Marian Mazur, “Cybernetyka” (‘Cybernetics’), entry in Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN (‘Great Universal Encyclopaedia’), vol. 2, Warsaw 1963, pp. 642–643 (entry signed by the author).
Why should one science cover machines, organisms and communities at once? The entry in which Mazur introduces the field to encyclopaedia readers of the early 1960s answers through its method: the researcher sets aside how a system is built and attends only to the principle on which it works, and this lets the same laws apply to fields very far apart. The method gives rise to a thesis that connects with all of the author's later work: the cybernetic view shows how conventional the boundary between the natural sciences and the humanities is.
The entry delimits the field in two ways — more broadly as knowledge of all control, more narrowly as knowledge of systems with a considerable degree of self-control. Generality understood in this way explains why the text gives a good deal of space to the points of contact with the technical, biological and social sciences, and to modelling as a bridge between theory and experience. A short history of the name leads to Wiener, who is credited with giving the word its present-day sense; among the Polish authors, Mazur's own name appears as well.
For a reader of the dictionary, what is interesting is how the entry talks about concepts. In a few sentences it refers to neighbouring entries, among them receptor, effector, information, message and code, and it still treats information quantitatively, in bits, following the information theory of the day. The author will present his own precise terminology later, in the books Cybernetyczna teoria układów samodzielnych (‘A Cybernetic Theory of Autonomous Systems’, 1966) and Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’,
- — the dictionary's entry pages under these links already show that later form.
The practical part ends with examples of applications, mainly medical, and the whole entry with a forecast that cybernetics will one day become the basis of every person's education. Mazur will develop this thread two years later in a set of articles on school in the weekly Argumenty.