Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wienerwas an American mathematician and philosopher. He was professor of mathematics at MIT...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth26 November 1894
CountryUnited States of America
friday modern physicist quantum relativity student sunday theorist theory
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.
slave-labor machines remember
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
environment new-environment our-environment
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
running simple numbers
It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior...
rivers air water
Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves
ideas matter degrees
Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
rivers water may
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
organization giving information
Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
mathematician
Am I really a good mathematician?
witty cat models
The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.
science men have-faith
I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith.
sacrifice past important
Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover, this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to put a single cent into the pockets of their employers.
order community healthy
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.
adequate information
To live effectively is to live with adequate information.