How to Use perturbation in a Sentence

perturbation

noun
  • On the backside of the moon there had been some venting--some perturbations unknown to us.
    Jennifer Bogo, Popular Mechanics, 17 July 2018
  • Whether the perturbation is in the inner ear itself or the brain, the end result seems to be the same: a feeling of having defied physics and left one’s body.
    Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 26 July 2017
  • The system has determined that’s a spot that wouldn’t hold up well to perturbations.
    Matt Simon, WIRED, 13 July 2018
  • One is to use subtle perturbations that make the sign look weathered to a human observer.
    Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 1 Sep. 2017
  • And the brain is an especially noisy system, so there would be many such perturbations.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 7 June 2019
  • That was long enough for the spacecraft to have recorded any faint perturbations a faraway planet could induce in Saturn’s motion around the sun.
    Lee Billings, Scientific American, 22 Mar. 2018
  • If a perturbation were to jostle this fluid, a gravity wave would result.
    Matthew Cappucci, Washington Post, 6 Apr. 2018
  • Where the ring particles are shoved together because of perturbations by moons, the particles have to go somewhere.
    Stav Ziv, Newsweek, 6 Sep. 2017
  • The what, when, and where of these immunological assaults are all crucial to the body’s ability to waylay disease; any perturbation threatens to set the whole system askew.
    Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 15 Apr. 2021
  • Calculating perturbations for many different grasps on just one spray bottle takes a whole lot of brain power.
    Matt Simon, WIRED, 13 July 2018
  • What O’Hara gets so right, regardless of the apparent setting, is the relentless rhythm of placation and perturbation.
    New York Times, 25 Jan. 2022
  • The perturbations in the magnetic field were similar to what astronomers have observed around objects with thin atmospheres.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 17 Feb. 2017
  • The challenge, Doursat says, is to find ways of ensuring reliable outcomes that will not be thwarted by small perturbations and that are adaptive—if circumstances change, the system needs to be able to find a solution that does the job.
    Philip Ball, Scientific American, 18 Apr. 2023
  • The atmosphere is too complicated, too fragile, too sensitive to small perturbations, to submit to the equations with the precision of planets or stars.
    Hannah Fry, The New Yorker, 24 June 2019
  • The enormous perturbations in soil, water and air leave clear chemical signatures.
    Jan Zalasiewicz, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2016
  • Granting all perturbation and backsliding, generous lives had been lived on that fecund soil, and a generous spirit inhered in it.
    Marilynne Robinson, The New York Review of Books, 12 Oct. 2023
  • Jia used measurements from Galileo’s magnetometer to seek out small perturbations in the magnetic field during the closest flyby.
    Ramin Skibba, Scientific American, 14 May 2018
  • Marine ecosystems would be highly disrupted by both the initial perturbation and in the new ocean state, resulting in long-term, global impacts to ecosystem services such as fisheries, write the authors.
    David Bressan, Forbes, 7 July 2022
  • In Florida, for instance, it could be detected as a perturbation in air pressures shortly after 9 a.m.
    Washington Post, 15 Jan. 2022
  • The mechanisms of this polar perturbation are not yet fully understood.
    Robin Andrews, Wired, 22 Feb. 2022
  • This procedure, known as perturbation theory, gets them correlation functions for most of the fields in the standard model, because nature’s forces happen to be quite feeble.
    Charlie Wood, Wired, 4 July 2021
  • This procedure, known as perturbation theory, gets them correlation functions for most of the fields in the Standard Model, because nature’s forces happen to be quite feeble.
    Quanta Magazine, 17 June 2021
  • Due to planetary perturbations, disturbances in a planet’s orbit, denser clumps of debris occur every 60 years caused by this comet’s proximity to Jupiter and Saturn, Lunsford said.
    Taylor Nicioli, CNN, 21 Apr. 2023
  • Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future.
    Natalie Wolchover, WIRED, 21 Apr. 2018
  • The resulting magnetic perturbations of their atomic nuclei, compiled and displayed by software, can reveal the arrangement of a protein’s atoms to a discerning eye.
    Quanta Magazine, 10 Oct. 2023
  • With any change in leadership, there will be obviously some minor perturbations.
    CBS News, 15 Jan. 2020
  • For all the affirmation of female interiority in these stories, therefore, Diski also gives us a low hum of dread and perturbation.
    Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 11 Dec. 2017
  • One prominent candidate for a brain signature of consciousness is its response to a perturbation.
    Anil Seth, Wired, 20 Dec. 2021
  • After exposure to sunlight and 30 seconds have passed, the clouds will ionize and turn a violet hue, generating a magnetic field perturbation.
    Julia Musto, Fox News, 7 May 2021
  • Evidence is accumulating that the gut microbiome, and perturbations in it, can affect behavior—at least in mice.
    Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 27 Oct. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'perturbation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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