Transforming Noise: A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955

Transforming Noise explores the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise, shedding light on the interactions between physics, mathematics, mechanical technology, electrical engineering, and information and data sciences in the twentieth century. It discusses how noise was transformed from unwanted sounds to a synonym for errors and deviations and how it became an informational concept.

Format: Hardback
Length: 496 pages
Publication date: 30 October 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The term "noise" is now used to describe random variations in general, but before the 20th century, it only referred to annoying noises. In the 1900s and 1950s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be tamed into a synonym for errors and deviations, which is now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise explores the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history sheds light on the interactions between physics, mathematics, mechanical technology, electrical engineering, and information and data sciences in the 20th century.

This book explores the process of engineers and physicists turning noise into an informational concept, starting from the rise of sound reproduction technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio in the 1900s and 1920s until the theory of Brownian motions for random fluctuations and its application in thermionic tubes of telecommunication systems. These processes produced different theoretical treatments of noise in the 1920s and 1930s, such as statistical physicists' studies of Brownian fluctuations' temporal evolution, radio engineers' spectral analysis of atmospheric disturbances, and mathematicians' measure-theoretic formulation. Finally, it discusses the period during and after World War II and how researchers have worked on military projects of radar, gunfire control, and secret communications and converted the interwar theoretical studies of noise into tools for statistical detection, estimation, prediction, and information transmission.

To physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists, this book offers a historical perspective on themes highly relevant in today's science and technology, ranging from the measurement of noise to the development of noise-canceling headphones and the use of noise in medical imaging.

Weight: 984g
Dimension: 166 x 241 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198887768