Engineering Cybernetics
H. S. Tsien
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
1954
Preface
The celebrated physicist and mathematician A. M. Ampere coined the word
cybernetique to mean the science of civil government (Part II of
"Essai sur la philosphie des sciences," 1845, Paris). Ampere's
grandiose scheme of political sciences has not, and perhaps never will,
come to fruition. In the meantime, conflict between governments with
the use of force greatly accelerated the development of another branch
of science, the science of control and guidance of mechanical and
electrical systems. It is thus perhaps ironical that Ampere's word
should be borrowed by N. Wiener to name this new science, so important
to modern warfare. The "cybernetics" of Wiener ("Cybernetics, or
Control and Communication in the animal and the Machine," John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., New York, 1948) is the science of organization of
mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful
actions. A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total
absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are
so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern
of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations
among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of
the complete mechanism.
The purpose of "Engineering Cybernetics" is then to study those parts
of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering
applications in designing controlled or guided systems. It certainly
includes such topics usually treated in books on servomechanisms. But
a wider range of topics is only one difference between engineering
cybernetics and servomechanisms engineering. A deeper---and thus more
important---difference lies in the fact that engineering cybernetics
is an engineering science, while servomechanisms engineering is an
engineering practice. An engineering science aims to organize the
design principles used in engineering practice into a discipline and
thus to exhibit the similarities between different areas of
engineering practice and to emphasize the power of fundamental
concepts. In short, an engineering science is predominated by
theoretical analysis and very often uses the tool of advanced
mathematics. A glance at the contents of this book makes this quite
evident. The detailed construction and design of the components of the
system---the actual implementation of the theory---are almost never
discussed. No gadget is mentioned.