Page 33 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

A NEW SCIENCE 13

of them were interested in the storage of information. . . . All of them
found that the term feedback . . . was an appropriate way of describ-
ing phenomena in the living organism as well as in the machine.

Cybernetics

By 1947, Wiener decided he was ready to bring his ideas to both the
larger world of science and to the scientifically literate public. As
he retired to Mexico City to write his book, Wiener was faced with
a simple question: What should he call the new science he and his
colleagues had been developing?
As he later wrote in his second autobiography:

I first looked for a Greek word signifying “messenger,” but the only
one I knew was angelos (angel). . . . Then I looked for an appropriate
word from the field of control. The only word I could think of was
the Greek word for steersman, kubernetes.

Weiner decided that the Greek steersman was a good analogy to
the mechanisms about which he would be writing.
Published simultaneously in France and the United States in 1948,
Cybernetics was not an easy book to understand. Nevertheless, the
general public found intriguing ideas nestled among the math. The
prestigious magazine Scientific American made the book its cover
story, and Newsweek also featured it. Even at the end of the cen-
tury, Scientific American would still consider Cybernetics to be one
of the most “memorable and influential” works of 20th-century
science. Wiener noted, though, in his second autobiography that
“when [Cybernetics] became a scientific best-seller we were all
astonished, not least myself.”
Readers who persevered were rewarded with a comprehensive
look at the ideas that would characterize the coming revolution in
computers, communications, industrial technology, and robotics:

• The idea of information as a central and measurable quantity
• Information expressing the degree of organization of a system
(making it the opposite of entropy, or disorder)