"Cybernetics is a word invented to define a new field in science. It combines under one heading the study of what in a human context is sometimes loosely described as thinking and in engineering is known as control and communication. In other words, cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and in living organisms." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics", 1948)
"Cybernetics is similar in its relation to the actual machine. It takes as its subject-matter the domain of 'all possible machines', and is only secondarily interested if informed that some of them have not yet been made, either by Man or by Nature."
"[Cybernetics is] the art of ensuring the efficacy of action." (Louis Couffignal, 1958)
"Cybernetics is the science of the process of transmission, processing and storage of information." (Sergei Sobolew, Woprosy Psychology, 1958)
"Cybernetics is the general science of communication. But to refer to communication is consciously or otherwise to refer to distinguishable states of information inputs and outputs and /or to information being processed within some relatively isolated system." (Henryk Greniewski, "Cybernetics without Mathematics", 1960)
"Cybernetics is concerned primarily with the construction of theories and models in science, without making a hard and fast distinction between the physical and the biological sciences." (Frank H George, "The Brain As A Computer", 1962)
"Cybernetics is the science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors; showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence." (Gordon Pask, "The Cybernetics of Human Performance and Learning", 1966)
"For cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science, owing as much to biology as to physics, as much to the study of the brain as to the study of computers, and owing also a great deal to the formal languages of science for providing tools with which the behaviour of all these systems can be objectively described." (A Stafford Beer, 1966)
"Cybernetics is a homogenous and coherent scientific complex, a science resulting from the blending of at least two sciences - psychology and technology; it is a general and integrative science, a crossroads of sciences, involving both animal and car psychology. It is not just a discipline, circumscribed in a narrow and strictly defined field, but a complex of disciplines born of psychology and centered on it, branched out as branches of a tree in its stem. It is a stepwise synthesis, a suite of multiple, often reciprocal, modeling; syntheses and modeling in which, as a priority, and as a great importance, the modeling of psychology on the technique and then the modeling of the technique on psychology. Cybernetics is an intellectual symphony, a symphony of ideas and sciences." (Stefan Odobleja, 1978)
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