cybernetics
Cybernetics is a science that studies the general rules of control and communication in machines and living society, and how dynamic systems keep a balance or a stable state under changing environmental conditions.
Nowadays, cybernetics is not limited to engineering automation control theory, but also includes ecological cybernetics, environmental cybernetics, energy cybernetics, population cybernetics, social cybernetics and economic cybernetics. For natural disasters, human beings seek ways to resist disasters through cybernetics.
In addition, I would like to mention qian Xuesen’s Cybernetics of Engineering, which is qian’s opinion on engineering problems based on Wiener’s ideas. One of the two Chinese I think have the most talented brains, the other is Yang Lao. For the legend of Qian Lao, you can read his biography.
The father of cybernetics
Norbert Wiener was a famous American mathematician and professor at MIT. In 1948, he published a book called Cybernetics in Paris, France, and founded a new academic theory — cybernetics, so he is known as the “father of cybernetics”.
I was a child prodigy
Wiener could read alone by the age of three and a half, and by the age of four he was reading “History of Natural History” as well as books on the nature of light in planetary systems. When his 9-year-old cousin argued with Weiner and talked about God every time, Weiner denied god and said people were making up lies. The cousin turned white and hurried away from Wiener, afraid of god’s thunderbolt.
Father’s Influence
His father, a professor of modern linguistics, was then well-known in academia and had published several books. His father found Wiener to be intellectually gifted from an early age and focused on nurturing him. Father has a study, in which there are all kinds of books. Including novels, poems, linguistics works, Chinese dictionaries, popular science series, history of natural history, psychiatry and so on.
Even though his father had a large library in his study, it was not enough for little Weiner. So he went to the home of another math professor in the neighborhood, where Wiener was free to come and go and read his vast library. He and Weiner would often derive mathematical formulas from memory without pen and paper, which would benefit him throughout his life.
Father is usually very busy, in order to make the family to live a wealthy life, he in addition to Harvard University teaching academic, but also with the publishing house to do a lot of text work. However, no matter how busy he was, the father took charge of his son’s education. People are always skeptical of the achievements of child prodigies, thinking that they will one day run out of ideas and become ordinary people. But not wanting to waste Wiener’s extraordinary intelligence, his father tentatively taught Wiener German and mathematics, which he did not expect wiener to learn with ease.
Primary and secondary schools
Already in the fourth grade before the age of seven, Like other prodigies, Weiner was unbalanced in all aspects of his development and often broke classroom discipline because of his young age.
At the age of nine, Weiner entered middle school as a special student. The plan was for him to start in all grades of middle school, but weiner learned most of the courses in the third grade, so he went straight to the first grade. Wiener could recite texts as well as students seven years older, and he also studied algebra and geometry, all of which were refresher to him. The only thing he found difficult was socializing. Many older students taunted him.
The university of
At the age of 11, Weiner had already started college. At the entrance interviews, four or five professors tested weiner on algebra, geometry, German, Latin, philosophy and more. Weiner won over the examiners and went on to university. In college, Wiener was intellectually curious and focused on mathematics. But I also studied philosophy, psychology, engineering and so on.
Wiener finished college in three years and graduated with honors.
Growing pains
After graduating from college, Weiner, 14, had two big questions on her mind: What am I going to do with my life? Do I have any hope of success? At the age of 14, there seems to be only one way out, and that is to stay in school.
Because of his interest in biology, Wiener chose to study zoology at harvard Graduate School. However, he failed in biology due to clumsy hands and feet, poor eyesight and quick temper. The sense of failure weighed heavily on Wiener. His father asked Weiner to study philosophy unconditionally and helped him get a scholarship to Cornell.
In addition, he was caught in another worry. He knew for the first time that he was a Jew, and he had been accustomed to the prejudices and prejudices against Jews that affected him. But it was hard to imagine the pain of suddenly discovering that you were a Jew who was considered a plague.
The door of the philosophy
At 17, Weiner returned to Harvard as a doctoral candidate. Philosophy was not what Weiner wanted to study, but it involved reading and thinking rather than observing and experimenting, which was exactly what Weiner was good at. So the learning task is done relatively easily.
In order to get his doctorate, he has to pass a special topic exam and an oral exam in addition to his thesis defense. The project exam is a written exam, and Wiener can’t be bothered. The oral exam, however, required students to sit the exam face-to-face at the homes of each of the examiners, a frightening experience for the unsociable Wiener. But I finally passed the oral exam.
Eventually, at the age of 18, Wiener got his PhD.
The trip to Cambridge
Wiener regained his confidence after receiving his doctorate and was now an adult, his childhood gone, his prodigy troubles gone. I began to let go of being Jewish. There was no need to feel inferior because I was Jewish.
In her final year at Harvard, Wiener applied for a traveling scholarship and got the opportunity to study with Russell. Who was Russell? You can look at Russell’s biography. He was accomplished in philosophy, mathematics, physics, history, politics, education, religion and many other fields. Russell spent 10 years to write three volumes of “Principles of Mathematics” and made outstanding contributions to the development of mathematical logic. In particular, his “Russell’s Paradox” shocked the mathematical community. The edifice of mathematical theory, which had taken mathematicians centuries to build, was stripped of its foundations by Russell. Russell’s paradox points out that set theory can only give the concept of set there are contradictions.
At Russell’s suggestion, Wiener delved into mathematics, and later studied it with Hilbert. Hilbert was a super generalist in mathematics, he worked in almost every branch of mathematics, and he was a super genius, and you can read his biography.
Wiener’s mathematical skills improved rapidly and he finally decided to pursue mathematics.
Young mathematician
Weiner returned to the United States mature both academically and physically, but not professionally. Wiener was fired after a year as an assistant professor in harvard’s philosophy department. Mathematical logic was still a new discipline at the time, so neither philosophy nor mathematics paid much attention to him.
At the age of 24, wiener was introduced to the mathematics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology by his father’s friends, who were mathematics majors at Harvard. Influenced by the engineering culture of the Polytechnic, Wiener became more and more interested in mathematics in physics. He no longer indulging in pure mathematics but turned to applied mathematics.
A mathematician’s mission is to find order out of disorder, and Wiener looked out of his office window at the shimmering water of the fickle river, sometimes gentle and sometimes splashy. While all this seemed chaotic, Wiener pondered how to describe the complexity of nature in mathematical terms.
About the Subject
Wiener believed that divisions between disciplines were merely administrative tactics to facilitate the distribution of money and manpower, and that a practical scientist should break down such divisions.
On the one hand, the development of modern science and technology makes experts conduct research in increasingly narrow fields, and some scientists become slaves of narrow division of labor. On the other hand, there has been a trend of interdisciplinary integration, and many problems need to be studied jointly by multiple disciplines. There is a sharp contradiction between these two aspects.
On racial perception
Used of being Jewish and being discriminated against as a child. That is why he despises American stereotypes of jews as greedy, Irish as stubborn and black as lazy. He did not believe that any nation was inherently superior; each nation had its own strengths and weaknesses. A person’s success has nothing to do with his ethnic background, the key lies in the acquired efforts.
Cybernetics
After the world war, the center of science and technology has moved from Europe to the United States. Europe before the war was the world’s center of science and technology, with many world-class scientists. After the war, the older generation of scientists had gone to America, while the new generation had just come off the war and was still immature.
The publisher, Freeman, approached Wiener, interested in his wartime work, and wanted him to write a pamphlet on the ideas of communication automation factories and the nervous system. Wiener readily accepted and confirmed the contract on the spot.
Wiener had a problem from the start. What title should he choose to express his ideas exactly? At first I wanted to find a Greek word meaning “messenger”, but the English meaning changed to “angel”. It took a long time to find a Greek word for “helmsman” from the field of control, which I imported into English as cybernetics.
Wiener summarized his previous research and introduced concepts such as control and feedback from engineering to biology and sociology. To extend the concepts in information and communication engineering to the whole social and natural sciences. For the natural sciences, engineering, technology and social sciences that is, the various disciplines provide a language to communicate with each other.
The book introduces the control system composed of electronic components, studies the transmission and processing of information by statistical methods, and points out how to study human brain and neurophysiological activities by functional simulation method and black box method. It also raises many sociological and philosophical questions such as social control and whether machines can think.
Wiener’s cybernetics mainly deals with the transformation, extraction, processing and prediction of information with the view of time series. It depends on the transfer function and frequency characteristics of the system. The main mathematical tools used are mathematical statistics and harmonic analysis. This approach is called “classical control theory”.
question
After cybernetics was published, some people praised him as the next genius scientist after Einstein. Others accused him of being a swashbuckling scientist. The two extremes made Weiner nervous, but his wife relieved him. When Einstein just published the special theory of relativity, only Russell, Madame Curie and a dozen people in the world could understand his theory…
Wiener saw the light, adjusted his approach, ignored the opinions of others, gave most of his time back to himself, and decided to devote the rest of his life to cybernetics.
Subsequent development
In the 1980s, cybernetics appeared in front of the world with a new look. People develop the theory of system identification by studying how to build dynamic equations from input and output data. Scientists are realizing Wiener’s dream — artificial intelligence.
Life today is more or less influenced by cybernetics. It has developed many branches: industrial automation, artificial intelligence, neurocybernetics, biological behavior cybernetics, medical cybernetics, ecological cybernetics, environmental cybernetics, resource cybernetics, population cybernetics, development environmental cybernetics, energy cybernetics, population cybernetics, social cybernetics and so on.
The domestic policy of family planning, afforestation, returning farmland to forest and returning farmland to lake is based on the conclusion of cybernetics.
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