Understanding Noise in Twentieth-Century Physics and Engineering

Abstract

��� Noise is a common experience in the contemporary world. Din from traffic, construction sites, factories, and neighbors bother urban residents. Radio listeners, television watchers, and mobile phone users have to endure statics and fading from time to time. Music lovers have debated whether jazz, atonal composition, rock and roll, rap, and abstract expressionism are art or nuisance. Scientists try to retrieve genuine signals from fluctuating data. Engineers design devices, software, or systems to filter out disturbance to the normal functioning of technology. Mathematicians and physicists examine randomness. Traders and economists attempt to predict markets’ future trends beneath highly irregular commodity prices. Decision makers cope with all kinds of uncertainty. No matter whether we understand the term as annoying sound or random fluctuations, we simply cannot live a life without encountering noise. Despite its ubiquity in modern times, noise has rarely been a focus of historical studies of recent science and technology. There may be an obvious reason for this lack of attention: noise largely reveals what science and technology are not, instead of what they are. Noise is an environmental plight of industrialization, an obstacle to the advancement of scientific knowledge, a subversive force to technology, a barrier to prediction, estimation, and control, and a symptom of disorder. As a result, noise often exposes the limitations of science and technology. While such limitations have played an important part in the development of science or technology, they are generally conceived as a background to this development, and thus scarcely become the subject of close investigations. A number of recent historiographical turns, however, have begun to change this situation. Inspired by the cultural histories of senses that flourished