The Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal address - Norbert Wiener and the idea of contingence

The Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal address delivered by the Nobel Laure ate recipient Considers Norbert Wiener and the idea of contingence. Refers to Wiener's book The Human Use of Human Beings and in particular to the pre face entitled "The idea of a contingent universe" and to the epilogue of th e book by Rosenblith. This raises the question faced by Wiener: how to reco ncile a deterministic world a la Newton with the intrinsically probabilisti c universe of Gibbs, the relativistic universe of Einstein and the Heisenbe rg uncertainty principle? Notes the parallelism among the questions Wiener is asking with the ones to which the Gold Medallist has devoted most of his scientific life. Presents a different point of view, as a tribute to the v isionary ideas developed by Wiener. Discusses the "new physics" and the pro blems facing physics today, at the end of the twentieth century.