Blip, Ping and Buzz

Making Sense of Radar and Sonar

Radar development was the biggest technological breakthrough of World War II, 
apart from the atomic bomb. Sonar is older, but is a less well known military 
technology because it is invisible to us--below the sea surface. Both 
technologies today have significant non-military applications. Have you ever 
wondered how stealth planes achieve invisibility? How satellite radars map the 
world, or sidescan sonars map the ocean floor (as shown above), or how medical 
imaging works? The U.S. radars at Pearl Harbor in 1941 were superior to the 
British radars used a year earlier in the Battle of Britain--so why did they 
fail while the cruder equipment on the English coast succeed? The algorithms we 
use to process radar and sonar signals are also employed by bats and dolphins 
when they echolocate. Indeed, in some ways the tiny microchiropteran bats are 
ahead of us. But why shouldn't they be?--they have a 30 million year head start.

Blip, Ping and Buzz (2007) is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.