The Information - James Gleick [221]
♦ “WIENER’S HEAD WAS FULL”: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 5.
♦ THE WORD HE TOOK FROM THE GREEK: André-Marie Ampère had used the word, cybernétics, in 1834 (Essai sur la philosophie des sciences).
♦ “A LAD WHO HAS BEEN PROUDLY TERMED”: “Boy of 14 College Graduate,” The New York Times, 9 May 1909, 1.
♦ “AN INFANT PRODIGY NAMED WIENER”: Bertrand Russell to Lucy Donnelly, 19 October 1913, quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 18.
♦ “HE IS AN ICEBERG”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, 15 October 1913, quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 30.
♦ “WE ARE SWIMMING UPSTREAM AGAINST A GREAT TORRENT”: Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 324.
♦ “A NEW INTERPRETATION OF MAN”: Ibid., 375.
♦ “ANY CHANGE OF AN ENTITY”: Arturo Rosenblueth et al., “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18.
♦ “THAT IT WAS NOT SOME PARTICULAR PHYSICAL THING”: Quoted in Warren S. McCulloch, “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics,” ASC Forum 6, no. 2 (1974).
♦ “THEY ARE GROWING WITH FEARFUL SPEED”: “In Man’s Image,” Time, 27 December 1948.
♦ “THE ALGEBRA OF LOGIC PAR EXCELLENCE”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), 118.
♦ “TRAFFIC PROBLEMS AND OVERLOADING”: Ibid., 132.
♦ “FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE”: Warren S. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 5, no. 17 (1954): 18.
♦ A NOAH’S ARK RULE: Warren S. McCulloch, “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics,” 11.
♦ WIENER TOLD THEM THAT ALL THESE SCIENCES: Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 22.
♦ “THE SUBJECT AND THE GROUP”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 11.
♦ “TO SAY, AS THE PUBLIC PRESS SAYS”: Ibid., 12.
♦ “I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO PREVENT THESE REPORTS”: Ibid., 18.
♦ IT WAS, AT BOTTOM, A PERFECTLY ORDINARY SITUATION: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 89.
♦ COULD PROPERLY BE DESCRIBED AS ANALOG OR DIGITAL: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 13.
♦ “THE STATE OF THE NERVE CELL WITH NO MESSAGE IN IT”: Ibid., 20.
♦ “IN THIS WORLD IT SEEMS BEST”: Warren S. McCulloch and John Pfeiffer, “Of Digital Computers Called Brains,” Scientific Monthly 69, no. 6 (1949): 368.
♦ HE WAS WORKING ON AN IDEA FOR QUANTIZING SPEECH: J. C. R. Licklider, interview by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg, 28 October 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=180 (accessed 6 June 2010).
♦ “MATHEMATICIANS ARE ALWAYS DOING THAT”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 66.
♦ “YES!” INTERRUPTED WIENER: Ibid., 92.
♦ “IF YOU TALK ABOUT ANOTHER KIND OF INFORMATION”: Ibid., 100.
♦ “IT MIGHT, FOR EXAMPLE, BE A RANDOM SEQUENCE”: Ibid., 123.
♦ “I WOULDN’T CALL THAT RANDOM, WOULD YOU? ”: Ibid., 135.
♦ “I WANTED TO CALL THE WHOLE”: quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, 189.
♦ “I’M THINKING OF THE OLD MAYA TEXTS”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 143.
♦ “INFORMATION CAN BE CONSIDERED AS ORDER”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Eighth Conference, March 15–16, 1951 (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1952), xiii.
♦ HIS NEIGHBOR SAID: Heinz von Foerster,