Internationally honored for brilliant achievements throughout
his career, author of Cybernetics, ExProdigy, and the essay God and
Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert
Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to
understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he
linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas
for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to
communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Wiener
had an abiding concern about the ethics guiding applications of
theories he and other scientists developed. Years after he died,
the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The
world of science has changed greatly since Wiener's day, and much
of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now
published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary
corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of
an environment that encourages inventiveness.Wiener provides an
engagingly written insider's understanding of the history of
discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances
that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is
that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line,
and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times
and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to
be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society
is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting
topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener's
comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the
"free-lance" scientist are particularly pertinent today.Steve Heims
provides a brief history of Wiener's literary output and reviews
his contributions to the field of invention and discovery. In
addition, Heims suggests significant ways in which Wiener's ideas
still apply to dilemmas facing the scientific and engineering
communities of the 1990s. Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was Institute
Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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