Sampling Theorem and reconstruction

You can think of any perfectly bandlimited signal as the superposition of a set of \$\frac{\sin(t)}{t} = \text{sinc}(t)\$ curves, with their peaks positioned uniformly along the time axis. Their spacing is \$\frac{2}{BW}\$.

sinc(x) also happens to be the time-domain response of a perfect low-pass filter, and it explains how the continuous-time reconstruction (interpolation) is accomplished from a series of discrete samples.

When we uniformly sample a signal, each sample is a direct measurement of the amplitude of one of those sinc() waves. This works because it is a property of the sinc() function that it is zero at every sampling point, except at its own peak. In other words, when you take a measurement, you're not getting any "interference" from any of the other sinc() functions. Therefore, the set of N discrete measurements contains all of the information in the continuous-time signal represented by that collection of sinc() waves.

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Now, it gets even weirder than what TimWestcott was alluding to — the samples do not even have to be uniformly spaced in time! It turns out that ANY N unique samples taken within a window of time (with certain limitations) of a perfectly bandlimited signal can be used to reconstruct that signal. It takes a lot more math to do it, though!

With nonuniform sampling, you are no longer getting a clean measurement of just one of the sinc() amplitudes. Instead, you're getting a mix of many, if not all of them. However, since you know exactly where you are on each one (obviously, each sample must be time-stamped), it is possible to solve the large system of linear equations to find the actual amplitudes and therefore reconstruct the original signal. Of course, this process is very sensitive to small perturbations (noise and math errors, for example), and I'm hand-waving away some details about constraints on the set of samples, but the general principle holds.