• Page 59. In Figure 2.5, in the line in the table for q_A = 59, the entry for Ω_total should be 6.7 × 10¹¹⁴, not 6.8 × 10¹¹⁴.
• Page 78. In the third line, change “internal energy” to “kinetic energy”.
• Page 80. Three lines above the bottom of the page, after the word “helium”, insert the parenthetical clarification “(aside from the mass difference)”. (Thanks to K. Kiers for pointing out that the mass effect is actually larger than the difference I am trying to emphasize in this passage.)
• Page 81. The brief discussion of the Gibbs paradox just above Problem 2.37 is misleading. In the OUP reissue I have rewritten the last two sentences as follows: “There’s no actual paradox if the gas molecules are indistinguishable from each other, as actual gas molecules seem to be (see Chapter 7). But the paradox invites us to ponder the meaning of ‘distinguishable’ and, hence, the meaning of entropy.” I have also added a footnote: “See E. T. Jaynes, ‘The Gibbs Paradox,’ in Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods: Seattle 1991, ed. C. R. Smith, G. J. Erickson, and P. O. Neudorfer (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1992), pp. 1-22.”
• Page 84. In the footnote, the misspelled name “Beckenstein” should be corrected to “Bekenstein”. This correction should also be made to Bekenstein’s index entry on page 407. (Thanks to R. Downey.)
• Page 86. In Table 3.1, in the line for q_A = 59, the entry for Ω_total should be 6.7 × 10¹¹⁴, not 6.8 × 10¹¹⁴.
• Page 86. In Table 3.1, in the line for q_A = 60, the entry for S_B/k should be 105.3, not 105.5. (Thanks to M. Park.)
• Page 114. In Problem 3.32(c), delete the word “internal”.
• Page 126. In the first line of Problem 4.6, change “work” to “power”.
• Page 150. At the beginning of the sixth line below equation 5.2, just before the word “energy”, insert “maximum”.
• Page 155. At the end of Problem 5.5(a), insert “and [assume] that the water comes out in liquid form”.
• Page 173. In Figure 5.16, add the labels “Liquid” and “Gas” to the upper-left and lower-right of the curve, respectively.
• Page 179. In Problem 5.46(b), just before “surface tension,” insert “effect of”.
• Page 184. Two lines above Figure 5.23, change “above” to “in Figure 5.23”.
• Page 241. At the end of the fourth line of part (c), change “smallest” to “largest”. (Thanks to S. Jackson.)
• Page 250. Four lines below equation 6.68, change “ideal” to “ordinary”. (Here my intent is to exclude the exotic gases discussed in Chapter 7, which are still often called “ideal” when the forces between the particles are negligible.)
• Page 256. In the last sentence of Problem 6.52, change “as above” to “that led to equation 6.79”.
• Page 264. Three lines below equation 7.17, change “an ideal gas” to “a nonrelativistic ideal gas”.
• Page 296. In line 14, the entropy of a cubic meter of the photon gas should be (1.5 x 10⁹)k, not (2.89 x 10⁹)k. (Thanks to R. Downey.)
• Page 304. In the last sentence of Problem 7.52(c), remove the s from “units”.
• Page 307. In Problem 7.54(c), the value given for the luminosity of Betelgeuse is out of date; a better value is 100,000 times the sun’s luminosity. (I have not attempted to bring the entire book up to date since it was first published in 1999, but this order-of-magnitude discrepancy seems worth correcting. Thanks to D. Vargas.)
• Page 309. Two lines above equation 7.107, change “a sphere” to “an eighth-sphere”.
• Page 366. In Problem A.9, two lines below the first displayed equation, the reference should be to Problem A.8, not A.7. (Thanks to Mingqi Yan.)
• Page 374. At the upper-left corner of Figure A.13, change the axis label “z” to “L_z”.
• Page 382. In Problem A.24, just before the start of part (a), fix the embarrassing misspelling “embarassing”.
• Page 402. The fourth significant digits of three of the numbers on this page need updating. The gas constant R should be 8.314, rather than 8.315, in SI units; the mantissa of the gravitational constant G should be 6.674 instead of 6.673; and the number of joules in a calorie should be 4.184 instead of 4.186. These values also appear on the inside front cover of most versions of the book, and should be corrected there as well. (I have chosen not to try to update any of the more detailed data on pages 403-405.)

Corrections made to early printings of the book, 2000 through 2003

The following errors affect only the first seven printings of the book, through about the year 2003. If you have a copy of the book from 2003 or earlier, check the bottom line on the copyright page where you should find a row of numbers counting up to 10. The lowest (leftmost) number in this row is the number of your printing.

Error in some copies of the 7th printing

• Page 86. Some (but not all) copies of the 7th printing of the book contain a serious printer’s error: Where page 86 should appear, a copy of page 286 has been substituted (although the page number still says 86). If you are in possession of a copy of the 7th printing, please turn to page 86 and check the running headline. If it says “Chapter 7 Quantum Statistics”, your copy unfortunately is faulty. If it says “Chapter 3 Interactions and Implications”, your copy does not suffer from this error. Here is a pdf version of the actual page 86. (Thanks to J. Pribram.)

Error in the 5th and 6th printings

• Pages 285-286. In the course of correcting the earlier errors on these pages, a printing error caused dozens of mathematical symbols to disappear in the 5th and 6th printings. Here is a pdf file of these two pages showing the corrections.

Errors in the 4th and earlier printings

The following errors have been corrected as of the 5th printing.

• The corrections to the 1st and 2nd printings, listed below, were initially made from laser-printed pages instead of using a higher-quality process. As a result, the corrected pages (37 in all) are inferior in quality in the 3rd and 4th printings.
• Page 24. In the line just above equation 1.31, “for and ideal gas” should be “for an ideal gas”. (Thanks to S. Patitsas.)
• Page 105. In the last line of the last full paragraph, five lines above the footnote, “proprtion” should be “proportion”. (Thanks to In Hyun Nahm.)
• Page 228. In Problem 6.11, line 3, the formula E = mμB should have a minus sign: E = −mμB. (Thanks to D. Durian.)
• Page 355. In Problem 8.30, part (c), please delete the instruction to sketch a graph of the most likely magnetization vs. temperature. The graph is too boring to sketch.

Errors in the 1st and 2nd printings

The following errors have been corrected as of the 3rd printing.

• Page iv. The section number after 5.2 should be 5.3, not 5.4.
• Page x. The figures credited to Karen Thurber should be 1.15, 5.1, and 5.9 (not 5.8). (Thanks to T. Niebuhr.)
• Page 6. In Problem 1.7, the value 550,000 for the inverse of the expansion coefficient of mercury is too large by a factor of 100; please replace it with 5500. The value β = 1.81x10⁻⁴ K⁻¹ is correct. (Thanks to O. Echt.)
• Page 9. In the fourth line on the page, the elevation of Mt. Everest is given incorrectly as 8840 m; the correct value, to three significant figures, is actually 8850 m. The quoted elevation in feet is correct to three significant figures. (Thanks to H. Haber.)
• Page 14. In Problem 1.22, part (d), please assume that the gas is air at room temperature.
• Page 23. In the right-hand graph in Figure 1.10, the labels C and D should be interchanged, so the letters go in sequence A-B-C-D. (Thanks to D. Jacobs.)
• Page 31. In parts (a) and (b) of Problem 1.41, please interchange the words “lost” and “gained”.
• Page 52. In the last full paragraph, line 5, “can take on” should be “to take on”.
• Page 63. Just below equation 2.17, please change “the difference between N! and (N−1)!” to “the ratio of N! to (N−1)!”. (Thanks to O. Echt.)
• Page 66. In the second-to-last line before the problems, please insert the word “measurable” before “fluctuations”. (Thanks to O. Echt.)
• Page 68. In the first line of the second paragraph after the subsection heading, which begins “So suppose...”, please change “total energy U” to “kinetic energy U”. (Thanks to O. Echt.)
• Page 87. In the caption to Figure 3.1, the third line should begin “therefore the slopes of the tangents to the graphs...”.
• Page 105. In the paragraph beginning “In a real-world...”, the third and fourth sentences should be clarified as follows: “The number of possible states for each dipole is always some small integer, depending on the total angular momentum of all the electrons in an atom or molecule. The simple case considered here, with just two states, occurs when there is just one electron per atom whose spin is uncompensated.” (Thanks to O. Echt.)
• Page 129. In Problem 4.12, the system considered is an ideal gas, as in Problems 1.34 and 4.1.
• Page 141. In Problems 4.30(b) and 4.32, the phrase “same extreme temperatures” should be replaced with “same reservoir temperatures”. Choosing the correct reservoir temperatures requires some thought (more than I put in when writing the problems!), and is not entirely clear-cut.
• Page 153. At the end of the first line of text below the figures and figure captions, “energy” should be “entropy”; so the end of the sentence reads “—the system’s entropy increases by this amount.” (Thanks to R. Glosser.)
• Pages 154-155. Most of the numbers given for the lead-acid reaction are in slight disagreement with the data on page 405. (I updated the data with a more recent source, but forgot to update the text.) A better value for ΔG is −394 kJ, while a better value for ΔH is −316 kJ. The difference between these two numbers is still 78 kJ, which is the maximum energy that can enter the system as heat. With the improved value of ΔG, the electrical work per electron (equation 5.15) should instead be 3.27 × 10⁻¹⁹ J, or 2.04 eV. Therefore the predicted voltage is 2.04 V.
• Page 156. Problem 5.6(e) should refer to parts (b) and (c), rather than (a) and (b).
• Page 165. On the left-hand side of equation 5.39, P₀ (with a subscript zero) should instead be P° (with a superscript circle), as on the right-hand side.
• Pages 172-173. Starting in equation 5.43, it’s important to keep in mind that G_l and G_g each refer to the entire amount of stuff (say one mole). So just above equation 5.43, it would be better to say “At the phase boundary the material is equally stable as a liquid or a gas, so its Gibbs free energy must be the same whether it is in either phase.” And in the second line on page 173, instead of “the two phases remain in equilibrium”, it would be clearer to say “the two phases remain equally stable”. (Thanks to W. Wehrbein.)
• Page 173. Two lines above equation 5.47, insert “(total)” just before “latent heat”, to emphasize that L is not the specific (per unit mass) latent heat. (See the related correction to page 32 listed above, which was not made in the printed book until 2020.) (Thanks to J. Wrinkle.)
• Page 176. In the displayed equation in Problem 5.41, part (b), the minus sign on the left-hand side should instead be a division symbol. That is, the left-hand side should read P_v(P) / P_v(P_v). (Thanks to D. Lowe.)
• Page 177. In Problem 5.43, please change the assumed environmental air temperature from 5°C to 10°C. This makes the problem much more interesting.
• Page 177. At the end of Problem 5.45(a), insert “You may assume that the H₂O makes up only a small fraction of the air mass.”
• Page 180. Just below equation 5.49, change the date 1881 to 1873. (Thanks to M. Moloney.)
• Page 192. At the end of Problem 5.58(b), insert “(Assume that the mixing is totally random.)”
• Page 255. In Problem 6.49, just inside the opening parenthesis, insert “The rotational constant ε for N₂ is 0.00025 eV.”
• Page 259. In the fourth line of the first paragraph, “other molecules” should be “other atoms”.
• Page 260. In the last sentence of Problem 7.1, “myosin” should be “myoglobin”.
• Page 276. In the equation at the very bottom of the page, the numerical factor on the right-hand side should be 0.0088, not 0.0086.
• Page 284. In equation 7.62, after the second integral sign, the denominator should have a straight d rather than a partial-derivative curly ∂. (Thanks to H. Geyer.)
• Page 284. The problem referred to just before equation 7.67 should be Problem 7.29, not 7.28. (Thanks to H. Geyer.)
• Page 285. In the caption to Figure 7.16, the reference to Problem 7.31 should instead be to Problem 7.32.
• Page 286. In the third line on the page, within the hint to Problem 7.32(a), please replace “x = ε/kT” with “x = ε/ε_F”.
• Page 314. In the fourth line (not counting the figure caption), in the numerical value of m^*, the exponent should be −29, not +29.
• Page 364. In part (d) of Problem A.8, the final expression should be ikΨ, with no minus sign. (Thanks to D. Fillmore.)
• Page 372. In the energy level diagram in Figure A.11, the second arrow from the left should originate at the next level up, with 3 units of vibrational energy, not 2.
• Page 404. A better value for the enthalpy of formation of glucose is −1273 kJ. Sources of data for glucose are often incomplete, and are further complicated by the fact that glucose comes in several different varieties. So I’m still not entirely sure of what the best values are for any of the glucose data. However, making this change improves the results of Problem 5.6 considerably.

Last modified on 10 August 2024.