Норберт Винер цитаты (54 цитат) | Цитаты известных личностей

Источник: 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

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

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

Источник: 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”

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Norbert Wiener

"A Scientist Rebels" Atlantic Monthly (Jan, 1947)
Контексте: 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.”

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Norbert Wiener

Источник: I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953), p. 266
Контексте: 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.”

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Norbert Wiener

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

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Norbert Wiener книга God & Golem, Inc.

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

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Norbert Wiener

Источник: 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.”

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Norbert Wiener книга 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.”

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Norbert Wiener книга 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.”

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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.”

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Norbert Wiener

Источник: 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.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

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

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

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Norbert Wiener

Источник: 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

“What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

VIII. Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist. p. 135
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

“The terms "black box" and "white box" are convenient and figurative expressions of not very well determined usage. I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed. On the other hand, a white box will be similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation.”

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Norbert Wiener книга Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Preface. page xi. (Footnote 1)
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

“May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belong to acquiescence and hence to weakness.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

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

“The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

X. Some Communication Machines and Their Future. p. 184
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

“It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

Источник: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 16

“We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

VII. Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy. p. 129
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

“What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

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

“There are no answers, only cross-references.”

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Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener 1894-1964 (Vita Mathematica, 1990, p. 337)
Wiener's Law of Libraries

“Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.”

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Norbert Wiener

As quoted in Comic Sections (1993) by D MacHale

“The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.”

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Norbert Wiener книга Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Источник: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), p. 2

“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.”

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Norbert Wiener книга The Human Use of Human Beings

Источник: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 26-27 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) " Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/024Weiner.htm", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61