The Scientist as Rebel (33 page)

Unlike most pure mathematicians, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to apply his skills to the messy practical problems of the real world. He became a successful applied mathematician, helping to design machines and communication systems for use in war and peace. He understood, more clearly than anyone else, that the messiness of the real world was precisely the point at which his mathematics should be aimed. As an applied mathematician, he worked out a general theory of control systems and feedback mechanisms, a theory which he called “cybernetics.” Cybernetics was a theory of messiness, a theory that allowed people to find an optimum way to deal with a world full of poorly known agents and unpredictable events. The word “cybernetics” comes from the Greek word for steersman, the man who steers a frail ship through stormy seas between treacherous rocks.

During World War II, Wiener worked with his engineer friend Julian Bigelow designing an optimum control system for antiaircraft guns. The design of the control system was an elementary exercise in cybernetics. Like his colleagues at
MIT
, Wiener was happy to be engaged in work that could help to win the war. To shoot down an airplane, it was necessary to predict the future position of the airplane at the time of arrival of the shell, knowing only the past track of the airplane up to the moment when the prediction was made. During the interval between prediction and arrival, the pilot of the airplane would be taking evasive action, changing his course in a way that could only be estimated statistically. To maximize the chance of destroying the airplane, the control system must take into account the multitude of wiggly paths that the airplane might follow. The concept of Wiener measure was the tool that allowed him to translate the
problem of finding an optimum prediction into precise mathematical language. He worked hard with Bigelow to translate the mathematical solution of the problem back into electrical and mechanical hardware. Unfortunately, the United States Army could not wait for the Wiener-Bigelow hardware to be manufactured and tested. The army needed an antiaircraft control system that could be mass-produced and deployed on the battlefield as soon as possible. The army chose a less sophisticated control system that would be available sooner, designed by a rival group of engineers at the Bell Laboratories.

The Bell system became operational and the Wiener-Bigelow system never saw combat. In the end, the choice of the Bell system probably had little effect on the course of the war. The big breakthrough in antiaircraft technology was the invention of the proximity fuse, a radar-controlled fuse that enabled a shell to explode and destroy an airplane nearby without directly hitting it. Without proximity fuses, neither the Bell system nor the Wiener-Bigelow system was accurate enough to shoot down airplanes reliably. After proximity fuses became available in 1944, the Bell system was good enough.

When the war ended with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Wiener was outraged. In his eyes, the government had committed a crime against humanity, and the scientists who had created the bomb were to blame for allowing the government to exploit their skills for evil purposes. The nuclear attacks confirmed a belief that had been growing in his mind for many years, that the technology of communication and control which he had helped to create was fundamentally dangerous. He saw the nuclear attacks as a glaring example of the disasters that could result from science and technology when scientists were working in secrecy for military and industrial authorities. He feared that the nascent technology of computers and automatic machinery could lead to even greater disasters if it remained in the hands of secret military and industrial organizations. He decided from that moment on to have nothing to do either
with government or with industry. He decided to devote a major part of his time to educating the public, to helping it deal wisely with new technologies.

In January 1947, Wiener published in
The Atlantic Monthly
an article with the title “A Scientist Rebels,” an eloquent statement of his refusal to cooperate with the government. “I do not expect to publish any future work,” he wrote, “which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists.” This article immediately made him as famous at the age of fifty-two as he had been as a child prodigy. For the rest of his life, he continued to be well known as a political activist, writing articles and books that were widely read, traveling to many countries to meet with political leaders and concerned citizens. As he explained in his second autobiography,
I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
,
²
“I thus decided that I would have to turn from a position of the greatest secrecy to a position of the greatest publicity, and bring to the attention of all the possibilities and dangers of the new developments.”

For the last decade of his life, Wiener was a prophet who spoke and wrote eloquently about the displacement of human beings by automatic machinery. He saw this displacement as a likely consequence of his own inventions. But he spoke and wrote with equal eloquence of the good that automatic machinery could do, if it were used intelligently to make poor societies rich, to enable poor countries to jump from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy without enduring the horrors of nineteenth-century industrialization. He published two books that became best sellers,
Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
, in 1948,
³
and
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
, in 1950.
⁴
Before modern electronic computers existed, these books predicted with some degree of accuracy the economic and political effects of computer technology on human societies. “We were here,” he wrote,

He concluded his sermon with a sentence borrowed from the medieval poet Bernard of Cluny, “The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.”

Wiener shared the fate of other major prophets, being honored abroad more than at home. He was honored most spectacularly in India and Russia. He traveled several times to India and was welcomed personally by Nehru and other Indian leaders. He went on lecture tours, and gave advice about industrial policy to the Indian government. He advocated the founding of technical institutes and the encouragement of homegrown technical industries. His advice is bearing fruit fifty years later, as India emerges as a major center of information technology and American business is outsourced to Indian firms. He also traveled to Russia, where he received equally strong official adulation but felt less at home. He told the Russians that science must be free from the restraints of political ideology. He found the ideology of Marxism as destructive of human values as the ideology of free-market capitalism. The Soviet government ignored his plea for scientific freedom but enthusiastically supported cybernetics.

The cult of cybernetics in Russia was more philosophical than practical, but it may have had some lasting effects. Perhaps it contributed to the recent emergence of a computer-literate society and a homegrown software industry. In 1964, at the age of sixty-nine, Wiener was invited to give lectures about cybernetics in Sweden, where his ideas also had a wide following. The day after his arrival, he died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism on the steps of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Dark Hero of the Information Age
⁵
is the third biography of Norbert Wiener, unless there are others of which I am ignorant. First came a joint biography of Wiener and the mathematician John von Neumann,
John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death
, by Steve Heims in 1980.
⁶
Then came
Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964
, by Pesi Masani in 1990.
⁷
The main justification for a new biography is that the three biographies emphasize different aspects of Wiener’s life and character. The Heims biography emphasizes politics. It is mainly concerned with Wiener’s activities as a social critic in the last third of his life. It presents the parallel lives of von Neumann and Wiener as a simple struggle between black and white, with von Neumann as the evil genius of science in the service of war, and Wiener as the good genius of science in the service of peace.

The authors of the new biography cite Heims frequently, but do not accept his judgments uncritically. They present the relationship between von Neumann and Wiener as it appears in the historical documents, a friendship based on common interests and deep mutual
respect. The paths of von Neumann and Wiener diverged after World War II when von Neumann was willing to accept money from the United States government to support his research and Wiener was not. After that, they saw little of each other, but the mutual respect endured. When von Neumann started building a digital computer in Princeton in 1946, Wiener recommended his collaborator Julian Bigelow to be in charge of the hardware, and Bigelow became von Neumann’s chief engineer with Wiener’s blessing.

Pesi Masani’s biography is from a scholarly point of view the best of the three. Masani was a professional mathematician, born in India and settled in the United States. He collaborated with Wiener and published several substantial papers with him in the 1950s. After Wiener died, Masani edited his collected papers for publication. Masani was intimately familiar with every detail of Wiener’s work. The Masani biography is the only one that portrays him as a working mathematician. Any biography that skips the mathematics can give only a vague impression of Wiener’s way of thinking. Masani states his purpose at the beginning of his book: “This book attempts to trace the interaction between mathematical genius and history that has led to the conception of a stochastic cosmos.”

Masani explains Wiener’s mathematical ideas with admirable clarity, and he has found and reproduced many historical documents that the other biographers have missed. One particularly illuminating document that Masani reproduces in full is a long and friendly letter from von Neumann to Wiener, written in November 1946, discussing the mysteries of the human brain and the various ways in which the mysteries might be explored. “I am most anxious to have your reaction to these suggestions,” von Neumann writes. “I feel an intense need that we discuss the subject extensively with each other.” Von Neumann’s letter shows how far he had come in foreshadowing the era of molecular biology that he never lived to see. Von Neumann and Wiener shared a passionate interest in biology. Both of them saw a deeper
understanding of biology as the ultimate goal of their explorations of the science of computing and information.

After Heims has described Wiener’s politics and Masani has described his mathematics, what is there left for a third biography to do? This third biography gives us a new and intimate portrait of Wiener as a person, and describes his stormy relationships with his friends and family. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have done a thorough job of historical research, interviewing most of the surviving witnesses, and documenting the narrative with detailed references to published and unpublished papers, letters, and interviews. The title,
Dark Hero of the Information Age
, indicates their main preoccupation. Their aim is to explore the roots of Wiener’s lifelong malaise and often weird behavior. Their intimate portrait became possible because they enjoyed the cooperation of Wiener’s daughters, Barbara and Peggy, who gave them free access to Wiener’s private papers and family records. Peggy wrote in a letter, “Serious unanswered questions remain concerning Dad’s life and relations with his colleagues. It is very important to tell the whole story,” and Barbara agreed. The main obstacle to full disclosure disappeared with the death of Wiener’s wife, Margaret, at the age of ninety-five in 1989.

The drama of Wiener’s personal life begins with his years as an infant prodigy, tormented by his brilliant but tyrannical father. Either as a result of his father’s training or from genetic predisposition, he suffered from violent swings of mood that continued throughout his life. If he had been seen by a modern psychiatrist he would probably have been diagnosed as manic-depressive. He sank periodically into deep depressions that continued for several months, and then emerged into intervals of restless and creative activity. The depressions tended to come more often when he stayed at home, and that was one of the reasons why he spent so much of his time traveling. Away from home, the distractions of public lectures and ceaseless conversation with friends and admirers kept his spirits high.

Another major theme of this biography is Wiener’s marriage. His wife, Margaret, was a student of his father, and the marriage was arranged by his parents. Margaret was chosen to take over from his parents the job of caring for him and organizing his life. This job she performed well, running a frugal household and providing a comfortable home for him and the children. She said to a friend in the early days of the marriage, “Norbert does the math and I do the arithmetic.” She coped with his moods and raised his daughters.

But Margaret was in some respects even crazier than Wiener. She had emigrated from Germany to America at the age of fourteen. She was a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler and kept two copies of
Mein Kampf
displayed prominently in her bedroom, one in German and one in English. She made no secret of her political views, to the intense annoyance of Wiener, who was himself Jewish and had many friends who were victims of Nazi persecution. When the daughters were teenagers and began to acquire boyfriends, she made their lives miserable by accusing them of nonexistent sexual delinquencies. When they once went out with a girlfriend and came home with their ears pierced, Margaret was furious and accused them of trying to seduce their father. As a result of her paranoid accusations, both daughters escaped from home as soon as they could and thereafter had little contact with her or with Wiener.