Heinz von Foerster

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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 by von 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."

Based on population data obtained from various sources, von Foerster and his students concluded that world population growth over the centuries was faster than an exponential. In such a situation, doubling-time decreases over time. Von Foerster's tongue-in-cheek prediction of Doomsday on November 13, 2026 was based on an extrapolation into the future of doubling-time, with the finding that doubling-time would decrease to zero on that date.

Responders to his Doomsday prediction objected on the grounds of the finite human gestation time of 9 months, and the transparent fact that biological systems rarely persist in exponential growth for any substantial length of time. Those who knew von Foerster could see in his rejoinders an evident sense of humor.

The recent research has confirmed the basic soundness of von Foerster's findings. The hyperbolic growth of the world population observed till the 1970s has recently been correlated to a non-linear second order positive feedback between the demographic growth and technological development that can be spelled out as follows: technological growth - increase in the carrying capacity of land for people - demographic growth - more people - more potential inventors - acceleration of technological growth - accelerating growth of the carrying capacity - the faster population growth - accelerating growth of the number of potential inventors - faster technological growth - hence, the faster growth of the Earth's carrying capacity for people, and so on (see, e.g., Introduction to Social Macrodynamics by Andrey Korotayev et al.).

[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.