Control Theory for Physicists

This book extends a tutorial I wrote on control theory (Bechhoefer, 2005). In both the article and this book, my goal has been to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange."1 The strange is control theory-feedback and feedforward, transfer functions and minimum phase, H8 metrics and Z-transforms, and many other ideas that are not usually part of the education of a physicist. The familiar includes notions such as causality, measurement, robustness, and entropy-concepts physicists think they know-that acquire new meanings in the light of control theory. I hope that this book accomplishes both tasks"--