Book Description

Before turning to the unsolved problems of noise presented in this book, I would like to take your attention to the probably most important unsolved problem of nowadays science, because this problem is also relevant to noise phenomena. We, noise researchers all know that a finite duration time record of a noise does not have any meaning. Either, the record duration has to be infinite or we should have finite records from an infinite number of analogous physical systems to use the terms of nowadays science: distribution functions, noise spectra, etc. We are interested in the general properties, and we are unable to accurately predict details of single events. Scientists of classical physics believed that this is due to our limited knowledge and by solving the set of equations describing a complex system, we, in principle, could be able to predict even a single sequence of events accurately. Quantum physics has proved that it is not the case: the nature is fundamentally 'noisy': the single event is basically unpredictable; the wavefunction provides only a probability distribution for the elementary processes.