The Information - James Gleick [115]
Now came a time of excitement.
“We are again in one of those prodigious periods of scientific progress—in its own way like the pre-Socratic period,” declared the gnomic, white-bearded neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch to a meeting of British philosophers. He told them that listening to Wiener and von Neumann put him in mind of the debates of the ancients. A new physics of communication had been born, he said, and metaphysics would never be the same: “For the first time in the history of science we know how we know and hence are able to state it clearly.”♦ He offered them heresy: that the knower was a computing machine, the brain composed of relays, perhaps ten billion of them, each receiving signals from other relays and sending them onward. The signals are quantized: they either happen or do not happen. So once again the stuff of the world, he said, turns out to be the atoms of Democritus—“indivisibles—leasts—which go batting about in the void.”
It is a world for Heraclitus, always “on the move.” I do not mean merely that every relay is itself being momentarily destroyed and re-created like a flame, but I mean that its business is with information which pours into it over many channels, passes through it, eddies within it and emerges again to the world.
That these ideas were spilling across disciplinary borders was due in large part to McCulloch, a dynamo of eclecticism and cross-fertilization. Soon after the war he began organizing a series of conferences at the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, with money from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, endowed in the nineteenth century by heirs of Nantucket whalers. A host of sciences were coming of age all at once—so-called social sciences, like anthropology and psychology, looking for new mathematical footing; medical offshoots with hybrid names, like neurophysiology; not-quite-sciences like psychoanalysis—and McCulloch invited experts in all these fields, as well as mathematics and electrical engineering. He instituted a Noah’s Ark rule, inviting two of each species so that speakers would always have someone present who could see through their jargon.♦ Among the core group were the already famous anthropologist Margaret Mead and her then-husband Gregory Bateson, the psychologists Lawrence K. Frank and Heinrich Klüver, and that formidable, sometimes rivalrous pair of mathematicians, Wiener and von Neumann.
Mead, recording the proceedings in a shorthand no one else could read, said she broke a tooth in the excitement of the first meeting and did not realize it till afterward. Wiener told them that all these sciences, the social sciences especially, were fundamentally the study of communication, and that their unifying idea was the message.♦ The meetings began with the unwieldy name of Conferences for Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems and then, in deference to Wiener, whose new fame they enjoyed, changed that to Conference on Cybernetics. Throughout the conferences, it became habitual to use the new, awkward, and slightly suspect term information theory. Some of the disciplines were more comfortable than others. It was far from clear where information belonged in their respective worldviews.
The meeting in 1950, on March 22 and 23, began self-consciously. “The subject and the group have provoked a tremendous amount of external interest,” said Ralph Gerard, a neuroscientist from the University of Chicago’s medical school, “almost to the extent of a national fad. They have prompted extensive articles in such well known scientific magazines as Time, News-Week, and Life.”♦ He was referring, among others, to Time’s cover story earlier that winter titled “The Thinking Machine” and featuring Wiener:
Professor Wiener