Wiener in the 1950s

[David Casseres]

Monte sez

>Wiener had zip, zero, *no* expertise in nuclear physics, reactor design or
>operations, and was not a hardware type at all, so "to help develop the
>reactor" has to be wrong. Conceivably the AEC might have hoped to apply
>either his stochastic-process theory (Brownian motion etc) to some kind of
>reaction probability, or cybernetics to control of feedback in the
>system... but the whole thing seems anomalous. As I say, it would help to
>know more details.

This connects to something that's been bothering me about the whole 
Wiener discussion.  Wiener was a mathematician, not a scientist, and the 
distinction is important in terms of personalities and motivations.  It 
is true, nevertheless, that when a team is put together to develop 
something that requires a great deal of scientific knowledge and a great 
deal of computational sophistication -- such as a nuclear bomb or reactor 
-- the roles change and the mathematicians and scientists converge upon 
the goal of technology.  Wiener, at Hanford, might well have helped to 
develop the reactor just as other mathematicians helped to develop the 
bomb at Los Alamos.

All of which is technology, by the way, an industrial process/product 
that uses math and science but is not either of those things.  During my 
brief time as an undergrad at Caltech, one of the most significant things 
I was taught came from an English prof, who told us to beware of the 
romance that surrounds being a scientist.  "There are all sorts of guys," 
he said, "running around in white coats and calling themselves 
scientists, but what they are doing is not science and you shouldn't want 
to be associated with it."


Cheers,
David