---
title: "Black Box"
description: "De Monchaux gives the term three stacked senses: (1) the literal black deed box that carried cavity magnetron E1189 to the MIT Rad Lab in 1940, whence \"black box\" became lab slang; (2) Wiener's 1945 epistemic sense — a device whose inputs and outputs are known but whose interior is not, vs."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/black-box"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/black-box"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Black Box

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/black-box), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

De Monchaux gives the term three stacked senses: (1) the literal black deed box that carried cavity magnetron E1189 to the MIT Rad Lab in 1940, whence "black box" became lab slang; (2) Wiener's 1945 epistemic sense — a device whose inputs and outputs are known but whose interior is not, vs. a "white box"; (3) the systems-engineering sense from SAGE/ICBM work — a subsystem defined only by its relationships to the larger system, swappable as long as those hold, i.e. technology redefined as "defined relationships between mutable things." The essay's turn is that sense (3) slides back into sense (2): a box hard to enter becomes impossible to understand. Latent Spacecraft explicitly argues against reading model interiors this way.

## Appears in

- [Some Movements of Models](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels) (2026-04-09)
- [Latent Spacecraft](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/latentspacecraft) (2026-02-04)
- [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) (2016-02-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._