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Norbert Wiener
40 quotes
“In the past, the community of scholars has made it a custom to furnish scientific information to any person seriously seeking it. However, we must face these facts: The policy of the government itself during and after the war, say in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has made it clear that to provide scientific information is not a necessarily innocent act, and may entail the gravest consequences. One therefore cannot escape reconsidering the established custom of the scientist to give information to every person who may inquire of him.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wiener's response to a request for information concerning controlled missiles, first published in Atlantic Monthly, December 1946
“The experience of the scientists who have worked on the atomic bomb has indicated that in any investigation of this kind the scientist ends by putting unlimited powers in the hands of the people whom he is least inclined to trust with their use.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wiener's response to a request for information concerning controlled missiles, first published in Atlantic Monthly, December 1946
“[T]he best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same cat.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth)
“The measures taken during the war by our military agencies, in restricting the free intercourse among scientists on related projects or even on the same project have gone so far that it is clear that if continued in time of peace, this policy will lead to the total irresponsibility of the scientist, and, ultimately, to the death of science. ...The interchange of ideas, which is one of the greatest traditions of science, must of course receive certain limitations when the scientist becomes an arbiter of life and death. ...”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists...”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Scientist Rebels" Atlantic Monthly (Jan, 1947)
“There are no answers, only cross-references.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1894 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Norbert Wiener 1894-1964 (Vita Mathematica, 1990, p. 337)
“Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Comic Sections (1993) by D MacHale
“What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A New Theory of Measurement: A Study in the Logic of Mathematics," Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Volume s2-19, Issue=1 (1921), pp. 181–205
“The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“{{#ifeq:{}|Information is information|”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To live effectively is to live with adequate information.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belong to acquiescence and hence to weakness.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it—the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it. In other words, no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent. It has been well said that the modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is praying. . . that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent'”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 322; Cited in: Walter F. Buckley (1967) Sociology and modern systems theory. p. 82
“The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is my thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers... although they are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until a time long after it is relevant. By the very slowness of our human activities, our effective control of our machines may be nullified. If the rules for victory in a war game do not correspond to what we actually wish for our country, it is more likely that such a machine may produce a policy which will win a nominal victory on points, at the cost of every interest we have at heart, even that of national survival.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Revolt of the Machines,” Time 75, no. 2, January 11, 1960, p. 32.
“The terms "black box" and "white box" are convenient and figurative expressions of not very well determined usage. I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed. On the other hand, a white box will be similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As to sociology and anthropology, it is manifest that the importance of information and communication as mechanisms of organization proceeds beyond the individual into the community. On the other hand, it is completely impossible to understand social communities such as those of ants without a thorough investigation of their means of communication, and we were fortunate enough to have the aid of Dr. Schneirla in this matter. For the similar problems of human organization, we sought help from the anthropologists Drs. Bateson and Margaret Mead; while Dr. Morgenstern of the Institute for Advanced Study was our adviser in the significant field of social organization belong to economic theory. His very important joint book on games with Dr. von Neumann, by the way, represents a most interesting study of social organization from the point of view of methods closely related to, although distinct from, the subject matter of cybernetics. Dr. Lewin and others represented the newer work on the theory of opinion sampling and the practice of opinion making, and Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let it be remarked ... that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A group may have more group information or less group information than its members. A group of non-social animals, temporarily assembled, contains very little group information, even though its members may possess much information as individuals. This is because very little that one member does is noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes further in the group. On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 26-27 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) "Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61
“What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We mathematicians who operate with nothing more expensive than paper and possibly printers' ink are quite reconciled to the fact that, if we are working in an active field, our discoveries will commence to be obsolete at the moment that they are written down or even at the moment they are conceived. We know that for a long time everything we do will be nothing more than the jumping off point for those who have the advantage of already being aware of our ultimate results. This is the meaning of the famous apothegm of Newton, when he said, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat-death of equilibrium and sameness described in the second law of thermodynamics. What Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs meant by this heat-death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system. These enclaves will not remain there indefinitely by any momentum of their own after we have once established them. Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentatism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus.”
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 89; partly cited in: Herman E. Daly. Steady-State Economics: Second Edition With New Essays. 1977/1991 p. 4