Zitate von Norbert Wiener

6 0

Norbert Wiener

Geburtstag: 26. November 1894
Todesdatum: 18. März 1964
Andere Namen: نوربرت وینر

Norbert Wiener war ein US-amerikanischer Mathematiker. Er ist als Begründer der Kybernetik bekannt, ein Ausdruck, den er in seinem Werk Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine prägte.

Photo: Konrad Jacobs, https://opc.mfo.de/detail?photo_id=4520 / CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Werk

The Human Use of Human Beings

Norbert Wiener

Zitate Norbert Wiener

„Die Individualität eines Körpers ist eher die einer Flamme als die eines Steines, eher die einer Form als die eines Teilchens Materie. Diese Form kann übermittelt oder abgeändert oder verdoppelt werden.“

— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings

nach William Voltz, Alphabet des Schreckens, Pabel, Rastatt, 1980, Seite 104
"the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, [...]" - The Human Use of Human Beings - Cybernetics and Society. 1954- p. 102 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=l9l6zquHvZIC&pg=PA102

„Es gibt keine Antworten, nur Querverweise“

— Norbert Wiener

Wiener's Law of Libraries, original: "There are no answers, only cross references") - Norbert Wiener 1894-1964 (Vita Mathematica), Seite 337, ISBN: 3764322462

„Das Gehirn ist ein Computer“

— Norbert Wiener

heise.de http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/66675

„Das menschliche Gehirn mag so weit auf dem Weg zu seiner destruktiven Spezialisierung sein wie die großen Nasenhörner der letzten der Titanotherien.“

— Norbert Wiener

heise.de http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/66675

„"Die Ökonomen haben die Angewohnheit entwickelt, ihre ziemlich unpräzisen Ideen in die Sprache der Integral- und Differentialrechnung zu verkleiden … Wann auch immer sie vorgeben, exakte Formeln zu verwenden, handelt es sich um Betrug und Zeitverschwendung." - Gott & Golem, Inc.“

— Norbert Wiener

Econ, Düsseldorf 1965; Seite 120 und 122 - zitiert von Andreas Weber in: 'Biokapital. Die Versöhnung von Ökonomie, Natur und Menschlichkeit, Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3827007925, Seite 71
Original engl.: "the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus. [...] any pretense of applying precise formulae to these loosly defined quantities is a sham and a waste of time." - God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge M.I.T. Press, 1964. p. 90 http://books.google.de/books?id=yLiSM41pHOwC&pg=PA90 - p. 91 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=yLiSM41pHOwC&pg=PA91

„Information ist Information, weder Materie noch Energie.“

— Norbert Wiener

Original engl.:"Information is information, not matter or energy." (Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948. Seite 166

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings

XI. Language, Confusion, and Jam. p. 193
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

„To live effectively is to live with adequate information.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings

Quelle: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 17-18

„I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

"A Scientist Rebels" Atlantic Monthly (Jan, 1947)
Kontext: 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.... I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists...

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

Quelle: I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953), p. 266
Kontext: 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".

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964)
Kontext: 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.

„The world of the future will be an even 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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch God & Golem, Inc.

Quelle: God & Golem, Inc. (1964), p. 69
Quelle: The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society
Kontext: [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.

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

Quelle: I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953), p. 109

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

V. Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 121.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings

II. Progress and Entropy. p. 46-47
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

„The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth)

„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.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

Quelle: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964), p. 89; partly cited in: Herman E. Daly. Steady-State Economics: Second Edition With New Essays. 1977/1991 p. 4

„We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings

V. Organization as the Message. p. 96
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

„Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower… Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy… There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.
It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, then physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologists ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand… A proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look. We had dreamed for years of an institution of independent scientists, working together in one of these backwoods of science, not as subordinates of some great executive officer, but joined by the desire, indeed by the spiritual necessity, to understand the region as a whole, and to lend one another the strength of that understanding.“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener, buch Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Quelle: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), p. 2-4; As cited in: George Klir (2001) Facets of Systems Science, p. 47-48

„A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent“

Help us translate this quote

— Norbert Wiener

Quelle: I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953), p. 322; Cited in: Walter F. Buckley (1967) Sociology and modern systems theory. p. 82