Norbert Wiener, a highly influential mathematician who worked at MIT from 1919 to 1964, gave the world the theory and practice of "cybernetics" - dooming us, unwittingly, to see the prefix slapped upon every new technological trifle. Although he's been dead for 30 years, he's gaining new attention with the publication of a long-lost 1954 manuscript called Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas.
Invention is Wiener's jaunt through scientific history, revealing the social, economic, and intellectual climates favorable (and, of course, detrimental) to the creation and use of technological innovations. But even more valuable, Wiener contends, are history's conceptual breakthroughs.
A revolutionary machine can sit idle for years before society catches up to it - a pattern Wiener calls the "inverse process of invention." The vacuum tube was first used for conducting electricity and amplifying sound in lighting, telegraph, and phone systems. Only decades later was its most profound application - as an energy discriminator in radios, TVs, and computers - discovered.
Although it was written during the Cold War, Invention delivers profound predictions, among them a creepy, accurate assessment of our technological present. "The great organization," Wiener writes, "which has accepted a purpose involving the expenditure of millions of dollars - megabuck science - is not easily turned aside; nor are the best administrators of large projects likely to be the most fertile originators of new ideas." He'd be gratified to know that garage computer science has brought a return to preleviathan industry models in which individual tinkering yields landmark gadgets.
Invention is a rare science book - a treatise with popular and technical appeal and a reminder that socially cognizant science is not a lost and sentimental notion.
Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas, by Norbert Wiener: US$9.95 paperback, $25 hardcover. MIT Press: (800) 356 0343, +1 (617) 253 5643, e-mail mitpress-orders@mit.edu.
STREET CRED
Killer ComputersPedro Meyer's True Visions
The Care and Feeding of Ideas
What Kind of Nation Will We Be?
They Do Make 'Em Like They Used To
