For a physicist, «noise» is not just about sounds, but refers to any random physical process that blurs measurements, and in so doing stands in the way of scientific knowledge. This book deals with the most common types of noise, their properties, and some of their unexpected virtues. The text explains the most useful mathematical concepts related to noise. Finally, the book aims at making this subject more widely known and to stimulate the interest for its study in young physicists.
Science often deals with hard-to-see phenomena, and they only stand out and become real when viewed through the lens of complex statistical tools. This book is not a textbook about statistics applied to science – there are already many excellent books to choose from – rather, it tries to give an overview of the basic principles that physical scientists use to analyze their data and bring out the order of Nature from the fog of background noise.
