Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of perturbing.
  • noun The state of being perturbed; agitation.
  • noun A small change in a physical system, such as a variation in a planet's orbit resulting from the gravitational influence of other celestial bodies.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of perturbing, or the state of being perturbed; disturbance; disorder; especially, disquiet of mind; restlessness or want of tranquillity of mind; commotion of the passions.
  • noun Variation; especially, irregular or violent variation.
  • noun A cause of disquiet.
  • noun In astronomy, a deviation of the motion of a planet or comet from a fixed orbit or from its regular velocity in that orbit.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of perturbing, or the state of being perturbed; esp., agitation of mind.
  • noun (Astron.) A disturbance in the regular elliptic or other motion of a heavenly body, produced by some force additional to that which causes its regular motion.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable Agitation; the state of being perturbed
  • noun countable A small change in a physical system, or more broadly any definable system (such as a biological or economic system)
  • noun countable, astronomy, physics Variation in an orbit due to the influence of external bodies

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a disposition that is confused or nervous and upset
  • noun (physics) a secondary influence on a system that causes it to deviate slightly
  • noun activity that is a malfunction, intrusion, or interruption
  • noun the act of causing disorder
  • noun an unhappy and worried mental state

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

perturb + -ation

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Examples

  • He agreed to furnish dogs on a given date, but no sooner had Floyd Vanderlip turned his toes up-creek, than Charley hied himself away in perturbation to Loraine Lisznayi.

    Jack London Play:The Scorn of Women 2010

  • A hundred years later, Laplace reduced the effects of the planets on each other to a series of 2 body problems and proved, at least to lowest order in perturbation theory, that the system was, in fact, stable over long periods of time (when questioned by Napoleon as to what influence god might have on the subject, Laplace famously replied that he had no need of that hypothesis).

    Matthew Yglesias » Cato’s David Boaz Joins George Will in Peddling Bogus “Global Cooling” Stories 2009

  • The interplanetary and relativistic corrections can be shown, to lowest order in perturbation theory, to result in the major axes of the planetary orbits precessing in space.

    Matthew Yglesias » The Trouble With Common Sense 2009

  • A theoretically optimal system that blows up at the slightest perturbation is not a great real-world solution.

    Efficient Enough to Be Regulated? 2009

  • He agreed to furnish dogs on a given date, but no sooner had Floyd Vanderlip turned his toes up-creek, than Charley hied himself away in perturbation to Loraine Lisznayi.

    THE SCORN OF WOMEN 2010

  • Holes appear only if a finite perturbation is applied to the layer for accelerations a above 10g.

    Faraday's Wave Garden 2006

  • Holes appear only if a finite perturbation is applied to the layer for accelerations a above 10g.

    Archive 2006-10-01 2006

  • In games for which there exists a potential, the deviation-from-rationality dynamical model for which each agent's output follows the gradient of the potential along with a normally distributed random perturbation, is shown to equilibrate to a Gibbs measure.

    Strange Science 2005

  • The tech bubble burst and 9/11 both resulted in significant short term perturbation of economic trend lines.

    Lean Left » Blog Archive » Record Revenues, Eh? 2007

  • He agreed to furnish dogs on a given date, but no sooner had Floyd Vanderlip turned his toes up-creek, than Charley hied himself away in perturbation to Loraine Lisznayi.

    The Scorn of Women 1901

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