Heinz von Foerster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heinz von Foerster (November 13, 1911 – October 2, 2002) was a scientist combining physics and philosophy. He worked in the field of cybernetics and was essential for the development of the radical constructivism theory and second-order cybernetics, for which he was an eloquent advocate. He is also known for his interest in (computer) music and magic.
He was born in Vienna and died in Pescadero, California. He was married to Mai von Foerster.
Von Foerster studied physics at the Technical University of Vienna and at the University of Breslau, influenced by the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He moved to the USA in 1949 and worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he formed the Biological Computer Lab, studying similarities in cybernetic systems in biology and electronics. He knew well and was in conversation with John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, among many others. He influenced generations of students as a teacher and inclusive, ethusiastic collaborator.
He was the youngest member of the core group of the Macy conferences and editor of the five volumes of Cybernetics (1949-1953), a series of conference transcripts that represent important foundational conversations in the field. It was von Foerster who suggested the Wiener's coinage 'Cybernetics' be applied to this conference series, that had previously been called "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems". He also authored more than 100 publications and was invited as a speaker to conferences all over the world until his death at age 92.
[edit] Doomsday Equation for November 13, 2026 CE
A 1960 issue of Science magazine included an article of Foerster stating that the human population would reach "infinity" on this date and he proposed a formula for representing all the available historical data on world population and for predicting future population growth. The formula gave 2.7 billion as the 1960 world population and predicted that population growth would become infinite by Friday, November 13, 2026 - a prediction that earned it the name "the Doomsday Equation."
[edit] See also
- Logarithmic timeline
- UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING, volume of von Foerster's papers, published by Springer-Verlag, 2002.
- Das Netz interview with von Foerster, 2003
The equation that he derived for the date calculated is one that nowadays is called a power law.
[edit] External links
- Stanford Humanities Review Interview
- The Heinz von Foerster Page
- Korotayev A., Malkov A., Khaltourina D. Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Moscow: URSS, 2006. ISBN 5-484-00414-4 [1].
