Dark Hero of the Information Age by Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman

A book about Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics. Cybernetics is Greek and the Latin is Gubernator, hence governor, which controls the speed of an engine by negative feedback. Cybernetics is system control.

Wiener was a polyglot genius, a child wonder, possibly the smartest boy in the world at the time. He went on to scientific greatness despite the persistent bipolar disorder which plagued him and an obsessive controlling wife who caused serious family troubles and alienated Wiener from his most talented collaborators, causing serious problems discussed in agonizing and voluminous detail in the book, almost ruining it.

Weiner, however, was a true genius and a legend at MIT. He invented cybernetics (unless you give proper credit to On Governors by my favorite scientist, James Clerk Maxwell). He was at Aberdeen Ballistic proving grounds, the 'Los Alamos' of WWI. He used statistical methods to extend Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion. He developed mathematical methods of measuring communication that were popularized by Shannon, who got all the credit. Decades too soon he recommended using vacuum tubes for a digital computer in the 1920s, but was rejected by Vannevar Bush. He had an idea for optical computing decades before it became feasible. And he recommended continued use and research on analog computing, which only now has recaptured interest.

His cybernetics research led to 'circular causality' and machines behaving 'with purpose,' an affront to reductionist philosophers. He formed a teleology society and studied brain nerve networks. He proposed that entropy and information are negatives of one another, information measuring order and entropy measuring disorder. He wrote a novel called The Tempter, a retelling of Faust in the technological age. He predicted that nucleic acids would be used in machines. He predicted 3-D electronic circuits.