The Information - James Gleick [112]
Cybernetics was a coinage, future buzzword, proposed field of study, would-be philosophical movement entirely conceived by this brilliant and prickly thinker. The word he took from the Greek for steersman: κυβερνιτησ, kubernites, from which comes also (not coincidentally) the word governor.♦ He meant cybernetics to be a field that would synthesize the study of communication and control, also the study of human and machine. Norbert Wiener had first become known to the world as a curiosity: a sport, a prodigy, driven and promoted by his father, a professor at Harvard. “A lad who has been proudly termed by his friends the brightest boy in the world,” The New York Times reported on page 1 when he was fourteen years old, “will graduate next month from Tufts College.… Aside from the fact that Norbert Wiener’s capacity for learning is phenomenal, he is as other boys.… His intense black eyes are his most striking feature.”♦ When he wrote his memoirs, he always used the word prodigy in the titles: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy.
After Tufts (mathematics), Harvard graduate school (zoology), Cornell (philosophy), and Harvard again, Wiener left for Cambridge, England, where he studied symbolic logic and Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell himself. Russell was not entirely charmed. “An infant prodigy named Wiener, Ph.D. (Harvard), aged 18, turned up,” he wrote a friend. “The youth has been flattered, and thinks himself God Almighty—there is a perpetual contest between him and me as to which is to do the teaching.”♦ For his part, Wiener detested Russell: “He is an iceberg. His mind impresses one as a keen, cold, narrow logical machine, that cuts the universe into neat little packets, that measure, as it were, just three inches each way.”♦ On his return to the United States, Wiener joined the faculty of MIT in 1919, the same year as Vannevar Bush. When Shannon got there in 1936, he took one of Wiener’s mathematics courses. When war loomed, Wiener was one of the first to join the hidden, scattered teams of mathematicians working on antiaircraft fire control.
NORBERT WIENER (1956) (Illustration credit 8.1)
He was short and rotund, with heavy glasses and a Mephistophelian goatee. Where Shannon’s fire-control work drilled down to the signal amid the noise, Wiener stayed with the noise: swarming fluctuations in the radar receiver, unpredictable deviations in flight paths. The noise behaved statistically, he understood, like Brownian motion, the “extremely lively and wholly haphazard movement” that van Leeuwenhoek had observed through his microscope in the seventeenth century. Wiener had undertaken a thoroughgoing mathematical treatment of Brownian motion in the 1920s. The very discontinuity appealed to him—not just the particle trajectories but the mathematical functions, too, seemed to misbehave. This was, as he wrote, discrete chaos, a term that would not be well understood for several generations. On the fire-control project, where Shannon made a modest contribution to the Bell Labs team, Wiener and his colleague Julian Bigelow produced a legendary 120-page monograph, classified and known to the several dozen people allowed to see it as the Yellow Peril because of the color of its binder and the difficulty of its treatment. The formal title was Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series. In it Wiener developed a statistical method for predicting the future from noisy, uncertain, and corrupted data about the past. It was too ambitious for the existing gun machinery, but he tested it on Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer. Both the antiaircraft gun, with its operator, and the target airplane, with its pilot, were hybrids of machine and human. One had to predict the behavior of the other.
Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics,