By Peter Galison. In: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1994)

 

How much agency (teleology) may we ascribe to bounded systems? This article discusses how Norbert Weiner tried to develop an "aircraft predicting machine" which would describe to anti-aircraft (AA) gunners the probable future path of an airplane, based on its past flight path, its aerodynamic capablilities (an aircraft at certain speeds posesses a limited repertoire of next moves), and the pilot's desire to take evasive action to avoid being shot out of the sky.

 

The AA gunner is trying to anticipate the pilot, and place an explosive shell in the plane's flight path. The pilot wants to act evasively, and introduce error to the gunner's anticipation, so the antiaircraft shell explodes harmlessly out of range.

 

Galison says that onologically it is irrelevant whether the "enemy" is a human, or a human-guided machine, or a machine programmed to take certain courses of action. And likewise, it is irrelevant whether the mechanism guiding the gun barrel and trigger mechanism is controlled by human "kentucky windage", or if a machine is doing mechanical and/or mathematical calibrating.

 

This is the birth of the age of cybernetics. Weiner was a big thinker, and the problem of controlling a gun barrel onto an erratically moving target quickly led to general problems of communication and control, and thence to his classic "Cybernetics".

 

See also Robert Rosen: "Anticipatory Systems"

 

 Spreading Chaos. By Danette Paul.

In: Written Communication, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Jan. 2004), pp. 32 - 68.

 

Subtitled: The Role of Popularizations in the Diffusion of Scientific Ideas

 

The abstract from the publisher (Sage): "Scientific popularizations are generally considered translations (often dubious ones) of scientific research for a lay audience. This study explores the role popularizations play within scientific discourse, specifically in the development of chaos theory. The methods included a review of the popular and the semipopular books on chaos theory from 1975 to 1995, interviews with key figures, and an analysis of the citations in scientific research journals to Gleick’s well-known popularization, Chaos: Making a New Science. The results indicate that popularizations take different forms as a scientific revolution develops into normal science. At various points, popularizations are used by scientists to find a broad, interdisciplinary, scientific audience, to show interest in the field, to disseminate lines of inquiry, and to help establish the author’s priority claim."

 

I am interested in how ideas percolate through populations, and Danette Paul's study on the success of chaos theory, and James Gleick's book in particular, caught my eye. Ms. Paul is a professor of rhetoric at BYU, and she keys on certain words used to promulgate the tenets of chaos theory. It is an interesting approach, as she shows the actual means whereby ideas can be presented to a general audience and, when the response is favorable, this language can filter back into the "scholarly" discussions.

 

"In this study, I argue that popularizations played an important role in diffusing concepts of chaos theory within and across disciplinary boundaries in science itself...I argue that although the text of [Gleick's] Chaos and the interview with Gleick indicate that Gleick holds a canonical view of popularization (a translation of science for a lay audience), scientists and mathematicians used this popularization both as a teaching tool and as a credible source for research." p. 33-34