Lawson J.L., Uhlenbeck G.E. (ed.) Threshold Signals

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950. — 388 p. — (MIT Radiation Laboratory Series. Volume 24)When the plan for this book was made the authors hoped that it would be possible to present a more or less completed account of the experiments and the theoretical ideas pertaining to the problem of the detectability of a signal in noise. However, because it became clear that the literature on the subject waa so large and that we had no convenient access to the results of a great deal of work in progress at other institutions, it soon appeared that we would be unable to realize our original plan of giving a critical account of the whole subject. Accordingly we decided to limit ourselves to describing ae completely aa possible the work done at the Ra&ation Laboratory during the war, with sufficient introductory material to make the account intelligible. The authors regret that this decision has necessitated the omission of many interesting investigations and calculations.
Another aim of the authors was always to confront the theoretical ideas with the experimental investigations and in this way achieve some kind of unification of theory and experiment, which the authors felt was so often lacking in the existing literature. We feel that we have done so with some success, particularly in Chaps. 8 and 10, though elsewhere we may have fallen short of this aim.