As 1948 came to an end, America’s intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals were avidly discussing the book that would launch a thousand compound words, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine , by Norbert Wiener. The book had come out in the fall but took a while to catch on as readers struggled with its daunting mix of mathematical notation (which pops up without warning around page 60), formal logic, metaphysics, neurophysiology, psychopathology, electronics, and socialism, all set forth in orotund sentences of baffling length and complexity. Like the latter-day Goedel, Escher, Bach and The Name of the Rose, Cybernetics became known as a book that millions bought and dozens finished. In time, however, enough readers either fought their way through or skipped the hard parts to make Cybernetics the hottest thing in faculty lounges, coffeehouses, and dormitory rooms across the country.

Wiener was a former child prodigy who had graduated from Tufts in 1909 at the age of fourteen. As a boy he had had the good fortune to be overshadowed by an even greater whiz kid, William James Sidis, who lectured at Harvard on four-dimensional bodies in 1910 at age eleven. Unlike Wiener, Sidis soon tired of academic life and fled from public view, and however abstruse Cybernetics may seem, it cannot help being more interesting than Sidis’s only publication, a three-hundred-page treatise on streetcar transfers. Wiener went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard (after getting kicked out of Cornell) in 1913 and eventually ended up in the mathematics department at MIT. Cybernetics brought together decades’ worth of his scattershot notions about intelligent machines, feedback, causality, geometry, perception, and just about everything else.

Nowadays critics tend to agree that Wiener was a much better thinker than writer. One biographer calls Cybernetics “a collection of misprints, wrong mathematical statements, mistaken formulas, splendid but unrelated ideas, and logical absurdities.” Another says: “In retrospect it is hard to understand what all the fuss was about.” Despite its flaws, Cybernetics remains influential among those stout souls with the patience to disentangle Wiener’s worthwhile thoughts from the morass. Still, the book’s most pervasive legacy is the first half of its title.

As the inventor of a new field, Wiener had the privilege of naming it. Since his ideas were all related (quite loosely in some cases) to the concept of control and guidance, he came up with a word based on the Greek kubernetes , meaning “helmsman” or “steersman.” Wiener later learned that comparable terms had been used in the 184Os by the French physicist André-Marie Ampère (cybernetique) and a Polish writer named Trentowski (cypernetyki) . Further inquiry discovered a similar word in one of Plato’s dialogues.

The usefully vague neologism spread rapidly, and in the 1950s and 1960s it seemed to