Noise, Statistics and Sign Problems

Sign problems typically plague lattice field theory computations for many-body systems, or thermodynamic systems at finite density. Sign problems are closely associated with noise problems in the measurements of correlators. I discuss how the statistics of this noise conveys information about the underlying physics, and how it often shows curiously universal behavior which can be exploited to better extract physics from the measurement. This investigation gives a picture for how a solution to the sign problem might look.