"A material model is the representation of a complex system by a system which is assumed simpler and which is also assumed to have some properties similar to those selected for study in the original complex system. A formal model is a symbolic assertion in logical terms of an idealised relatively simple situation sharing the structural properties of the original factual system." (Arturo Rosenblueth & Norbert Wiener, "The Role of Models in Science", Philosophy of Science Vol. 12 (4), 1945)
"No substantial part of the universe is so simple that it can be grasped and controlled without abstraction. Abstraction consists in replacing the part of the universe under consideration by a model of similar but simpler structure. Models, formal or intellectual on the one hand, or material on the other, are thus a central necessity of scientific procedure." (Arturo Rosenblueth & Norbert Wiener, "The Role of Models in Science", Philosophy of Science Vol. 12 (4), 1945)
"Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", 1948)
"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." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", 1948)
"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." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics:
Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", 1948)
"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 of 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." (Norbert Wiener, "The Human Use of Human Beings", 1950)
"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." (Norbert Wiener, "The Human Use of Human Beings", 1950)
"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." (Norbert Wiener, "Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society", 1950)
"[…] the characteristic tendency of entropy is to increase. As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness." (Norbert Wiener, "The Human Use of Human Beings", 1950)
"It [mathematics] 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." (Norbert Wiener, "Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth", 1953)
"Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent." (Norbert Wiener,"I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy", 1953)
"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." (Norbert Wiener, "Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth", 1953)
"The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance." (Arturo Rosenblueth & Norbert Wiener)
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