The New York Times Book Review
Sunday, March 20, 2005
The Original Computer Geek
At the apex of his scientific career, Norbert Wiener’s life imploded.
Dark Hero of the Information Age:
In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics.
By Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman.
Illustrated. 423 pp. Basic Books. $27.50.
By CLIVE THOMPSON
To be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had e=mc 2. Newton had the apple
and gravity. Even the lesser rock-star scientists have one shining achievement for which they’re known -such as Niels Bohr’s theory of the atom.
But there’s another kind of scientist who never breaks through, usually because while his discovery is
revolutionary it’s also maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two. He never produces a
catchy hit single. He’s more like a back-room influencer, his work inspires dozens of other innovators who
absorb the idea, produce more easily comprehensible innovations and become more famous than their
mentor could have dreamed. Find an influencer, and you’ll find a deeply bitter man.
Norbert Wiener – the inventor of “cybernetics” – is precisely this type of scientist. Odds are that you are
only dimly aware of cybernetics, if at all. (A friend asked me, “Isn’t that like Dianetics?”) “Dark Hero of
the Information Age,” by the journalists Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, intends to correct this, but their
book struggles with the circular tautologies of fame: it must continually plead the case of why the guy ought
to have been better known.
Cybernetics is the science of feedback – how information can help self-regulate a system. That includes
everything from biological mechanisms like the human immune system to artificial ones, like thermostats
that regulate a building’s temperature. Even in the early twentieth century, when Wiener did his work,
feedback mechanics weren’t new; engineers had long been building steam engines that self-regulated their
speed. But Wiener’s genius was to label the mysterious ghost that powered feedback: information.
It’s hard to imagine now, in our modern digital world – where “cyber” is a prefix for everything from sex
to pets – but “information” as a discrete concept did not widely exist before Wiener. (Early Bell engineers
referred to the signal traveling over telephone wires as “the commodity to be transported by a telephone
system.”) By separating out information as a kind of Platonic solid unto itself, Wiener create the idea that
scientists could measure information in a system and tweak it for optimal efficiency.
The idea resonated in every field. The anthropologist Margaret Mead began studying cultural taboos as
flows of self-regulating information inside a society. Wiener used his feedback theory to create an
antiaircraft gun that tracked a plane in the air as if it were alive. And neurologists started using cybernetic
theory to explain mental diseases as self-reinforcing patterns of behavior – a brain that gets stuck in a bad
biochemical rut.
Wiener knew about those ruts himself, tortured as he was by lifelong manic depression. Though he
produced his defining works in hypertalkative bursts of productivity, he would regularly plunge into moods
of near-suicidal intensity. The authors suggest Wiener’s swings were exacerbated by his oppressive
upbringing: home-schooled by a scold of a father, Wiener started college at the age of 11 in 1906, earned his
Harvard Ph.D by 18, and, like most prodigies, remained a socially awkward geek forever after. Myopic
nearly to the point of blindness, the rotund Wiener was famous for wandering the grounds of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a cigar, buttonholing anyone he met and pouring out his latest
theories in a rapid-fire spray. (Some M.I.T. engineers even developed the “Wiener Early Warning System”
to avoid him by ducking away.)
For a while, Wiener seemed destined to be as celebrated as Einstein. Like Einstein, he issued dark social
warnings about the misuses of science and technology, including his own. In his two most popular books –
“Cybernetics” and “The Human Use of Human Beings” – Wiener warned that mass media were
concentrated in too few hands and were losing their power as a feedback device for society. Appalled by the
atom bomb, he defiantly refused to accept any government money for research. (When he visited an M.I.T.
professor who accepted military money, he’d hover on the doorstep, refusing to walk into what he called
“federal territory.”) Given that postwar research was increasingly paid for by the military, this is partly why
Wiener got sidelined by history: he didn’t participate in much of the seminal military-financed work on
computation, where his ideas might have been useful.
But the real problem, the authors argue, was personal. At the crest of his career, Wiener’s life imploded,
almost like a feedback system falling out of equilibrium with itself. And this is where the book really shines,
because it offers a fascinating account of how a personal crisis can destroy a scientific revolution .
The catastrophe emerged from Wiener’s German-born wife, Margaret, and their almost gothically weird
relationship. Though Wiener was Jewish, Margaret became an outspoken Nazi supporter during World War
II. (She kept a copy of “Mein Kampf” on a dresser at home.) She was even more hostile to her daughters,
and accused the elder of inspiring “unnatural” sexual feelings in her father. As Wiener’s reputation grew and
he crisscrossed the globe on lecture circuits, Margaret attempted to trigger his depressions with undercutting
remarks.
At the peak of Wiener’s fame, she told an audacious lie that destroyed his relationship with his closest
scientific collaborators. One of Wiener’s daughters had interned for a spring with the colleagues. Margaret
told Wiener that their daughter had had sex with several of them. Wiener chose to believe the falsehood. He
immediately cut off all contact with his collaborators, never explained the accusation and never spoke to
them again.
And that, the authors contend, is the real reason cybernetics died. Wiener’s colleagues were shattered,
and without his participation, their explorations of his ideas quickly atrophied. One of Wiener's former
protégés, the young mathematical genius Walter Pitts, was so scarred that ultimately he drank himself to
death. By the time of Wiener’s death in 1964, there were few proselytizers left. Soviet scientists were
interested, but this only served to give cybernetics a “red” tinge.
Of course one could also argue that the science simply failed in the court of ideas. Postwar scientists
were obsessed with electronics; Wiener’s feedback studies, which careered from neurophysics to heavy
mechanics, seemed both antiquated and pointlessly ahead of their time. In his final years, Wiener could see
his relevance waning and worried that he was doomed to be remembered only in the footnotes of other
people’s papers.
The authors seem to fret about this too, and they embark on an awkward process common in the
biographies of lesser-known scientists: they continually attempt to reverse-engineer Wiener’s importance by
mentioning the famous thinkers you really have heard of – Marshall McLuhan, Mead or James Watson and
Francis Crick –and painstakingly noting how they incorporated Wiener’s ideas into their own work. It’s a
big of a stretch at times. But you sympathize with their project, and their subject. Wiener was both brilliant
and personally intriguing, an absent-minded professor straight out of central casting. As a character, he was
larger than life; as a scientist, he was smaller than history.
---------------Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and also writes for Wired and
Slate. [1222 words]
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