Wiener's science of communication and control in the animal and the machine — a discipline that deliberately cuts across the established sciences to abstract what they share about regulation.
Young reaches the word only after six chapters of biology, tracing it from mechanical clocks and Descartes' mechanical animal to Wiener, and warns the reader not to read too much “thought” into machines.
George opens with it as a “science with a difference” that has no fixed territory, separating a pure side (mathematical, logical) from an applied side (engineering, management, education).