1/f Signal Intelligence

                            Between order and chaos lies the realm in which we live. No rhythm is completely uniform, no signal entirely random—a pattern runs like a common thread through our world: in the heartbeat, in music, in sleep, in space. A century-old mystery that no one has yet been able to fully explain.

The pattern is called 1/f noise—also known as pink noise or flicker noise. Discovered in 1925 in an electron tube, it is found today in over thirty disciplines: in heart rate variability, in the EEG of the sleeping and waking brain, in speech and music, in quantum computers and atomic clocks, in earthquakes, the solar wind, and the flickering of distant galaxies. This book tells the story of the search—from Johnson and Schottky through Mandelbrot and self-organized criticality to today’s measurements—and asks what it means when health, consciousness, and the cosmos share the same spectral signature.

35 chapters, 20 figures featuring the author’s own measurements based on open data. Written through the symbiosis of human intuition and artificial intelligence.