X-Nico

unusual facts about thermal noise



Gaussian noise

In telecommunications and computer networking, communication channels can be affected by wideband Gaussian noise coming from many natural sources, such as the thermal vibrations of atoms in conductors (referred to as thermal noise or Johnson-Nyquist noise), shot noise, black body radiation from the earth and other warm objects, and from celestial sources such as the Sun.

Otto Julius Zobel

In modern terminology, this would include random (thermal and shot) noise but those concepts were relatively unknown and little understood at the time despite an early paper by Schottky in 1918 on shot noise.


see also

Nicholas J. Phillips

D. Abbott, B. R. Davis, N. J. Phillips, and K. Eshraghian, "Simple derivation of the thermal noise formula using window-limited Fourier transforms," IEEE Trans. Education, 39(1) (1996) pp.