2015-07-21
1057
Some fifteen years ago a group of science men formed in America. They were eminent scientists in many different fields, but they were united by a common interest in particular kind of problem. In a nutshell, this was the problem of control. The time was ripe for some new thinking on this topic. Particular manifestations of the control problem were arising at this time because of the Second World War. In fact, several rapidly developing lines of thought, originating in quite different spheres of activity, were coming together.
People were busy with the design of electronic control machinery of various kinds. Mathematicians were trying to help by discussing the behaviour of information inside these electrical systems in terms of mathematics. Elsewhere, people were developing a theoretical interest in the way in which information can be coded. They were trying to answer the question: how can we measure the content of information in a message, and how can this be expressed exactly? Statisticians, too, were beginning to discuss the flow of information in the animal body as the basis of physiological control. Biological scientists had also shown interest in problems of control, and in the way information behaves in the body of an animal. They were beginning to make attempts to discuss such questions formally with the help of mathematics. Logicians, engineers, psychiatrists – all these and others were finding roads which led to the same basic topic: the notion of control itself. Gradually scientists began to realize, through the terrible barrier constituted by their different professional languages, that they were talking about the same thing.
Форма Perfect Continuous
