Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas

By Norbert Wiener

Book Overview

Internationally honored for brilliant achievements throughout his career, author of Cybernetics, ExProdigy, and the essay God and Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Wiener had an abiding concern about the ethics guiding applications of theories he and other scientists developed. Years after he died, the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The world of science has changed greatly since Wiener's day, and much of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of an environment that encourages inventiveness.Wiener provides an engagingly written insider's understanding of the history of discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line, and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener's comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the free-lance scientist are particularly pertinent today.

Steve Heims provides a brief history of Wiener's literary output and reviews his contributions to the field of invention and discovery. In addition, Heims suggests significant ways in which Wiener's ideas still apply to dilemmas facing the scientific and engineering communities of the 1990s.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262731118
• ISBN13: 9780262731119
• Release Date: August 1994
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 3.5" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A book well worth reading

It has been said that all of science is concerned with ideas of patterns and all of mathametics is concerned with patterns of ideas. This book is a wonderful combination of both concepts. Norbert Wiener's towering intellect,knowledge of the history of science and ability to develop interesting associations between diverse areas of scientific activity, which on initial consideration appear unrelated, have produced a document which is grand in scope and remarkable in accomplishment. Moreover, his style of writing is, in my opinion, quite attractive. He has many axes to grind and once they are sharpened he applies them with enormous vigor. For example, he refers to the patent as "nothing more than a ticket to litigation". There is much to be learned from this book which can readily be applied to current areas of major importance such as molecular biology and solid state physics where new discoveries and their commercial applications clearly emulate societies previous experiences with our fundamental understanding of electricity and its application to both the transfer of power and of information.