Because of the discoveries of Norbert Wiener and his colleagues,
discoveries that were precipitated by the wartime need for a specific
kind of calculating engine, software has come to mean much more than the
instructions that enable a digital computer to accomplish different
tasks. From the secrets of life to the ultimate fate of the universe,
the principles of communication and control have successfully been
applied to the most important scientific puzzles of our age. These
principles were discovered through a strange concatenation of events,
and the people who were involved in those events were no less unusual
than the software patriarchs who preceded them.Eccentrics and
prodigies of both the blissful and agonized varieties dominated the
early history of computation.
Ada Lovelace,
George Boole,
John von Neumann,
Alan Turing, and
Presper Eckert
were all in their early twenties or younger when they did their most
important work. All except Eckert were also more than a little bizarre.
But for raw prodigy combined with sheer
imaginative eccentricity, Norbert Wiener, helmsman of the cybernetic
movement, stands out even in this not-so-ordinary crowd.
Norbert's father, a Harvard professor who was a colorful character in
his own right, had definite opinions about education, and publicly
declared his intention to mold his young son's mind. Norbert was to
become a lovingly but systematically engineered genius. In 1911, an
article in a national magazine reported these plans:
Professor Leo Wiener of Harvard University . . .
believes that the secret of precocious mental development lies in
early training . . . He is the father of four children, ranging in
age from four to sixteen; and he has the courage of his convictions
in making them the subject of an educational experiment. The results
have . . . been astounding, more especially in the case of his
oldest son, Norbert.
This lad, at
eleven, entered Tufts College, form which he graduated in 1909, when
he was only fourteen years old. He then entered Harvard
Graduate School.
Norbert completed his examinations and his doctoral dissertation in
mathematical logic when he was eighteen, then studied with
Bertrand Russell in Cambridge and
David
Hilbert in G�ttingen, where he later crossed paths with von Neumann,
nine years his junior, also a student of Hilbert's, and a world renowned
authority in several of Wiener's fields of interest. One of the most
immediate differences between the two prodigies, even this early in
their careers, was the pronounced contrast between their personalities.
Rare was the teacher or student who failed to be charmed by von
Neumann, who went out of his way to assure fellow humans that he was
just as mortal as everyone else. Wiener, an insecure, far less worldly,
sometimes vain, and often hypersensitive personality, simply didn't go
to as much trouble to make an impression outside the realm of
mathematics, where he was confident to the point of arrogance. Bertrand
Russell wrote of Wiener, in a letter to a friend:
At the end of Sept. an infant prodigy named Wiener,
Ph.D. (Harvard), aged 18, turned up with his father who teaches
Slavonic languages there, having come to America to found a
vegetarian communist colony, and having abandoned that intention for
farming, and farming for the teaching of various subjects. . . . 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.
Like Babbage, Wiener was famous for the feuds he carried on. While a
student at G�ttingen, he impressed the administrative head of the
university, Richard Courant, but Wiener accused him of misappropriating
several of the younger man's mathematical ideas and appending Courant's
own name to them. When he returned to Cambridge, the outraged young
genius turned his energies to a novel that was never published, about
someone who bore a remarkable resemblance to Courant, and who was
depicted as a man who stole the ideas of young geniuses.
Before World War I, Wiener wrote pieces for Encyclopedia Americana,
taught philosophy at Harvard and mathematics at the University of Maine.
During World War I, Private Wiener was assigned to the U.S. Army's
Aberdeen proving Grounds in Maryland, where he was one of the
mathematicians responsible for the computation of firing tables. His
service in 1918 was one of the reasons it was natural for Wiener's
friend Vannevar Bush to think of Norbert thirty years later, when the
allies needed a way to put firing tables directly into the radar-guided
mechanism of antiaircraft guns.
After the end of World War I, Norbert Wiener joined the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology as an instructor of mathematics. It turned out
to be the beginning of his lifelong association with that institution.
By the early 1920s, like his fellow polymath across the Atlantic, Wiener
was turning out world-class papers in mathematics, logic, and
theoretical physics. At MIT Wiener began his long friendship with
Vannevar Bush, a
man who in the early 1930s was deeply involved in the problems of
building mechanical calculators, and in the 1940s took charge of the
largest-scale administration of applied science in history.
Decades later, Wiener quarreled with his lifelong friend because Bush
didn't side strongly enough with Wiener in his feud with two other
colleagues. Such feuds were one of the more well-known characteristics
of Wiener's style -- he tended to take disagreements over scientific
issues as personal attacks, even if the disputes involved his closest
personal friends. Like Babbage, his judgement did not always seem equal
to his imagination.
It must be said that Wiener did have many warm lifelong friendships
that didn't go sour. For all his
moodiness and paranoia, Wiener truly cared about "the human use of human
beings" (as he was to title one of his later books on the
implications of cybernetics), and passionately reminded the scientific
community of their special responsibilities regarding the apocalyptic
weaponry they had created. Despite his failure to get along with some of
his colleagues, Wiener never wavered in
his belief that the future of scientific enterprise lay in
interdisciplinary cooperation. His friendship with the
physiologist Arturo Rosenbluth, and their shared dream of stimulating
such interdisciplinary pursuits, catalyzed the origins of cybernetics.
But Wiener might never have worked with Rosenblueth if it wasn't for the
Battle of Britain.
Like von Neumann, Wiener's most important need was for interesting
problems. Like von Neumann, he knew that the quantum revolution was the
most interesting problem of the 1920s. And one of the effects of
quantum physics on the young mathematician's thinking was to
convince him that some of the most interesting problems of purely
theoretical mathematics could end up having the most concrete
applications in the real world.
Another effect of quantum physics was
the importance of probability and statistical measures for
dealing with phemomena based on uncertain information. Wiener's
familiarity with these concepts was to mature under unexpected
circumstances. Like von Neumann and Goldstine and Eckert, in the late
1930s Wiener wasn't yet aware that ballistics would be the avenue for
bringing his knowledge of probability and statistics to bear on the most
pragmatic problems, eventually to yield most astonishing results. But,
like them, he would soon come to understand that his war-related task
was leading to profound scientific consequences far beyond the bounds of
ballistics.
The scene was set for the emergence of Wiener's astounding results,
not by any series of scientific events, but by the political
circumstances of the early 1940s. When war broke out in Europe, Bush
assigned Wiener to the antiaircraft control project at MIT, under the
direction of Warren Weaver, himself a distinguished mathematician. It
seemed like a natural step for Wiener, considering his prior experience
in the early ballistic calculation efforts at Aberdeen during World War
I.
The key ideas that led to computers were in the air in the late
1930s, albeit in the rather rarefied air of metamathematics and other
esoteric intellectual disciplines. The necessities of war and the
coordinated scientific effort that they entailed served to bring those
key ideas together with the few people who were equipped to understand
them more quickly and urgently than might have happened in more normal
times.
Von Neumann and Goldstine's accidental meeting at Aberdeen was
fortuitous and unlikely, but it could hardly be called incredible.
One of the circumstances that brought
Wiener together with the problem of antiaircraft guns, however, was
downright weird. The technological turning point of the Battle of
Britain, and a critical chapter in the science of communications systems
in machines and organisms, originated when a young Bell Laboratories
employee in America had an odd dream. The crucial dream was not
about mathematics or engineering problems connected with computers, but
was related to technical issues involving antiaircraft artillery. And it
was the question of how to deal with dive bombers that was the rather
urgent if indirect problem that led to Wiener's later insights.
The pathway between military strategy and scientific theory was far
too circuitous, coincidental, and unlikely to have been predicted in
advance, and became clearly discernible only in retrospect. In many
respects, the birth of cybernetics was the kind of story more likely to
be found in a novel than in a scientific journal. One of the historical
coincidences was the position of Vannevar Bush as the leader of
war-related research. In his role as a research administrator, Bush knew
that antiaircraft technology was one of his top priorities. As a
scientist, MIT researcher, and friend of Norbert Wiener's, Bush was also
concerned with the task of building high-speed mechanical calculators.
The allies' two most pressing problems in the early years of World
War II were the devastating U-boat war in the North Atlantic and the
equally devastating Luftwaffe attacks on Britain. Turing's secret
solution to the naval Enigma machine was responsible, in large part, for
solving the U-boat problem. But where Turing's problem was one of
cryptanalysis, of mathematically retrieving the meaning from a garbled
message, the Luftwaffe problem was one of predicting the future: How can
you shoot at a plane that is going as fast as your bullets?
Radar made it possible to track the positions of enemy aircraft, but
there was no way to translate the radar-provided information into a
ballistic equation quickly enough to do any good. And attacking
airplanes had a disconcerting habit of taking evasive action. Vannevar
Bush was well acquainted with the calculation problem when Bell
Laboratories came to him with an interesting idea for an electrically
operated aiming device. That is where the young engineer's dream came
in.
His name was D. B. Parkinson, and he was working with a group of Bell
engineers on an automatic level recorder for making more accurate
measurements of telephone transmissions -- a "control potentiometer,"
they called it. In the spring of 1940, Parkinson had the following
dream:
I found myself in a gun pit or revetment with an
anti-aircraft gun crew. . . . There was a gun there which looked to
me -- I had never had any close association with anti-aircraft guns,
but possessed some general information on artillery -- like a 3
inch. It was firing occasionally, and the impressive thing was that
every shot brought down an airplane! After three or four
shots one of the men in the crew smiled at me and beckoned me to
come closer to the gun. When I drew near he pointed to the exposed
end of the left trunnion. Mounted there was the control
potentiometer of my level recorder! There was no mistaking it -- it
was the identical item.
The electrical device, as it happened, was a good start on an
automatic aiming mechanism. But very serious theoretical and
mathematical problems, having to do with the way the control device sent
and received instructions, cropped up when they tried to construct such
a mechanism. That is when Bush turned to Weaver and Wiener.
During this wartime mathematical work related to radar-directed
antiaircraft fire, Wiener recognized the fundamental relationship
between two basic problems -- communication and control. The
communication problem in the earliest days of radar was that the radar
apparatus was like a badly tuned radio receiver. The true signal of
attacking planes was often drowned out by false signals -- noise -- from
other sources. Wiener recognized that this too was a kind of
cryptography problem, if the location of the enemy aircraft is seen as a
message that must somehow be decoded from the surrounding noise.
The noisy radar was more than an ordinary "interesting problem,"
because once you understand messages and
noise in terms of order and information measured against disorder and
uncertainty, and apply statistics to predict future messages, it becomes
clear (to a mathematician of Wiener's stature) that the issue is related
to the basic processes of order and disorder in the universe.
Once it is seen in statistical and mathematical terms, the communication
problem leads to the heart of something more important, called
information theory. But that branch of the story belongs to
Claude Shannon
as much as, or more than, it does to Wiener.
The control problem was where Wiener, and his very young and
appropriately brilliant assistant, an engineer by the name of Julian
Bigelow, happened upon the general importance of feedback loops.
Assuming that it is possible to feed information about a plane's path
into the aiming apparatus of a gun, how can that information be used to
predict the probable location of the plane? The use of statistics and
probability theory was one clue. A method for predicting the end of a
message based on information about the beginning was another clue. The
device in Parkinson's dream was another clue.
Then it occurred to Wiener and Bigelow that the human organism had
already solved the problem they were facing. How is any human being, or
a chimpanzee for that matter, able to reach out a hand and pick up a
pencil? How are people able to put one foot in front of the other, fall
face-forward for a short distance, and end up taking a step? Both
processes involve continuous, precise readjustments of muscles (the
servomechanisms that move the gun), guided by continuous visual
information (radar), controlled by a continuous process of predicting
trajectories. The prediction and control take place in the nervous
system (the control circuits of the animating automata).
Wiener and Bigelow looked more
closely at other servomechanisms, including self-steering mechanisms as
simple as thermostats, and concluded that feedback is the concept
that connects the way brains, automatic artillery, steam engines,
autopilots, and thermostats perform their functions. In each of those
systems, some small part of the past output is fed back to the central
processor as present input, in order to steer future output.
Information about the distance from the hand to the pencil, as seen by
the eye, is fed back to the muscles controlling the hand. Similarly, the
position of the gun and the position of the target as sensed by radar
are fed back to the automatic aiming device.
The MIT team had wondered whether someone more informed about
neurophysiology had come across analogous mathematics of pencil pushing,
with similar results. As it happened, there was another team that, like
Wiener and Bigelow, was made up of one infant prodigy and one slightly
older genius, by the names of Pitts and McCulloch respectively, who were
coming down exactly the same trail from the other direction. A
convergence of ideas that was both forced and fortuitous, related to but
distinctly different from the convergence on digital computation, was
taking place under the pressure of war.
Even von Neumann was due to get into the act, as Wiener wanted him to
do -- Wiener persuaded MIT to try to outbid Princeton for von Neumann's
attentions after the war. Politically, militarily, and scientifically,
Wiener's corner of the plot was getting
thick. The antiaircraft problem, the possible explanations for how brain
cells work, the construction of digital computers, the decoding of
messages from noise -- all these seemingly unrelated problems were woven
together when the leading characters were brought together by the war.
The founding of the interdisciplinary study that was later named
cybernetics came about when Wiener and Bigelow wondered whether any
processes in the human body corresponded to the problem of excessive
feedback in servomechanisms. They appealed to an authority on
physiology, from the Instituto Nacional de Cardolog�a in Mexico City.
Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth replied that there was exactly such a
pathological condition named (meaningfully) the purpose tremor,
associated with injuries to the cerebellum (a part of the brain involved
with balance and muscular coordination).
Together the mathematician, the neurophysiologist, and the engineer
plotted out a new model of the nervous system processes that they
believed would demonstrate how purpose is embodied in the mechanism --
whether that mechanism is made of metal or flesh. Wiener, never
reluctant to trumpet his own victories, later noted that this conception
"considerably transcended that current among neurophysiologists."
Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth's model, although indirectly derived
from top-secret war work, had such general and far-reaching implications
that it was published under the title "Behavior, Purpose and
Technology," in 1943, in the normally staid journal Philosophy of
Science. The model was first discussed for a small audience of
specialists, however, at a private meeting held in New York in 1942,
under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation. At that meeting was
Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist who had been corresponding with
them about the mathematical characteristics of nerve networks.
McCulloch, a neurophysiologist based at the University of Illinois,
was, naturally enough in this company, an abnormally gifted and colorful
person who had a firm background in mathematics. One story that
McCulloch told about himself goes back to his student days at Haverford
College, a Quaker institution. A teacher asked him what he wanted to do
with his obviously brilliant future:
"Warren," said he, "what is thee going to be?" And I
said, "I don't know," "And what is thee going to do?" And again I
said, "I have no idea, but there is one question that I would like
to answer: What is a number that man may know it, and a man that he
may know a number?" He smiled and said, "Friend, thee will be busy
as long as thee lives."
Accordingly, the mathematician in
McCulloch strongly desired a tool for reducing the fuzzy observations
and theoretical uncertainties of neurophysiology to the clean-cut
precision of mathematics. Turing, and Bertrand Russell before
him, and Boole before that, had been after something roughly similar,
but they all lacked a deep understanding of brain physiology.
McCulloch's goal was to find a basic functional unit of the brain,
consisting of some combination of nerve cells, and to discover how that
basic unit was built into a system of greater complexity. He had been
experimenting with models of "nerve networks" and had discovered that
these networks had certain mathematical and logical properties.
McCulloch started to work with a young logician by the name of Walter
Pitts. Pamela McCorduck, a historian of artificial intelligence
research, attributes to Manuel Blum, a student of McCulloch's and now a
professor at the University of California, the story of Pitt's arrival
on the cybernetic scene. At the age of fifteen, Walter Pitts ran away
from home when his father wanted him to quit school and get a job. He
arrived in Chicago, and met a man who knew a little about logic. This
man, "Bert" by name, suggested that Pitts read a book by the logician
Carnap, who was then teaching in Chicago. Bert turned out to be Bertrand
Russell, and Pitts introduced himself to Carnap in order to point out a
mistake the great logician had made in his book.
Pitts studied with Carnap, and eventually came into contact with
McCulloch, who was interested in consulting with logicians in regard to
his neurophysiological research. Pitts helped McCulloch understand how
certain kinds of networks -- the kinds of circuits that might be
important parts of nervous systems as well as electrical devices --
could embody the logical devices known as Turing machines.
McCulloch and Pitts developed a
theory that regarded nerves as all-or-none, on-or-off, switchlike
devices, and treated the networks as circuits that could be described
mathematically and logically. Their paper, "A Logical Calculus of
the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," was published in 1943 when
Pitts was still only eighteen years old. They felt that they were only
beginning a line of work that would eventually address the questions of
how brain physiology is linked to knowledge.
When Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth got together with McCulloch and
Pitts, in 1943 and 1944, a critical mass of ideas was reached. Pitts
joined Wiener at MIT, then worked with von Neumann at the Institute for
Advanced Study after the war. By the time this interdisciplinary
cross-fertilization was beginning, the ENIAC project had progressed far
enough for digital computers to join the grand conjunction of ideas.
A series of meetings occurred in 1944, involving an interdisciplinary
blend of topics that seemed to be coming from subject areas as far
afield as logic, statistics, communication engineering, and
neurophysiology. The participants were an equally eclectic assortment of
thinkers. It was at one of these meetings that von Neumann made the
acquaintance of Goldstine, whom he was to encounter again not long
afterward, at the Aberdeen railroad station. Rosenblueth had to depart
for Mexico City in 1944, but by December, Wiener, Bigelow, von Neumann,
Howard Aiken of the Harvard-Navy-IBM Mark I calculator project,
Goldstine, McCulloch and Pitts formed an association they called
"The Teleological Society," for
the purpose of discussing "communication engineering, the engineering of
control devices, the mathematics of time series in statistics, and the
communication and control aspects of the nervous system." In a word --
cybernetics.
In 1945 and 1946, at the teleological society meetings, and in
personal correspondence, Wiener and von Neumann argued about the
advisability of placing too much trust in neurophysiology. Von Neumann
thought that the kinds of tools available to McCulloch and Pitts put
brain physiologists in the metaphorical position of trying to decipher
computer circuits by bashing computers together and studying the
wreckage,
To von Neumann, the bacteriophage -- a nonliving microorganism that
can reproduce itself -- was a much more promising object of study.
He felt that much more could be learned
about nature's codes by looking at microorganisms than by studying
brains. The connection between the mysteries of brain physiology
and the secrets of biological reproduction were later to emerge more
clearly from theories involving the nature of information, and von
Neumann turned out to be right -- biologists were to make faster
progress in understanding the coding of biological reproduction than
neuroscientists were to make in their quest to decode the brain's
functions.
The Macy Foundation, which had sponsored the meetings that led to the
creation of the Teleological Society, continued to sponsor free-wheeling
meetings. Von Neumann and Wiener were the dramatic co-stars of the
meetings, and the differences in their personal style became part of the
excited and dramatic debates that characterized the formative years of
cybernetics. Biographer Steve Heims, in his book about the two men --
John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener -- noted the way their
contrasting personae emerged at these events:
Wiener and von Neumann cut rather different figures
at the semiannual conferences on machine-organism parallels, and
each had his own circle of admirers. Von Neumann was small and
plump, with a large forehead and a smooth oval face. He spoke
beautiful and lucid English, with a slight middle-European accent,
and he was always carefully dressed; usually a vest, coat buttoned,
handkerchief in pocket, more the banker than the scholar. He was
seen as urbane, cosmopolitan, witty, low-key, friendly and
accessible. He talked rapidly, and many at the Macy meetings often
could not follow his careful, precise, rapid reasoning. . . .
Wiener was the dominant figure at the conference
series, in his role as brilliant originator of ideas and enfant
terrible. Without his scientific ideas and his enthusiasm for them,
the conference series would never have come into existence, nor
would it have had the momentum to continue for seven years without
him. A short, stout man with a paunch, usually standing
splay-footed, he had coarse features and a small white goatee. He
wore thick glasses and his stubby fingers usually held a fat cigar.
He was robust, not the stereotype of the frail and sickly child
prodigy. Wiener evidently enjoyed the meetings and his central role
in them: sometimes he got up from his chair and in his ducklike
fashion walked around the circle of tables, holding forth
exuberantly, cigar in hand, apparently unstoppable. He could be
quite unaware of other people, but he communicated his thoughts
effectively and struck up friendships with a number of the
participants. Some were intrigued as
much as annoyed by Wiener's tendency to go to sleep and even snore
during a discussion, but apparently hearing and digesting what was
being said. Immediately upon waking he would often make
penetrating comments.
Although the nerve network theory was to suffer a less than glorious
fate when neurophysiology progressed beyond what was known about nerve
cells in the 1940s, the nerve-net models had already profoundly
influenced the design of computers. (Later research showed that
switching circuits are not such an accurate model for the human nervous
system, because neurons do not act strictly as "all-or-none" devices.)
Despite his misgivings about the state of the art in theories of brain
functioning, in his 1945 "first Draft," von Neumann adopted the logical
formalism proposed by McCulloch and Pitts. When the architectural
template of all future general-purpose computers was first laid down,
the cyberneticists' findings influenced the logical design.In 1944
and 1945, Wiener was already thinking about a scientific model involving
communication, information, self-control -- an all-embracing way of
looking at nature that would include explanations for computers and
brains, biology and electronics, logic and purpose. He later wrote: "It
became clear to me almost at the very beginning that these new concepts
of communication and control involved a new interpretation of man, of
man's knowledge of the universe, and of society."
Wiener was convinced that biology, even sociology and anthropology,
were to be as profoundly affected by cybernetics as electronics theory
or computer engineering; in fact anthropologist Gregory Bateston was
closely involved with Wiener and later with the first AI researchers.
While Shannon published information theory, and von Neumann pushed the
development of computer technology, Wiener retreated from the politics
of big science in the postwar world to articulate his grand framework.
After the war, as the plans for the Institute for Advanced Study's
computer proposed by von Neumann were put into action, with Julian
Bigelow as von Neumann's chief engineer on the project, and as Mauchly
and Eckert struck out on their own to start the commercial computer
industry, Wiener headed for Mexico City to work with Rosenblueth. Then,
in the spring of 1947, Wiener went to England, where he visited the
British computer-building projects, and spoke with Alan Turing.
When he returned to Mexico City, Wiener wrote his book and decided to
title it and the new field
Cybernetics,
from the Greek word meaning "steersman." It was subtitled: or Control
and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Cybernetics was the description of a
general science of mechanisms for maintaining order in a disorderly
universe, the process for steering a course through the random forces of
the physical world, based on information about the past and forecasts
about the future.
When a steersman moves a rudder, the craft changes course. When the
steersman detects that the previous change of course has oversteered,
the rudder is moved again, in the opposite direction. The feedback of
the steersman's senses is the controlling element that keeps the craft
on course. Wiener intended to embed in
the name of the discipline the idea that there is a connection between
steering and communication. "The theory of control in
engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical," he stated, "is a
chapter in the theory of messages."
The mathematics underlying the steering of rudders or antiaircraft
guns and the steering of biological systems was the same -- it was a
general law, Wiener felt, like the laws of motion or gravity. Wiener's
intuitions turned out to be correct. Communication and control, coding
and decoding, steering and predicting, were becoming more important to
physicists and biologists, who were interested in phenomena very
different from guns or computing machines.
In the late 1940s, another new category of interdisciplinary
theorists who would come to be known as molecular biologists were
beginning to think about the coding mechanism of genetics. Even
the quantum physicists were looking into the issues that were so dear to
Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth. It
looked as if Wiener might be onto an even more cosmic link between
information, energy, and matter. A scientific watershed was
imminent, and many of his colleagues were expecting more major
breakthroughs from Wiener. By the fall of 1947, prior to its 1948
publication, his book on cybernetics was making the rounds of government
and academic experts in manuscript form.
Robert Fano, a professor of electrical engineering who eventually
became head of the electrical engineering department at MIT and
administrative leader of MIT's pioneering computer project known as MAC,
witnessed some strange behavior on Wiener's part around that time,
behavior that Fano later had cause to remember when Claude Shannon
published his work. Fano was working on his doctoral thesis in
electrical engineering. From time to time,
Wiener would walk into the student's
office, inform him rather cryptically that "information is entropy," and
walk out without saying another word.
By the end of 1946, Wiener had reached a decision that had nothing to
do with the cold formalisms of mathematics, a decision that
distinguished him in yet another way from his weaponry-oriented
colleague. Renouncing any future role in weapons-related research,
Wiener deliberately removed himself from the hot center of the action in
the development of computer technology (as opposed to cybernetic theory)
when he stated: "I do not expect to publish any future work of mine
which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists."
Fortunately for Wiener, and for the scientific world, the implications
of his discoveries were not limited to military applications. It quickly
became evident that weapons were not the only things of interest that
were built from communication and control codes.
By the late forties and early fifties, the atmosphere was crackling
with new scientific ideas having to do with what nobody yet called
information theory. The quantum physicist Erwin Shroedinger gave a
famous lecture at Cambridge University in 1945, later published, on the
topic "What is Life?" One of the younger physicists in the audience,
Francis Crick, decided to switch to biology, where the most crucial
decoding problem in scientific history was waiting for him. Von Neumann
turned out to be right in his dispute with Wiener -- the bacteriophage,
not the nervous system, was the subject of the next great decoding.
Von Neumann's ideas about self-reproducing automata -- patterns
complex enough and highly ordered enough to direct their own replication
-- seemed to point toward the same idea. Something about order and
disorder, messages and noise, was near the heart of life. The
manipulation of information looked like something more like a game
mathematicians play, even more than a capability of machines.
Information, in a way that was not mathematically demonstrated until
Claude Shannon's 1948 publications, began to look like a reflection of
the way the universe works. The whole idea was a wrenching of mind-set,
at first for scientists, then for many others.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists saw the
universe in terms of particles and forces interacting in complicated but
orderly patterns that were, in principle, totally predictable.
In important ways, all of the
nonscientists who lived in an increasingly mechanized civilization also
saw the universe in terms of particles and forces and a clockwork
cosmos. Around sixty years ago, quantum theory did away with the
clockwork and predictability. Around thirty years ago, a few
people began to look at the world and see, as Norbert Wiener put it, "a
myriad of To Whom It May Concern messages."
The idea that information is still a fundamental characteristic of
the cosmos, like matter and energy, is still young, and further surprise
discoveries and applications are sure to pop up before a better model
comes along. Before the 1950s, only scientists thought about the idea
that information had anything to do with anything. Common words like
communication and message were given new, technical meanings
by Wiener and Claude Shannon, who independently and roughly
simultaneously demonstrated that everything from the random motions of
subatomic particles to the behavior of electrical switching networks and
the intelligibility of human speech is related in a way that can be
expressed through certain basic mathematical equations.
The information-related equations were useful in building computers
and telephone networks, but they also had significant impact on all the
sciences. Research inspired by the information-communication model has
provided clues to some of the fundamental features of the universe, from
the way the cellular instructions for life are woven into the
arrangement of atoms in DNA molecules, to the process by which brain
cells encode memory. The model has become what Thomas Kuhn calls a
"scientific paradigm." The two fundamental pillars of this paradigm were
Claude Shannon's information and Wiener's cybernetics.
The significance of these two theoretical frameworks that came to the
attention of scientists in the late 1940s and began to surface in public
consciousness in the 1950s, and the mass attitude shift they implied,
was noted by Paula McCorduck, in her history of artificial intelligence
research:
Cybernetics recorded the switch from one
dominant model, or set of explanations for phenomena, to another.
Energy -- the notion central to Newtonian mechanics -- was now
replaced by information. The ideas of information theory,
such as coding, storage, noise, and so on, provided a better
explanation for a whole host of events, from the behavior of
electronic circuits to the behavior of a replicating cell. . . .
These terms mean pretty much what you'd think. Coding refers
to "a system of signals used to represent letters or numbers in
transmitting messages"; storing means holding these signals
until they're needed. Noise is a disturbance that obscures or
affects the quality of a signal (or message) during transmission.
It turns out that coding and storing happen to be central problems in
the logical design of computing machines and the creation of software.
The basic scientific work that resulted in information theory did not
originate from any investigation of computation, however, but from an
analysis of communication. Claude Shannon, several years younger than
Turing, working about a year after the British logician's discoveries in
metamathematics, did another nifty little bit of graduate work that tied
together theory and engineering, philosophy, and machinery.
