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The Origins of Cyberspace collection described as lots 1-255 will first be offered as a single lot, subject to a reserve price. If this price is not reached, the collection will be immediately offered as individual lots as described in the catalogue as lots 1-255.
WIENER, Norbert. Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Paris: Hermann & Cie, 1948.
Details
WIENER, Norbert. Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Paris: Hermann & Cie, 1948.
8o. Original orange printed wrappers; boxed.
Provenance: Norbert Wiener. This is the copy that Wiener corrected for the 1961 second edition, containing approximately 340 changes in his hand in black and orange pencil, and his ms. pencil note "121 124 corrected figures" on the front cover. Some of the alterations are drastic, such as those on pages 78, 79, and 86, where Wiener completely rewrote several equations -- an indication of how poorly the first edition was proofread. All of Wiener's corrections appear to have been incorporated into the second edition. Slip laid in from the MIT editors reading "Return to Professor Wiener Pencil check mark in margin after correction means that correction was already incorporated. -- C. D. B." The large number of mistakes in the first edition did not interfere with the large sales of the book, or with its fine reviews, since the errors in the technical aspects of certain chapters were probably over the heads of many readers.
FIRST EDITION. Cybernetics was the first conventionally published book, rather than a technical report, to include a serious discussion of electronic computing. Writing as a mathematician rather than an engineer, Wiener's approach was, of course, theoretical rather than specific. Because so many aspects of Wiener's thought were hardly known to the scientific world, let alone to the public at large, the revolutionary aspect of this work can hardly be underestimated. Among the most informative chapters is Wiener's thirty-nine-page rambling historical introduction, in which he described his report to Vannevar Bush in 1940 on the proposed development of an electronic digital computer. (See Origins of Cyberspace 989 and From Gutenberg to the Internet 7.3). Wiener, independently of Claude Shannon, conceived of communications engineering as a brand of statistical physics, and applied this viewpoint to the concept of information. However, while Shannon concentrated mainly on applications of information theory to communications, Wiener stressed its application to control problems involving other physical and complicated biological phenomena -- indeed, what made Cybernetics so significant was Wiener's synthesis under his name of a vast variety of new developments that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s in modern technology and science. These were the times when there were rapid advances in computers, new findings in neurophysiology, tremendous progress in the development of communication systems, servomechanisms and other automation, new predictive methods connected with antiaircraft artillery. Wiener conceived all this rightly as a progress of a single science of "control." In fact the new breed of technological inventions of what came to be called information machines -- which include computers and all means of communication -- may be compared with the nervous system of an organism that serves the purpose of controlling its environment.
Information theory clearly plays an important role in Wiener's cybernetics, but what Wiener considered information theory is a more general scientific discipline than what is usually regarded in the United States, where information theory is more or less synonymous with coding theory. Wiener with his profound background in theoretical physics, particularly in Gibbsian statistical mechanics, knew that the entropy function has been around since the time of Boltzmann and that Szilard showed that information can be used to decrease physical entropy.
A rambling blend of popular and highly technical writing, ranging from history to philosophy, to mathematics, to information and communication theory, to computer science, and to biology, reflecting the amazingly wide range of the author's interests, Cybernetics represented an interdisciplinary approach to information systems both in biology and machines. OOC 991.
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Provenance: Norbert Wiener. This is the copy that Wiener corrected for the 1961 second edition, containing approximately 340 changes in his hand in black and orange pencil, and his ms. pencil note "121 124 corrected figures" on the front cover. Some of the alterations are drastic, such as those on pages 78, 79, and 86, where Wiener completely rewrote several equations -- an indication of how poorly the first edition was proofread. All of Wiener's corrections appear to have been incorporated into the second edition. Slip laid in from the MIT editors reading "Return to Professor Wiener Pencil check mark in margin after correction means that correction was already incorporated. -- C. D. B." The large number of mistakes in the first edition did not interfere with the large sales of the book, or with its fine reviews, since the errors in the technical aspects of certain chapters were probably over the heads of many readers.
FIRST EDITION. Cybernetics was the first conventionally published book, rather than a technical report, to include a serious discussion of electronic computing. Writing as a mathematician rather than an engineer, Wiener's approach was, of course, theoretical rather than specific. Because so many aspects of Wiener's thought were hardly known to the scientific world, let alone to the public at large, the revolutionary aspect of this work can hardly be underestimated. Among the most informative chapters is Wiener's thirty-nine-page rambling historical introduction, in which he described his report to Vannevar Bush in 1940 on the proposed development of an electronic digital computer. (See Origins of Cyberspace 989 and From Gutenberg to the Internet 7.3). Wiener, independently of Claude Shannon, conceived of communications engineering as a brand of statistical physics, and applied this viewpoint to the concept of information. However, while Shannon concentrated mainly on applications of information theory to communications, Wiener stressed its application to control problems involving other physical and complicated biological phenomena -- indeed, what made Cybernetics so significant was Wiener's synthesis under his name of a vast variety of new developments that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s in modern technology and science. These were the times when there were rapid advances in computers, new findings in neurophysiology, tremendous progress in the development of communication systems, servomechanisms and other automation, new predictive methods connected with antiaircraft artillery. Wiener conceived all this rightly as a progress of a single science of "control." In fact the new breed of technological inventions of what came to be called information machines -- which include computers and all means of communication -- may be compared with the nervous system of an organism that serves the purpose of controlling its environment.
Information theory clearly plays an important role in Wiener's cybernetics, but what Wiener considered information theory is a more general scientific discipline than what is usually regarded in the United States, where information theory is more or less synonymous with coding theory. Wiener with his profound background in theoretical physics, particularly in Gibbsian statistical mechanics, knew that the entropy function has been around since the time of Boltzmann and that Szilard showed that information can be used to decrease physical entropy.
A rambling blend of popular and highly technical writing, ranging from history to philosophy, to mathematics, to information and communication theory, to computer science, and to biology, reflecting the amazingly wide range of the author's interests, Cybernetics represented an interdisciplinary approach to information systems both in biology and machines. OOC 991.
Further details
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