Science Technology and War Wiener’s “A Scientist Rebels.”
What does this angry letter from the MIT mathematician and cybernetician Norbert Wiener suggest about how scientists made sense of their relationship to the security state? Be sure to draw directly from the source, citing Wiener specifically. On the face of it, few human activities would seem to be more different than war and science. War aims to kill people and destroy things, to bring one country’s military (or their whole society) under the control of another. War is primal, violent, chaotic. Science and mathematics, by contrast, seem the highest development of learning and civilization, creative and even noble activities.
