Sublime

Ergodic systems, in other words, exhibit a particularly safe and comforting sort of statistical regularity.

Norbert Wiener, the grandfather of cybernetics, wrote that “we are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Thus any limitations discovered in the theory at Level A necessarily apply to levels B and C.

But I notice nobody is willing to listen to the consequences of the mathematics. Because they imply very large consequences for human life. Much larger than Heisenberg’s principle or Gödel’s theorem, which everybody rattles on about. Those are actually rather academic considerations. Philosophical considerations. But chaos theory concerns everyday

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

Norbert Wiener, as one of the early pioneers of information technology, perceived the digital computer as being fundamentally different from the mechanical technologies that preceded it. It was a game changer: a new kind of machine with the potential to usher in a new age—and, ultimately, perhaps rend the very fabric of society. Yet, Wiener’s views

It took him forty years to formulate, but in the 1960s, Richardson finally found a model for this uncertainty; a paradox that neatly summarises the existential problem of computational thinking. While working on the ‘Statistics of Deadly Quarrels’, an early attempt at the scientific analysis of conflict, he set out to find a correlation between the