Epstein Secrets

ocess of control via feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener sa

er straddled as those tools did from each other. Wiener was a giant of the earlier era and built on the tools developed since the time of Newton and Leibniz to describe and analyze continuous processes in the physical world. In 1948 he published Cybernetics, a word he coined to describe the science of com

ntury. 174 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016977 from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long analogized people and devices an

nd systems thinking that had been around since the Enlightenment (boosted by the Industrial Revolution). The names in this lineage include Descartes, Leibniz, Sadi Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell, and Watt. Wiener’s coinage nonetheless had profound cultural effects.4”7 The ubiquity today of the prefix “cyber-” c

ocess of control via feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener sa

er straddled as those tools did from each other. Wiener was a giant of the earlier era and built on the tools developed since the time of Newton and Leibniz to describe and analyze continuous processes in the physical world. In 1948 he published Cybernetics, a word he coined to describe the science of com

ntury. 174 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016394 from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long analogized people and devices an

nd systems thinking that had been around since the Enlightenment (boosted by the Industrial Revolution). The names in this lineage include Descartes, Leibniz, Sadi Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell, and Watt. Wiener’s coinage nonetheless had profound cultural effects.4”7 The ubiquity today of the prefix “cyber-” c