Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually associated with the early days of computer hackers and AI. This is the first in a series of blog posts about how high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture were just as much a part of the rapid progress of 17th century natural science as they were of the rapid progress of 20th century computer science; and about what we can learn by drawing this comparison.
"If I were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics... I should have to choose Leibniz"
-Norbert Wiener
"if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done in arithmetic and geometry."
-Gottfried Leibniz
"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a language] may be free and where interest and authority do not intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be the great antagonists which may impede its progress..."
-Robert Hooke
The last quote is from an archival text which I've been trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months. It comes from a scan of a letter which Robert Hooke wrote to Gottfried Leibniz in 1681. I am fascinated by this letter for a couple of reasons:
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hooke and Leibniz had exchanged any letters at all. I found the letter by chance, when browsing through the Royal Society's online archives.
The letter is about one of my favourite topics: Leibniz's project to create a universal language of science, which could be mechanically applied to automate any piece of scientific reasoning (apart from the collection of new experimental data).
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